How the Tories Lost Britain

 

How the Tories Lost Britain

 

Brexit and immigration upended their 14-year reign — setting the stage for a pitched battle to remake British conservatism.

 

Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times.

Published Aug. 29, 2024

Updated Aug. 31, 2024, 8:28 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/magazine/uk-politics-tories-conservatives.html

 

Liz Truss has a theory about what caused the collapse of Britain’s Conservative Party, and it has little to do with her. Sitting last May in her corner office across the street from Big Ben, Truss diagnosed the multiple ailments of her party, without referring to her own calamitous, 49-day stint as prime minister. Instead, like the London Eye turning lazily on the far bank of the Thames outside her window, she spun a story about how the Conservatives had drifted away from their ideological moorings.

 

Mass migration, big government, anticapitalist protests, an erosion of Parliament’s power over the “deep state” and a hothouse legal culture that prizes transgender rights over common-sense policies — these and other nostrums of left-wing thinking had come to dominate British politics, she said. After 14 years in power, Truss went on, the Conservatives were still living in, even embracing, Tony Blair’s Britain.

 

“We’re still seeing gender ideology in schools; we’ve got record levels of immigration; our taxes are at an 80-year high; and the government accounts for 45 percent of G.D.P.,” she said, in her characteristic staccato tone. “By any objective measure, that’s not a very strongly conservative set of policies.

 

“I tried,” Truss said of her ill-fated premiership, the shortest in Britain’s history, “but it was too late in the day, fundamentally.”

 

Never mind that Truss was ultimately undone by her own policies: an ill-judged foray into Ronald Reagan-style, trickle-down tax cuts that frightened the financial markets, sent the British pound into a tailspin and provoked the kinds of warnings about financial instability from the International Monetary Fund normally issued to rogue regimes in Latin America.

 

Forty-eight hours after our conversation in mid-May, Truss’s successor as prime minister, Rishi Sunak, called a general election for July 4. Truss, who returned to the Tory backbenches in Parliament after leaving 10 Downing Street, was summarily ousted by the voters of her district in Norfolk, northeast of London. That made her the first former British prime minister in nearly a century to lose her own seat, the highest-profile casualty in a landslide victory by the Labour Party that was less a triumph of the left than a breathtaking repudiation of the Conservatives.

 

“People say the Conservative Party should be united,” Truss said, “but you’ve got to unite around an idea or set of ideas. At present, I think the views are very disparate about what the ideas should be.”

 

In this, at least, she has a point.

 

Two months after their historic rout, the Conservatives are still a house divided. Facing years in the political wilderness, they have scattered into angry camps — “fighting like rats in the sack,” in the words of Tim Bale, a leading scholar on the party at Queen Mary University of London — as they argue over what caused their collapse and what can be done to pick up the pieces.

 

There is no shortage of culprits. Rishi Sunak, for calling the election months earlier than he needed to. Boris Johnson, for presiding over an unsavory parade of scandals that left voters disgusted with a legacy of “Tory sleaze.” Yet another prime minister, David Cameron, for imposing painful fiscal austerity in 2010 and then calling the self-sabotaging referendum on Brexit six years later.

 

It is an overstatement to say that Brexit caused the Conservative crackup — but not by much. The scalding, seemingly never-ending debate over whether and how to leave the European Union haunted the party, dividing the Tories, pulling its leaders to the right and forcing successive governments into ever-more-extreme policies, especially after it was widely judged a failure. “Brexit is still at the root of all this,” says Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “The Conservative Party damaged itself because of it. And Brexit got tangled up in the populist tide. The original referendum vote allowed a populist expression, but after eight years, it’s clear Brexit did not produce the benefits promised by its supporters.”

 

 

‘Turn a Corner on Brexit’: Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he expected that a new Anglo-German treaty, covering defense, technology, business and culture, would be struck by the end of the year as part of a broader reset of relations with the European Union.

 

Fox Hunters Seek Legal Protection: A lobbying group is preparing a bid to define hunting with animals as a protected belief under Britain’s Equality Act. It has been illegal in England since 2005.

 

‘Keyboard Warriors’: Hundreds are appearing in court for their role in recent anti-immigrant riots. Several are accused of fueling disorder through online posts, raising questions about the limits of free speech.

