Politics

The Tories’ ‘angry white men’ act is desperate and dangerous | Aditya Chakrabortty


In his just-published memoirs, David Cameron describes how in 2010 he finally broke New Labour’s grip on power to become prime minister. “We had changed the Conservative party, making it appeal once more to Middle England and making people in urban, liberal Britain feel that they could vote for us.”

Wandering around this year’s Tory party conference, I sought some remnants of that legacy, even the ghostliest traces of the Cameron spirit. I came up empty. As the Conservatives plough toward the end of a decade in power that he bequeathed to them, the institutional memory of its leader of 11 years has been almost wiped clean. A new gang now runs the show, both in the secure zone at Manchester and across the land. They are redder of face, faster to jab fingers and they are fuelled by a vast resentment that demands constant replenishment. Forget Cameroonian optimism and progressive posturing: anger is the Conservatives’ new electoral strategy. An exaggerated, focus-grouped, nasty anger, to be sure; but not entirely artificial, nor without some justification. And it is my genuine fear that their anger could consume the entire country.

For illustration, look no further than Monday afternoon and one of the biggest fringe events of the week. On stage lounged Jacob Rees-Mogg, self-styled “hardman of Brexit” Steve Baker, and Andrea Jenkyns. In front of them teemed hundreds of activists, packing out the room and sitting on the floor despite some being of an age where standing up again requires a little time and planning. The subject was – what else? – Brexit, and it was Jenkyns who most starkly laid out its importance to today’s Tories. “We’re at the cusp of a new golden age,” she began, one in which “our language, our diplomacy, our armed forces” would secure glory for the UK. Boris Johnson, she assured us, “is a prime minister with balls”. But if his government failed to deliver Brexit, then the country would be “emasculated and humiliated”. More than 200 years after the East India Company seized and plundered the Indian subcontinent, a young politician was again fusing manhood with nationhood – and no one batted an eyelid.

What stood in the way? A “rotten parliament”, “anti-democrats”, “the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation”. How the audience delighted in this rollcall of villains – just as they did whenever any speaker at any event rattled them off. It is through their common enemies that the Tory base finds purpose – and the biggest of all is not Jeremy Corbyn or Jo Swinson, but journalism. Earlier I heard the Daily Mirror’s Pippa Crerar ask Mark Francois and John Redwood how they felt about Johnson crying “humbug” in parliament at the evocation of murdered MP Jo Cox. Neither man deigned to address her question, but let the audience shout her down. At this later session, a young activist from Northern Ireland leapt up to denounce the BBC again and “the leftwing bias from the media”. The entire room leapt to its feet, giving him the biggest cheer of the session, slapping him on the back, jeering at those treacherous souls clutching notepads.

Almost everywhere the Tory party looks, it spies a traitor. Francois led his crowd through a boo-fest against Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond and Michael Heseltine. Redwood slated the “well-educated remainer elite”, conveniently forgetting his fellowship at All Souls Oxford. They were joined by a QC who called for the abolition of the supreme court. The Lords, Rees-Mogg claimed, was stuffed full of Tony Blair’s placemen.

Delegates arrive in heavy rain at the conference on Tuesday.



Delegates arrive in heavy rain at the conference on Tuesday. Photograph: Frank Augstein/AP

This is today’s Tory party: patriots who want to bulldoze their national institutions, self-declared liberals who hate the liberal order, an entire government crying about being bullied. That, you might say, is what happens when you shove out 21 of your MPs and lose control of parliament. But it is also the result of trafficking in the language of betrayal, surrender, collusion. This is rhetoric that has been workshopped in No 10, ventriloquised by Johnson, then parroted by every Tory who wants to get ahead.

Many of the most prominent Brexiteers have been selling their wares at fringe events for decades; but two big things have changed. First, they are now in charge. Liberals such as Ruth Davidson, Andy Street and Rory Stewart are largely absent. Nicky Morgan and Matt Hancock, those proteges of Cameron and George Osborne, now sit there like captives in a hostage video, blindfold yanked off, mumbling words they would never normally dream of uttering, supporting behaviour they know to be indefensible. Johnson unlawfully shutting down parliament? A shrug. Allegedly groping women? A chap must have a “private life”. What price such debasement? A ministerial limo and the chance to run one of the groovier government departments?

The other big change is the almost complete lack of optimism. At the 2016 Conservative conference, with Theresa May installed as leader and Daniel Hannan the big draw at fringe events, the air was thick with claims of the grand trading relationships that would flower and the national renaissance soon to follow. That has evaporated, to be replaced by fulminations from numerous platforms about what will happen if their hearts’ desire is not granted. “Let’s get Brexit done, but can we please start looking like we enjoy it?” cried Baker.

Except Johnson and his followers have mislaid a vision and picked up a process instead. “Get Brexit Done”, the slogan on every placard, is no more a goal than “chop an onion” is a meal. Brexit will not be “done” by the end of next month – it will be a slow, painstaking torture of trading negotiations that will take a decade or more to complete. No one in Manchester seems clear what the purpose of all this is. One of the party’s newest recruits, up from Canterbury for his first conference, told me he’d helped run the local Vote Leave campaign. Could he name one big dividend from Brexit? He thought for a while, then suggested sovereignty over setting VAT on domestic fuel bills. I looked at him, this nice man who’d worked in IT, and wondered if that was really what got him out of bed in the mornings.

In the past decade the Conservative party has picked up and put down many visions for its future. It was about the “Big Society” and then it wasn’t. It was about tackling burning injustices until it lost interest. Now it is about Brexit, a Brexit that it cannot and will not define, but which is forever under threat. Meanwhile, the basic problem the Tories have faced ever since the banking crash – how to make our busted model of capitalism serve enough people to be an electable proposition – has barely been articulated, let alone resolved.

There are no more utilities to be privatised, hardly any remaining council houses to be flogged, the property market is in the doldrums. All those traditional Tory ticklers no longer work. What remains is the strategy resorted to by the US Republicans: to generate enough of what Senator Lindsey Graham called “angry white guys”. It may work – for now. But the toll it will take on the Conservative party and the country does not bear thinking about.

Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist



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