The Tories are suffering from Dorries syndrome:
paranoia steeped in denial
Rafael Behr
A party that is out of ideas and afraid to admit its
mistakes finds comfort in pursuit of traitors, scapegoats and in conspiracy
theory
Wed 30 Aug
2023 06.00 BST
Righteous
indignation is an appropriate response to bad government, except when it comes
from the cabinet, in which case it is absurd. Suella Braverman is right that
the failure of police to investigate thefts is “completely unacceptable” and
the comment would have been a stinging rebuke to the relevant minister if it
had come from someone other than the home secretary herself.
Denouncing
policy failure from the pulpit of incumbency has become a speciality of the
Tory right. Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the party, says immigration is “out
of control”. A chorus of backbench MPs laments that high taxes are suffocating
economic growth. The Conservative party is appalled by the state of a country
it has been governing for the past 13 years. Who could be responsible?
There are
numerous candidates: the opposition, lawyers, judges (European and domestic),
immigrants, charities, environmental activists, the BBC, the civil service,
universities, the Office for Budget Responsibility or some shapeless
confederacy of them all: the malignant “blob”.
But even
that formidable alliance should not rival the power of a determined government
under visionary leadership. There must be debilitation on the inside, too. The
rot starts at the top.
That is the
conclusion reached by Nadine Dorries in a resignation letter, published over
the weekend, relinquishing the parliamentary seat she had notionally quit in
June.
After a
preamble celebrating her achievements as a minister in Boris Johnson’s cabinet,
Dorries explains that she is stepping down in order to expose “the machinations
of a small group of individuals embedded deep at the centre of the party and
Downing Street”. Hers is a “dark” and “disturbing” tale that begins with the
“political assassination” of Johnson (the subject of Dorries’ forthcoming
book). The same regicidal cabal then “took down” Liz Truss (as if her downfall
had no better explanation). The sinister “onslaught” was perpetrated by
“forces” who “are today the most powerful figures in the land”, whose purpose
was the undemocratic installation of Rishi Sunak in Downing Street “without a
single vote”.
Dorries’
letter itemises a range of mainstream Conservative gripes – failure to ignite
the bonfire of EU legislation, for example – but its tone is too personal and
self-regarding to speak for anyone other than the author. Most Tory MPs find
the histrionics embarrassing. Ultra-loyalists of the deposed Johnson regime are
a dwindled faction.
And yet the
Dorries letter illuminates the Tory predicament in ways that the former MP for
Mid Bedfordshire didn’t intend. It eloquently conveys the moment of elision
where disillusioned Conservatism, swerving self-criticism, blends into
conspiracy theory.
The idea of
Sunak as the beneficiary of a plot to subvert the will of the people is
self-evidently unhinged to anyone who followed the chaotic unravelling of
Johnson’s rule and the ruinous Truss interregnum. But it is also an
extrapolation from two more common ideas. First, that the government is only
unpopular because it has ceased to be authentically Conservative. Second, its
accomplishments are too few because of obstacles put in its path by an
entrenched liberal leftwing Establishment.
That
analysis shapes the thinking of many Tory MPs. It will set the tone for Sunak’s
general election campaign because it is the only explanation for
underachievement that doesn’t require contrition from the ruling party.
If that
election is lost, as looks likely, the audit of failure will be painful. Many
Conservatives will cope with defeat by groping deeper into the shadows of
conspiracy.
Sunak’s
friends will try to cast him as an able administrator who strove to restore
competence but was unable to reverse a tide that had turned before he took
office. But the parable of the valiant caretaker lacks any honest articulation
of what caused the mess he was supposed to be clearing up.
No one
pulls on that thread because it leads by way of Truss to Johnson and from
Johnson back to Brexit. Then the whole shoddy weave comes undone. Individual
pride is one impediment to candour, but there are also ideological currents at
work.
One is the
difficulty Conservatives have tackling the social impact of economic inequality
when they start from doctrinal opposition to anything that looks like wealth
redistribution. That is why Johnson’s levelling up agenda never got any
practical purchase on Tory policymaking.
A party
that dares not incriminate markets in its analysis of unfairness, and that
refuses to grasp the levers of tax-and-spend to engineer equal opportunities,
looks instead to grievance rooted in culture and identity. That is the appeal
of “anti-woke” campaigns.
It is true
that academia, Whitehall and creative industries are over populated with
humanities graduates with opinions to the left of the median voter. That divide
is real enough. It is also true that making a scapegoat of cultural elites is
easier than confronting economic elites, especially for a party that stays
solvent through the good graces of rich donors. That dynamic is accelerated by
the absence of tangible benefits from Brexit, which was sold as redress for
economic and cultural alienation.
When
revolutions fail to build utopias it can never be the architects’ fault.
Instead there is the automatic recourse to blaming saboteurs and hunting
traitors. So it was with Marxist regimes. So it has been with Tory
Eurosceptics, and so it will continue for as long as there is any compromise
with European neighbours that leaves some morsel of sovereignty theoretically
vulnerable to continental capture.
Brexit is a
peculiarly British expression of a cycle that is not confined to British
conservatism, nor unique to the right. It is the contradiction inherent in all
populism once it graduates from insurgency to government. A party that claims
to seek power on behalf of the people and against corrupt elites ends up
reliant on the enduring potency of that elite to explain why its policies
aren’t working.
Failure
inflates the myth of an all-powerful enemy, which begets bad policy, which
fails, confirming the strength of the invisible foe. This is the conveyor from
ideology to conspiracy theory. It is the seductive key that unlocks political
frustration without a requirement to revise deeply held beliefs. It follows its
own internal logic, reassuringly insulated from countervailing evidence.
Sunak is
not riding that conveyor but he is watching it whisk his party along and he
lacks the courage to disrupt it. He may think Dorries’ explanation for why and
when things went wrong for the Tories is deranged. But her narration is no less
coherent than the prime minister’s reticence on the subject. Downing Street
will be relieved to see her leave parliament but the habit of paranoid denial
that she represents, the Dorries syndrome, will linger in the Conservative
party for years.
Rafael Behr
is a Guardian columnist
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