 

That lingering disappointment acted as an accelerant for the anti-immigrant riots that convulsed Britain for several days this summer. Four weeks after voters threw out the government, gangs of far-right thugs stormed mosques and torched the hotels used to house asylum seekers. The spark was a brutal knife attack on a dance studio by a 17-year-old Welsh-born man whose parents immigrated from Rwanda; he was charged with killing three children and injuring 10 others.

 

But the deeper causes lie in the broken promises of the Brexiteers. They claimed that immigration levels would decline as a result of leaving the E.U.; instead, they have soared. Conservative governments have quietly encouraged this influx in the hope that the new arrivals, many of them highly skilled, would recharge Britain’s lagging economy. At the same time, Conservative leaders pandered to anti-immigration sentiment within their political base by inflaming fears about a much smaller subset of illegal migrants: asylum seekers from countries like Afghanistan or Albania, many of whom make desperate crossings of the English Channel in rickety boats.

 

Now the Tories are caught in the vortex of the rancorous debate they whipped up. In September, the party will hold the first stage of a two-month contest to select a new leader. The six declared candidates are struggling to articulate a coherent policy on immigration, to say nothing of the many other social and economic problems facing the country, including low productivity and a corroded public health service. Those candidates run the gamut from middle-of-the-road figures like Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly, military men who have somewhat awkwardly adopted the vocabulary of hard-liners, to more natural right-wingers like Kemi Badenoch and Priti Patel, children of immigrants who project a kind of “multiethnic nativism,” in the words of Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research institute.

 

As if a battle for the party’s soul wasn’t existential enough, the Tories must contend with the resurgence of Nigel Farage, the gleeful populist and chronic political disrupter. No longer a fringe figure, he expertly stoked anger about immigration to win more than four million votes for his insurgent party, Reform U.K., with most coming from disaffected Tories. This has split the right and raised questions about whether he may engineer a hostile takeover of the Conservatives.

 

In their embrace of radicalism, the Conservatives bear an obvious resemblance to their American cousins in the Republican Party. Both have ridden the whirlwind of populism. Both have discarded decades of orthodoxy on core economic and social issues. Both have seen their traditional party establishments hollowed out — in the case of the Conservatives, by the Brexiteers; in the case of the G.O.P., by Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement. What separates the two is that the Conservatives underwent this transformation while clinging stubbornly to power. Their psychodrama became the country’s psychodrama. British politics was shaped not by Tony Blair, as Truss suggests, but by the decade-long disintegration of the Conservative Party.

 

As a more unified, businesslike Labour government turns the page on the Tory era, many people in Britain want to look ahead. But even in defeat, the Tories are a spectacle. Their leadership contest has become “a battle of ideological purity,” says Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at Kings College London. “It’s the Mensheviks versus the Trotskyites in the Bolshevik Party before the First World War.”

 

History suggests the party will lurch to the right, at least for a time. After the Tories were defeated by Blair in 1997, they cycled through three right-wing leaders — and two further election defeats — before settling on David Cameron and a centrist route back to power. Even Tories who reject links to Farage or the far right echo Truss’s argument that the party must find its way back to a more authentic conservative identity. But in a Britain convulsed by riots and newly attracted to Farage and Reform, the very concept of such an identity seems up for grabs. For the party’s aspiring leaders, the soul searching has scarcely begun.

 

“We have to recognize what we did to alienate and frustrate a lot of voters,” Cleverly, who served as foreign secretary and home secretary, says. “None of us should turn around and say the voters made a mistake. ”

 

To understand the sheer magnitude of the Conservative defeat, it helps to recall the party’s record of winning elections, without peer in the West. Tories have been in power for roughly two-thirds of their existence, which dates to the 17th century, when they emerged as a factional rival to the Whigs before organizing as a party under the Conservative banner in 1834. Samuel Earle, in his book, “Tory Nation,” attributed that success to the party’s talent for projecting stability. “It is the Conservatives’ abiding promise,” he wrote, “that they will keep things recognizably the same, that tomorrow will look like today. They are the safe pair of hands.”

 

The party of Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Rishi Sunak, the Conservatives are also a big tent, with an endless capacity to remake themselves in the face of changing circumstances. This shape-shifting quality has enabled the Tories, though rooted in the aristocracy, to expand beyond their upper-class roots and appeal to working-class voters, as they did in 2019, when Johnson won an election by vowing to “Get Brexit done.” Yet as Earle wrote, “The strange dissonance between the Conservative Party’s ability to win elections and its destructive record in government stands as one of the defining riddles of British politics.”

