As someone whose career relies on its continued existence, I obviously spend much of my time worrying about the extinction of the Conservative Party. Almost daily do the spectres of Nigel Farage, “zero seats”, and a historic wipeout play before my eyes. As such, with an enthusiasm that I pray isn’t verging on sadomasochism, I often turn towards the Substack of one Dominic Cummings.
Reading the ex-Vote Leave supremo is an excellent way of highlighting your inadequacies. When he writes that you will “search ConHome in vain for a serious analysis of why the Tories failed in government”, it’s hard not to take it personally. Similarly, when he suggests voters will have a “moral/aesthetic revulsion” that will make it “simply inconceivable to vote Tory”, it rather hits home.
Nonetheless, my decision to consult the world of budget night-clubbing’s answer to Cassandra relies on more than a lack of self-confidence. Cummings is very clearly on manoeuvres. A Politico report that he had been “organizing a series of focus groups to get the public’s views about a potential new anti-establishment party” was followed by a wide-ranging interview with The I.
Both refer to his plans for The Startup Party (TSP) – a placeholder name – designed to become active “immediately after the exit polls are live on election night 2024”. Its purpose? To “divert energy and money away from ‘how to revive the Tories’ to ‘how to replace the Tories’.” It is not 2019. This time, Cummings comes not to save the Conservative Party, but to bury it.
Why? Because we have failed. MPs are “not interested in how government works…or how voters think”. They’re “completely absorbed in getting peerages and being on the Today programme”. The Tories now represent “nothing except a continuation of the sh*tshow: higher taxes, worse violet crime…public services failing, immigration of control”. We have squandered Brexit’s chance.
I have wondered if Cummings is Britain’s version of N. S. Lyon’s ‘Right-Wing Progressives’: what Mary Harrington calls the “liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right…scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order”. They like El Salvador.
Yet for all his previous interest in turning Britain into an education superpower, and for all his enthusiasm for Silicon Valley and Marc Andreesen, the TSP’s immediate aims are small-c conservative. Govern for two terms, slash immigration, fix public services, reshape our sclerotic state, and restore faith in democracy. Imagine Rishi Sunak’s five pledges, on steroids.
It’s easy to dismiss Cummings. When he seems to want J K Rowling to be his Lee Kwan Yew, one wonders if the post-Cumberbatch fame has gone to his head. For much of the country, he will forever be associated with the words “Barnard Castle” and “eye test”. As Will Lloyd asks, if he is a genius, how was he outmanoeuvred by a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation?
Even for those sympathetic to his analysis, there is a lot about Cummings that leaves many on the Right cold. His enthusiasm for lockdown is now anathema to most. Leaving aside the vagaries of Covid and Boris Johnson’s personality, Cummings played his part in rapidly torpedoing a government he helped construct. What about did he actually manage to change in his 18 months?
Yet for all of his apparent flaws, it is impossible not to find his insights more worthwhile than most hot-takes available. That is not only because he has a refreshing honesty about the futility of the war in Ukraine, the crapness of our political class, and the insanity of our being governed by “some 27-year-old PPE idiot in the Treasury”. All that should be obvious, refreshing, and needed.
No, what is most attractive about Cummings is that he actually wants to change things. Some scoff at him for railing against the establishment whilst persuing much of his career in SW1. But the point is not to philosophise about the world, but to change it. That cannot be done by sitting politics out. Put your Peter Hitchens down. Reject doomsterism. Take your place on the battlefield, anon.
How many others can claim to have played a crucial role in winning both a referendum and an 80-seat majority in under five years? Who else has occupied such a prominent position in government and is so willing to be open about its systemic flaws? He may be an imperfect avatar for his arguments. But I’d rather have him make them than allow Westminster to keep rotting from the head.
If he hadn’t been getting some form of sympathetic response from these focus groups, Cummings wouldn’t be bothering to tell The I what he wants the TSP to be like. It will be “completely different from other parties”, “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media”, and “friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country” – both in the private and public sectors.
