The Conservative Party Fought Against the Blob and Lost

What happened in Britain during the extraordinary years of 2018-24 wasn’t the philosophical defeat of ‘Toryism’, or even its betrayal. It was a legal and bureaucratic power struggle that the British Right fought and then lost, decisively.

Here was the essential question of the last six years: is opposition politics allowed in Britain? Almost everything turned on this issue; old Left-Right appeals were the exception not the rule. First came the saga over the referendum result and whether it should be honoured, which meant a constitutional crisis over prerogative powers and an extended showdown with the courts. Corbynism, so close to victory in 2017, was crowded out and fell by the wayside.

Then came a series of unprecedented interventions by the standards and ethics committees into politics. Sue Gray stalked the elected Government in plain sight. An obscure ultra-royalist reading of the constitution was invoked to prevent Boris Johnson from seeking a new mandate from the electorate.

The Parliamentary Right found itself winnowed away by investigations, which led to the former Prime Minister’s expulsion from the House of Commons and his allies being threatened with the same if they criticised these proceedings. A leading member of the Conservative Right, Miriam Cates, was hit with a gag order at the climax of its showdown with Downing Street over illegal migration. Investigations into workplace conduct unhorsed a Deputy Prime Minister and nearly did the same to two Home Secretaries.

Policy became almost irrelevant. The legal inheritance from New Labour made border control impossible. When Raab fell to a workplace investigation, his ‘British Bill of Rights’ that would have replaced the ECHR fell with him. After opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) became Government policy, a Health Minister was asked to refer herself to an ethics advisor for leafleting against “15-minute cities”. In the closing days of the Sunak ministry, a court case killed onshore fossil fuel extraction at a stroke.

Seldom have ideas counted for so little. This was a battle over the levers of Government – not what should happen once they were pulled. Everything was downstream from a willingness or an unwillingness to challenge the various non-partisan bodies for control of the British state.

The coalitions that formed were motley and defied ordinary description. Steve Baker, Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak were each starchy Thatcherites. Rory Stewart was a Burkean stickler for tradition, Theresa May a committed Anglican. None of it mattered. When the time came, each made the only choice that really counted now: for ‘decentralised’ Britain and against the democratic executive. The same was true of their opponents. Almost nothing united Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Nadine Dorries beyond some defence (ebbing and flowing) of central and democratic authority.

Things were now elemental enough to make the old distinctions blur into irrelevance. The most scrupulous Thatcherite could not have passed a budget without first neutralising the OBR. No YIMBY could have built without defying Natural England and limiting the scope of judicial review. And no kind of Government is possible at all if probity and ethics boards are allowed to cashier the people’s representatives for interrupting people.

We are well beyond theoretical jollies about the remit of the state or the proper role of the markets. Owing to a few key individuals, in 2019 the British Conservative Party essentially solved the problem of centre-Right politics in the 21st Century: that is to say, how to rouse the lower-middle and working classes with a demagogic appeal against the Blob while not spooking the upper-middle classes. The solution, as it turns out, was to simply recast the necessary attack on institutions as modernisation and reform. This is a circle that has yet to be squared in any other Western democracy.

By the end of 2019 the way was open. If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, even after the folly of lockdown the permanent administration essentially surrendered to the Johnson Government, offering to let it carry out the long mooted reform of the Civil Service that would have drastically cut its headcount and ended its institutional independence.

Had this been carried out, it would have opened a new chapter in world history. Britain would have been the first major country to decisively break with the bureaucratic-oligarchic model that rules virtually every state on the planet. At the very least, it certainly would have made the old divides between, oh I don’t know, the Bow Group and Blue Beyond feel less pressing.

Britain is further along in this historical process than any other developed country. Even the most extreme Project 2025 stretch goals would leave a President Trump with far less control over the state than Boris Johnson enjoyed in January 2020. People like Keir Starmer appreciate this. His first speech outside Downing Street had almost nothing to say about living standards, everything to say about probity, ethics and the liberties of the quango. He is prosecuting a conflict that the British Tories began and then refused to wage.

And so to say now, as many do, that the Conservative Party should in the wake of its defeat muse on the philosophical case for the centre-Right is to forget all that has happened – perhaps wilfully. It ignores how politics has regressed, or perhaps progressed, into a bare conflict between institutions. It means everyone can go back to ignoring that a Prime Minister with an 80-seat majority was ousted from office for eating cake. It means that everyone can go back to ignoring that the particular formation around Johnson and Cummings got within an ace of actually dissolving the Blob and transforming politics forever. Those who would sooner forget about these events are taking Keir Starmer at his word: that the ordinary democratic process has resumed and that the last few years were only a freak aberration, never to be repeated.

More than anything else, it allows the Tories to ignore the fact that they have, since 2019, known perfectly well how to win a popular mandate from the British people, which can then be used to carry out a reformation of the state. Everyone knows what would drive a person to vote against something like Starmerism – this showy, hand-wringing over the reason why only invites us to think they don’t like the answer.

How will a centre-Right Government elected in 2028 pass a budget in the teeth of OBR opposition? These are the salient questions, and their ultimate answers are more profound and more revolutionary than any paean to ‘institutions’, or even to free markets. Politics as commonly understood ended in 2019, and those who would now lead the opposition should not forget it.