Matthew d'Ancona: The Tory project isn’t ‘bust’ but it is plainly creaking under stress

Reports of the death of Conservative Party thinking have been exaggerated but point to the turf war over its future
Dissident-laureate: Sir David Hare foresees doom for the Right but could rue the Left’s disengagement
Rebecca Reid
Matthew d'Ancona9 March 2016
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One of my favourite moments in the church sitcom, Rev, showed the impeccably modern Archdeacon Robert rushing off, as ever, to a chic cultural gathering: “I need to get going now. I’ve got tickets to watch David Hare read some of his emails at the National.”

It is a perfectly-pitched gag, funny because it lurks on the fringes of plausibility. If any contemporary man of letters might just read out the contents of his inbox to an audience, it would be Hare. As a playwright of distinction, he has settled in recent decades into the role of dissident-laureate; deploying his drama both to report on the state of the nation (media, financial sector, Labour Party, Iraq War) and to deplore those who — in his opinion — have vandalised the country he loves.

Yesterday’s Guardian published an edited version of his Richard Hillary Lecture, delivered last week in Oxford. In this densely argued polemic, Sir David’s central thesis was typically forthright: “In its essential thinking, the Tory project is bust.”

Really? Less than a year after David Cameron’s unexpected general election victory, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party shrink-wraps itself into ever-greater irrelevance, this assertion seems (at best) counter-intuitive.

Some of Hare’s claims are overblown or downright sophomoric. Conservative governments, he says, “have launched waves of attacks” upon public sector workers, “all of whom they openly scorn for the mortal sin of not being financiers or entrepreneurs”. This is an absurdly partial way of describing public service reform, as though it were intrinsically immoral to ensure that taxpayers’ money is well-spent and that the interests of patients, pupils and passengers come first.

On occasion, the rhetoric is little more than a tantrum: Hare sneers at David Cameron’s “big society” as “self-evidently, a palliative, nothing more, the lazy shrug of a faltering conscience”. That “self-evidently” is trying to do far too much work.

So it is tempting to dismiss Hare’s cri de coeur as the foot-stamping outburst of the archetypal knight-luvvie. Tempting, but wrong. Sir David is onto something in his intuition that the Tory project is under stress: not bust, as he claims, but certainly creaking at the joints. Naturally, the general election result masked these tensions: success tends to postpone inquiry. But the EU referendum campaign is already ushering some of the divisions in question into plain sight.

If there is such a thing as Cameronism, it is not a project to dismantle the state but to decide upon its priorities. Hare is right that the banks were the principal culprits in the 2008-9 crash. But that financial crisis also forced a global assessment of fiscal realities. In a democratic society, how much of its GDP can the state afford to spend without dire consequences for economic stability and the burden upon future generations?

Cameron and George Osborne have pursued austerity for almost six years: a week today, the Chancellor’s eighth Budget will pursue this trajectory further (alongside much else, of course). No less interesting, however, has been the areas of spending that they have ring-fenced — the NHS, international development, pensioner benefits, schools, and defence.

But Cameron will be gone before the next election and the battle to succeed him will trigger a fresh round of argument over the proper limits of the state. More or less unopposed by the hibernating Labour Party, Conservatives will be free to pursue their deepest ideological yearnings.

Alongside the internal argument about the size of the state runs the disagreement over its powers. Those I have called the Runnymede Tories — notably David Davis — share Hare’s alarm at “the right to intercept private communications, the intention to curtail freedom of speech”. Their Conservative opponents — such as Theresa May — insist that new powers are necessary to address the metastasising threat of Islamist terrorism.

Most pointed of all, as the referendum campaign has already demonstrated, is the Tory split over the nature and destiny of the nation. Hare correctly focuses upon the correlation between free markets and free movement of labour — a question that foxes Leavers who (mostly) wish to remain part of the EU Single Market but refuse to accept that this would mean the continued influx of EU workers.

But what this referendum is forcing Tories to confront is a question far deeper than Britain’s precise relationship with Brussels. It is the long-postponed challenge posed by Dean Acheson in 1962 when he observed that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role”. Should that “role” continue to be that of a querulous but committed member of the European club, a pivot between the US and EU power blocs? Or is it time, as the Leavers imagine, to weigh anchor and embrace our true destiny as a smaller, nimble, buccaneering nation? Again, as Labour has chosen the worst possible moment to go off on sabbatical, the battle is being fought within the Tory party, between buccaneering Boris and clubbable Dave.

These divisions within Conservatism are hardly peculiar to this country. E J Dionne Jr’s fine new book, Why the Right Went Wrong, identifies the central paradox: “A broad desire for governments to reduce the levels of economic insecurity and expand opportunity is constrained by a loss of confidence in the capacity of government to succeed.” Dionne urges Republicans to embrace once more the imported traditions of Burke and the adaptive optimism of Eisenhower. But today, as Donald Trump celebrates victories in Michigan and Mississippi, this doesn’t seem immediately probable.

Back in the UK, what Hare identifies as the final malfunction of the “Tory project” is more like a turf war to define its next manifestation. It is already a strange prospect: a brutal struggle within a party that is untroubled by external opposition. I dare say Sir David will not like the new Conservatism that emerges from the smoke and fire of the political battlefield. But until the liberal-Left parties and their supporters get their act together, they will be in no position to do more than seethe in the stands.

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