Do you find that an attractive proposition? Who can survey the litany of misery both parties have heaped on us for the last three decades and say the politics-as-usual is working well? Have auto-enrolment pensions been worth Iraq, the financial crisis, Covid cock-ups, a stillborn Brexit, and economic stagnation? Westminster has proven itself to be persistently useless.
Will Keir Starmer changes things? Of course not. He is the human manifestation of the Blob, posing as a Tony Blair tribute act due to his lack of imagination. A man who makes Sue Gray his chief of staff is interested in little more than being PM for a few years in his sixties and will not challenge a broken Whitehall machine. He will leave the civil service to run the country and disappoint voters.
We are hardly well-positioned to criticise. One would hesitate to describe the last fourteen years as wasted. But have we left Britain in much of a better place than we found it in 2010? Evelyn Waugh was right. Since Cummings was central to the two most fundamental victories we can point to – education reform and Brexit – I would suggest he is only more worth listening to.
The best argument for voting Tory remains keeping Labour out, even if we have sullied it through self-indulgence, incompetence, and Liz Truss. Rishi Sunak is the most intelligent and hardworking option for Prime Minister available. But even he is clear that the next five years hold little to look forward to. Global war, AI-led transformation, mass migration: the twenties are hardly roaring.
For Cummings, crisis means opportunity. A Labour government overwhelmed from all sides and collapsing into incoherence would be easily picked off. They are only a “carbon copy of the Tories…intellectually dead, organisationally dead” and filled with “obviously useless people”. In short, “everything will keep failing and everyone will be even more miserable by 2026 than… now”.
By this point, he plans that the TSP will have long overhauled the Tories. Our immediate fate relies on Nigel Farage. If he “un-retires” we could “easily be driven down to double-digit seats”. In that contest, “discussions of a Startup Party and replacing them will go from a very fringe idea to being a very mainstream idea”. Say it loud, say it proud: a 1997-style defeat would be a very good result.
Commentators now usually point out the historic struggles of third parties. Since Labour supplanted the Liberals, first-past-the-post has done its best to preserve our current two-party duopoly. Our current parties may be “useless charlatans”, but they are persistent buggers. We Conservatives can trace our lineage back, in various permutations, to the Exclusion Crisis. We survive.
Yet, as Cummings points out, “history shows” a new party breaks through “in response to huge system changes” – like Labour replacing the Liberals after the First World War. We have been battered by a financial crisis, political chaos, and a pandemic. As Aris Roussinos has explained, Pax Americana is dying around us. Britain faces crisis, poverty, and war. Things can only get worse.
If there was ever a new party to break through into government, it is now. Both major parties will have proven unequal to task of challenging the desiccated Whitehall machine; both will have had their credibility crushed between the Scylla and Charybdis of this Manchuria stage of the Third World War and persistent economic turmoil. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan might finish them off.
All of this is grim for those of us who have devoted our lives to the Conservative Party. I was born a Tory and hope to die as one. This is why I can still offer some hope despite all the gloom of the preceding paragraphs. Even if Cummings may be good at diagnosing what ails our politics, his efforts to deliver his proposed remedies into practice have not always succeeded.
The major barrier to building the TSP is an incoherence between personnel and ambitions. Cummings hopes to attract a combination of entrepreneurs, NHS workers, and military veterans to enter politics, pay themselves the national average income, and dissolve after two terms of government. He might have only been brainstorming. But that all sounds highly improbable.
Even if there looks like little hope of winning the next election now, Tories have an opportunity to absorb the analysis of Cummings and put it to our use before the TSP gets going. Close CCHQ. Purge the list of candidates. Unite around a zealous focus on tackling Britain’s structural challenges. Writing Stepping Stones 2 should only start our full-bodied embrace of Tory Leninism.
Will any of this happen? I suspect it is about as likely as J K Rowling swapping Twitter for Number 10. One can be sceptical of the TSP’s ability to overhaul our two-party duopoly, and accept that things will only get worse. Cummings may not be the Right’s Lisan al Gaib but he can smooth the path to our Leto II. If not, the future for the Tories – and Britain, and the West – looks unremittingly bleak.
