No one has ever fully explained the most persistent phenomenon in European democratic political history – the success of the Conservative Party. Its very name implies it is behind the times. To some, it reeks of the few, not the many. Yet in the century in which the many have been allowed to vote at all, they have chosen a wholly or predominantly Conservative government two thirds of the time. Friday’s local election results confirm the general view that they will do so again on June 8. In the world crisis of the elites, only the Tories have managed to change sides and stay on top at the same time.
Why? Although I have no neat answer, I suggest it is partly because the Conservatives have fewer prejudices than their rivals. This sounds a weird thing to say – the Tories are always supposed to be more racist, sexist, stuffy etc than the others. Indeed, their present leader once warned them against becoming the “nasty party”. Yet it is, in practice, true.
Being unintellectual – even, on occasions, plain stupid – the Conservatives don’t carry that dreadful weight of needing to prove you are doctrinally correct which bedevils life on the Left. They find it easier to confront reality. In February 1975, their overwhelmingly male, old-soldier-dominated parliamentary gang, fed up with two election defeats, chose a woman to be their leader. They cast aside their prejudices because they thought she was “a brave girl”. She went on to win the next three general elections.
To this day, by contrast, the Labour Party has not chosen a woman leader. Its attitude to women is infected by doctrine: it seeks the unattainable, perfect feminist, rather than the best person to run the country.
Last year, the Tories did it again. The world gasped at the chaos which ensued when David Cameron lost the EU referendum which he himself had called. After a sharp tussle of betrayal and assassination, however, the Conservatives picked, without a contest, a woman from the losing side. Within days, order was restored. Untroubled by the logical thought-processes which afflict rationalists in politics, the Tories had felt their way to the solution.
Now Theresa May is seeking an electoral mandate, and her enemies lie prostrate before her.
Nobody thinks of Mrs May as a flexible sort of person, but she has won herself an astonishing degree of freedom. She supports free trade, yet is scooping up protectionist votes. She herself voted Remain, but is now so well trusted by most Leave voters that she has swallowed Ukip whole. She is the Oxford-educated wife of a prosperous City man, yet she has become the scourge of the boss class. She sits for plush Maidenhead, but, as Friday’s results show, is going down big in the West Midlands and the east end of Glasgow. Her planned election trips do not concentrate on leafy heartlands, but include raids on enemy territory such as Manchester and Leicester. She has convinced people that she is decent and straightforward, yet boasts about being “a bloody difficult woman”.
Her main opponents are much more prejudiced than she. They fall into three groups. (Until Friday’s results, I might have mentioned four, but the poor Liberal Democrats seem to have relegated themselves.)
The first are the out-and-out Remainers, who probably constitute about half of those who voted Remain last year. They are such prisoners of their European prejudices that they have become professionally pessimistic. In their house journals, such as the Financial Times, they grasp at every straw of evidence that the economy is doomed. They can be presented – often unfairly – as people who just don’t like their country very much. In different ways, Tony Blair and George Osborne are both trying to become their spokesmen. Mrs May easily can place them on the wrong side of history.
Next comes Jeremy Corbyn. His prejudices are magnificently impervious to evidence, and were already perfectly formed before he entered Parliament a third of a century ago. His dream of Britain as Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela will never die, but it will never win either. Mrs May needs him just where he is.
Last comes Jean-Claude Juncker. I argued last year that he was a massive plus for the Leave campaign, but it never occurred to me how much this gift would go on giving.
Mr Juncker’s prejudices lead him to believe that for the European Union to win, everyone else must lose. This makes dealing with him unpleasant, but also simple. At that famous dinner with Mrs May last week, she said she wanted Brexit to be a success. He replied: “Brexit cannot be a success.”
Faced with such hostility, what can she do but fight, and how can most British voters avoid siding with her? When Mrs May emerged from Downing Street on Wednesday to denounce Mr Juncker’s “threats”, one feared she might be going over the top. But she is right that “there are some in Brussels who do not want these talks to succeed”. It is as well to say so now, using the plain English language which, Mr Juncker announced on Friday, is “losing importance” in Europe. Insulted by people like him, voters instinctively gravitate to the Prime Minister, even those who wish we hadn’t voted Leave in the first place.
All of the above make it almost freakishly easy for Mrs May’s campaign team to craft her message. Sir Lynton Crosby, who is in charge of the concepts, is never happier than when a clear and sombre choice presents itself, hence “strong and stable leadership”, ad nauseam. If I were a Tory candidate, I would find it hard to obey the strict orders not to indulge in the party’s habitual vice of complacency.
But there is a caution to be entered here. Mrs May has been shown the focus groups. They all say that she is more popular than her party. Therefore, she is advised, she must campaign as Theresa May, not as its leader. In her counter-attack against Mr Juncker, she used the word “me” five times. She ended by inviting voters to “give me your backing to lead Britain”. At no point did she use the word “Conservative”.
Prime Minister Theresa May accuses EU officials of trying to influence election
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All great party leaders reach out beyond their party. The two previous successful leaders of the past 50 years – Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron – did that notably. But all depend upon their party too, and once they forget that fact, things start to go wrong. Claim all the credit, and you will get all the blame.
By “party”, I do not mean just activists, constituency associations and parliamentary colleagues, but that whole wider, looser, deeper structure of culture, history, class, money, media and (yes, even among Conservatives) ideas from which Conservative success somehow emerges.
So far, Mrs May’s public performance has been an impressive example of her party’s strange capacity for renewal which I describe above. In private, though, there are already too many who feel unthanked and too few who are working out the future. What Mrs May calls the “overriding task” of Brexit is concealing the lack of thought about what sort of country we want to be when we leave. If she thinks this election is all about “me”, she is riding for a fall – though not, probably, on June 8.
