The most interesting story of the UK election campaign is not the rise of the Labour Party — its campaign is no more exciting than its leader — but the collapse of the Conservative Party.
The Conservatives could end up with just 72 seats in the 650-member British House of Commons, one market research agency, Survation, said.
Savanta, another such agency, said that it could be headed for “electoral extinction.”
A party that won an 80-seat majority just five years ago might now be headed for the worst performance in its almost 200-year history.
How did the world’s most enduring right-of-center party come to the edge of catastrophe?
One answer is poor leadership. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has certainly capped a lackluster term in office with an ill-timed and clumsy campaign, but the Conservatives have tried a succession of leaders with contrasting styles and philosophies.
A second answer is boredom with the same party being in power for so long.
However, the problem with the Conservatives is not that the UK has had 14 years of the same. Rather, it has been 14 years of chaos: There have been four distinct political regimes under four prime ministers — David Cameron’s social liberalism, Theresa May’s compassionate conservatism, Boris Johnson’s populism and Sunak’s warmed-up Thatcherism — as well as a dizzying succession of office holders.
The Conservative right blames the party’s addiction to high taxing and spending.
“The wets and other centrist-dad wannabes ... bear full responsibility,” said the ever-reasonable Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
Yet this ignores that former British prime minister Liz Truss introduced a tax-cutting budget that almost crushed the economy.
The Conservative left is much closer to the mark in blaming Brexit for damaging the economy and creating political chaos, but simply blaming Brexit fails to explain the nature of the harm it did or the best way of fixing it.
The deeper problem with Brexit is that it turned the party of Edmund Burke into the party of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — and the only way to repair the damage is to turn the Conservatives back into a party of Burke. The Conservatives did not literally swap one philosopher’s collected writings for the other. Although the party still contains a few intellectuals — British lawmaker Jesse Norman has even written an excellent book on Burke — it is difficult to imagine British lawmaker Mark Francois burning the midnight oil over Rousseau’s The Social Contract. I mean that the Conservatives have swapped the spirit of Burke for the spirit of Rousseau.
Rousseau provided the philosophical inspiration for the French Revolution. Burke was the first person to explain why the revolution would inevitably lead to bloodshed and dictatorship.
Rousseau believed in the sovereignty of the “general will” — indivisible, omnicompetent and infallible. Burke believed that the people’s will needs to be restrained by institutions, conventions and, for want of a better word, experts. He believed in representative government rather than plebiscites.
In his “Speech to the Electors of Bristol” in 1774, Rousseau told his constituents that he owed them his intelligence and judgement, not his obedience.
He also believed that institutions represented the collective wisdom of previous generations, whereas the general will blows hither and thither in the wind of popular opinion.
Cameron inadvertently injected the principle of the “general will” into the heart of Britain’s parliamentary democracy by confronting the electorate with a simple “in” or “out” vote in 2016. (Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher had earlier dismissed referendums as “devices of demagogues and dictators.”) The Conservative Party’s Brexit faction also interpreted their narrow 52-48 victory not as an opportunity to produce a soft version of Brexit that would take into account the concerns of the minority, but as an opportunity to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market.
The Rousseauean Conservatives argued that once the general will had been revealed, the job of the government was to crush all critics just as so many French aristocrats did.
The Brexiteers repeatedly invoked the will of the people in their campaign to “get Brexit done.” The European Research Group, the pro-Brexit “party within a party,” undermined May’s attempt to produce a Brexit compromise, accusing her of betraying the millions of people who voted for Brexit.
The Conservative-supporting Daily Mail denounced judges as “traitors,” while then-British lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, a pin-striped sans-culotte, called then-Bank of England governor Mark Carney an “enemy of Brexit.”
Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Johnson and the Robespierre of the Brexit revolution, promised to achieve Brexit “by any means necessary.”
The result was exactly what Burke had predicted in his Reflections on the French Revolution: chaos, disappointment and disaster.
Because Brexit was conceived of in utopian terms (“taking back control”), Brexiteers responded to failure by becoming ever more extreme. The Brexit revolution not only drove a generation of talented moderates out of the Conservative Party and into the wilderness of podcasts and opinion columns; it also ate its own children: The long list of Brexiteers who have seen their careers destroyed by their own stubbornness is about to get much longer as they lose their seats on July 4.
A significant number of Conservatives are now drawn to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s populist slogan: “It’s time to join the revolt.”
The Brexit revolution also distracted Conservatives from the art of government. May was so consumed by her party’s civil war that she was unable to implement her modest, but sensible social reforms. Johnson was completely unsuitable for high office, a bloviator who was elevated by his ability to cater to Brexiteer fantasies rather than his ability to run anything.
In Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, historian Anthony Seldon is excoriating in his verdict: “Rarely in three hundred years and ever since 2016 has a prime minister been so poor at appointments, so incompetent at running cabinet government or so incapable of finding a stable team to run Number 10... It is hard to find a prime minister who has done more to damage the fabric of government.”
By the time poor Sunak came to power, the situation was unsalvageable.
The Rousseauean spirit has also corrupted the wider conservative ecosystem. The Daily Mail and Sunday Telegraph are full of hysterical headlines about the betrayal of Brexit and the end of civilization: “Nigel Farage is already the leader of the Conservatives,” “There are just 1,000 hours to save Britain,” “We are the West’s last generation before the new Dark Ages begin.”
The Conservative think tank world headquartered in Tufton Street, London, is addicted to the idea of “revolution” — tearing up the established order and starting again. A section of the conservative intelligentsia is abandoning the Conservative Party for Reform UK with its offer of a pure Brexit and a war on the establishment.
Recognizing the distinction between Burke and Rousseau is not only the best way of understanding the Conservative Party’s parlous condition. It is also the best way of reviving the party’s fortunes — or even, if the result is as bad as some polls are suggesting, saving it from annihilation.
To survive and eventually thrive, the Conservative Party needs to recognize that the true dividing line between sensible Conservatives and ultras does not lie over taxes or cultural values, as the right of the party would like to suggest; it lies in one’s attitude to Burke’s great insights into the evils of the revolutionary spirit and the virtues of parliamentary democracy.
Sensible Conservatives need to re-emphasize the importance of institutions, compromise and collegiality. They need to recognize the evils of Farage-style populism with its dangerous distinction between the real people and the corrupt elites. They need to refocus on the art of government rather than the purity of revolutionary intentions.
The UK has suffered from the absence of a Burkean ruling party since Cameron’s fatal decision to throw the European question to the vagaries of the general will. The least the Conservatives could offer now is a Burkean opposition.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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