 

Never has that riddle been more mystifying than in the eight years since the Brexit referendum. The party cycled through no fewer than five prime ministers, a spectacle of corruption, hubris, folly and misrule.

 

Cameron called the referendum to settle Britain’s future in Europe once and for all, but then ran such a desultory campaign to stay in the E.U. that it contributed to the narrow vote to leave. Johnson, the clown prince of British politics, threw wine-and-cheese parties in 10 Downing Street that violated his government’s own lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic. Sunak, Britain’s first prime minister of color, may be most remembered for championing a plan to put newly arrived asylum seekers on one-way flights to the central African country Rwanda. And then there’s Truss, who occupies a special place in Tory hell. Her tax experiment turned Britain — the birthplace of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes — into a global laughingstock. She herself became a punchline: Which would last longer, The Daily Star asked: Liz Truss or a lettuce? The paper bought a head of lettuce and posted a livestream of it next to her photo. The lettuce won.

 

For the Conservative Party, however, the consequences were longer lasting. “Liz Truss destroyed any claim to economic credibility,” says Rory Stewart, the broadcaster and former diplomat who served as a Tory member of Parliament from 2010 until 2019. “She removed the central Conservative argument that they are the responsible party for managing the economy.”

 

Stewart’s own career as a Tory ended abruptly when he and other lawmakers resisted Johnson’s plan to pull out of the European Union without a trade deal and were pushed out. Now the co-host, with the onetime Blair adviser Alastair Campbell, of a popular podcast, Stewart has become an eloquent eulogist for a party he says he no longer recognizes. “Margaret Thatcher achieved a radical economic transformation,” Stewart told me. “Tony Blair achieved a constitutional and cultural transformation. The problem that the Conservatives face is that it’s very difficult over 14 years to identify what they’ve achieved beyond the catastrophe of Brexit.”

 

Perhaps that explains why, in the last election, the Tories simply stopped talking about it. With polls showing that nearly 60 percent of Britons now regret leaving the European Union — a consequence both of the weak economy and of changing demographics — Brexit has become political Kryptonite. Voters blame the Brexiteers for failing to negotiate a better departure deal with Brussels or, more plainly, for having sold them a bill of goods in the first place. “That sense of being scammed is one of the reasons people don’t want to talk about it,” says Chris Patten, a Conservative elder who once chaired the party and later served as the last governor of colonial Hong Kong. “Brexit became sort of the pit-bull terrier of British politics. Nobody knew whether it was house-trained or whether, if you went on walks with it in the park, it would bite people.”

 

The radicalization of the party is also rooted in a profound shift in the behavior of the British electorate: away from voting on economic, class-based criteria toward voting on cultural identity. In this sense, the debate over Britain’s place in the E.U. was a cultural debate and the Brexit vote a kind of cultural protest. “The Tory Party’s strategy has been to give ground to emerging populism to head off a threat from the right,” says David Gauke, who served as a Conservative justice secretary and, like Stewart, was purged by Johnson in 2019. “The Brexit debate accelerated this process and clarified it. It has forced members of the Conservative Party to choose what kind of conservatives they are.”

 

Broadly speaking, Bale said, the ideological fault line runs between the forces of big-state populism and neoliberal economics. Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” whose free-market revolution in the 1980s defined the modern-day Conservative Party, embodied both strains. But present-day Tories tend to sort into one camp or the other: Johnson was a populist, while Sunak and Truss are heirs to the neoliberal tradition. Neither, though, was willing to face down the populists on their right, and Truss has styled herself as a populist since leaving office.

 

Less than five years before their crushing defeat, the Conservatives used an avowedly populist message to pull off their own lopsided victory over Labour. Boris Johnson, having gained occupancy of Downing Street in the chaotic aftermath of the referendum, called an election to break an impasse in Parliament over the terms by which Britain would leave the E.U. His Brexit-themed campaign was reductive but crudely effective. To illustrate his point, Johnson drove a backhoe through a wall of foam bricks. The wall was labeled “Gridlock,” while the backhoe was stamped with a Union Jack and the three-word slogan, “Get Brexit done.”

 

Sure enough, the Conservatives smashed Labour’s “red wall,” a crumbling bastion of coal and factory towns in the Midlands and north of England that had voted for the Labour Party for generations. Having also widely supported Brexit, they felt betrayed by Labour’s mealy-mouthed position on Europe and frustrated by those who called for a do-over referendum on membership. Labour’s loss was its worst since 1935, and the Conservative majority the largest since 1987. Johnson had redrawn Britain’s political map, commentators said. Some predicted the Tories would be in power for another decade. But Johnson himself recognized the evanescence of his coalition. “You may only have lent us your vote,” he said, adding presciently, “You may intend to return to Labour next time.”

 

Johnson was able to get Brexit done — Britain left the European Union in January 2020 — but it failed to deliver tangible economic dividends. As many experts predicted, Britain’s departure from the E.U.’s vast single market hindered trade and stunted economic growth. In a more unexpected development, driven by labor shortages and post-Brexit emphasis on attracting skilled workers, net immigration surged to 765,000 in 2022, more than twice that in the year before the referendum.

 

To the economically starved “red wall,” Johnson promised a hefty dose of state intervention. He named a “leveling up” minister, whose job was to pour investment into the Midlands and North to erase the wealth disparity with the richer south, especially the booming capital, London. But bureaucracy and tight finances, especially after the pandemic, put an end to those dreams.

 

Few places capture the disenchantment with Brexit more vividly than Shirebrook, a hard-bitten former coal town of 11,500 in the East Midlands. More than a decade ago, a sporting-goods company opened a giant warehouse on the edge of town, hiring hundreds of workers from Eastern Europe to staff it. While it provided jobs, the warehouse changed the look and feel of Shirebrook. “You can go down to the village, and you don’t know anybody,” said Gary Attenborough, 54, who works as a groundskeeper and plays bingo at a social club for the families of retired coal miners.

 

That sense of dislocation fueled an anti-immigration backlash that led people in Shirebrook to vote to leave the E.U. Many of those same people turned out for the Tories in 2019. But little changed in the four years after the election. The workers at the warehouse were still there, and there were no new employers with jobs for British residents. With boarded-up storefronts, Shirebrook still looked like a place left behind. In 2024, the voters ousted the Conservative member of Parliament in favor of his Labour opponent.

 

“They voted Conservative” in 2019, Attenborough said, before turning back to his bingo game. “But now they’re fed up.”

 

As the Tories pick their way through the political wilderness, rarely have they found the landscape rockier. While the election did not drive the party into extinction, as some feared it would, it left the Conservatives badly out of step with mainstream British politics. Nor are there obvious forces to pull them back and make them palatable to a broader share of voters. If anything, structural changes in Britain’s political system are conspiring to push the party further into the right-wing weeds.

 

Anti-immigrant sentiment, which helped Reform soak up 14 percent of the vote and propelled Farage into Parliament for the first time in eight attempts, shows signs of hardening further, at least on the right. Brexit, while fading from the headlines, continues to impose burdens on Britain’s economy. The media ecosystem that surrounds and props up the Conservatives — from The Daily Telegraph and other pro-Tory papers to the noisy right-wing TV news channel, GB News — keeps hammering the message that the party’s problem is that it is not sufficiently right-wing.

 

Britain’s summer of unrest presented something of a quandary for the party’s candidates. They were loath to endorse the Labour government’s hardheaded response to the rioters: hundreds of arrests and fast-track convictions. But in so doing, they risked blurring the line with Farage, who stirred up malefactors on the far right by questioning why the authorities were not treating the attack on the children as a terrorist act. “I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us,” he said.

 

While only 7 percent of the British public said they approved of the riots, a fifth of those who voted for Reform did. “You can’t win if your brand is being dragged by Reform,” Sunder Katwala says.

 

Tories are evenly divided about the wisdom of merging with Reform, according to a poll taken by the market research firm YouGov after the election. That speaks to how disillusioned they have become. It also speaks to the growing gulf between the rank-and-file members and their representatives in Parliament. Tory members tend to be older, whiter and more right-wing than Tory M.P.s, let alone the general population. There are also far fewer of them: From a peak of 2.8 million in 1953, the membership has dwindled to about 170,000.

 

“The main parties used to be a much more authentic expression of the nation,” says Charles Moore, a columnist and former chief editor of The Daily Telegraph, a paper so aligned with the Tories that it is often referred to as the Torygraph. “Both of them were deeply rooted in the country: Labour, with unions and the organized working class; Tories, with the butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.”

 

The loosening of ties between the Conservative Party and the grass roots has made voters less loyal and the electorate more volatile. It has also contributed to the party’s capture by ideas like the trickle-down economics of Truss or the Rwanda asylum scheme championed by Sunak — policies machine-tooled to appeal to the party’s base, even if they were unpopular with much of the public. As the party has changed, so have its politicians. The ubiquity of social media and the emergence of GB News have given members of Parliament a way to become, as Bale puts it, “legends in their own lunchtime.” Farage has his own prime-time show on the channel, arguably as valuable as his seat in the House of Commons and certainly more lucrative.

 

Hungry for publicity and heedless of authority, the Tories have become all but unmanageable, less a big tent than a chaotic campground. During the debate over sending migrants to Rwanda, the party’s right split into five dissident groups, which took to naming themselves the “five families,” after the mobsters who run the rackets in New York City. For months before the election, Sunak was plagued by would-be successors maneuvering to take his place after a defeat. He turned up at a reception thrown by the political magazine The Spectator, at the party’s conference in Manchester last fall, to find guests in the sweaty ballroom mobbing potential leaders, as they drained warm glasses of Pol Roger, Churchill’s favorite Champagne.

 

Now, with Sunak in a caretaker role, the candidates are pleading for party unity, even as they carry on a sharp-elbowed campaign that has featured leaked videos and other opposition research to discredit one another. The agendas they lay out for the party are tailored to the peculiarities of the selection process: While their fellow M.P.s will vote to cut the six candidates to two finalists, the winner will be chosen by party members, the same people who selected Liz Truss.

 

Little surprise, then, that their policies tilt uniformly to the right. Tugendhat, a 51-year-old standard-bearer for the centrists, has called for “common-sense Conservative positions,” which include a threat to leave the European Convention on Human Rights if it blocks Britain’s effort to close its borders. Tugendhat used to warn against withdrawing from the treaty on the grounds that it would create new problems, not least for the peace in Northern Ireland. But he now says it hinders Britain’s ability to deport criminals who enter the country illegally. Cleverly, 54, whose father’s family is from Wiltshire and whose mother came from Sierra Leone, says immigration is woven into Britain’s history but that the system breeds resentment because some people cut in line to get into the country. “The Brits love queuing up,” he says. “Where there is a perception that the rules are being broken, that really hits a nerve.”

 

Cleverly’s star is rising, but Britain’s bookmakers are still betting that Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will emerge victorious. Jenrick, who is 42, resigned from the last Conservative government because he said its Rwanda plan did not go far enough. He has styled himself as an immigration absolutist; the number of migrants, he said, should be capped in the “tens of thousands.” He has also endorsed Donald Trump in the American election, which some said was a blunder given Trump’s deep unpopularity with much of the British public. Badenoch, 44, a daughter of Nigerian immigrants and former trade secretary, wrote recently in The Times of London that the party needs to fight against “nasty identity politics” and “a postmodernism that can best be described as joyless decadence.” Bale called her the “thinking man’s Thatcherite culture warrior.” The biggest threat to Badenoch has come from a recently resurfaced 2018 video in which she welcomed the Conservative government’s proposal to relax restrictions on visas for skilled migrants. She said she has since changed her mind.

 

Badenoch is not the only candidate who once viewed immigration differently. Patel introduced more work visas for foreign graduates of British universities when she served as home secretary. Tugendhat campaigned to grant full citizenship to holders of British Overseas passports in Hong Kong. Cleverly fought for visas for Ukrainian refugees, while Jenrick even hosted a Ukrainian family. Some of these circumstances were extraordinary, of course, and there is broad recognition that Britain cannot sustain a net influx of nearly 700,000 migrants a year. But that Conservatives are tying themselves in knots on this issue attests to a deeper dysphoria in the party that has long dominated British politics. And it is only one of many contradictions: a party caught between big-state populism and neoliberal economic policy; a champion of national unity that also wages culture wars; a self-proclaimed change agent even after 14 years in power.

 

“Who is the Conservative Party for?” Menon asked. “Ten years ago, I could have told you: it’s for relatively wealthy people who want a small state and to pay lower taxes. Who is the Conservative Party for today? God only knows.”

 

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler