Tories face up to why they lost their way in office

Good morning. Parliament has risen for the summer recess, and most MPs will be using some of the time to rest and recuperate. We’ll still be here throughout the summer (though I myself will be on holiday next week).

One of the running debates during the recess will be about what the Conservative party needs to do to be electable again — but I’m not convinced that “being electable” is really what the Tory party in the country is looking for.

One big reason for why its record in office is very thin compared with either the Conservative governments of 1979 to 1997 or the New Labour governments of 1997 to 2010, is that the party became obsessed with holding on to office and frankly unfussed about what it might do with power.

Islands in the sun

Robert Jenrick kicked off his campaign for the Conservative leadership with a slick video. There is much to say about how the candidates are pitching themselves, but we’ve got four long summer weeks ahead of us. For now, I just want to talk about the section right at the beginning of the video when Jenrick lays out the achievements of the last Conservative government: the period of public spending restraint from 2010 to 2015, the improvements in education in England, and “getting Brexit done”.

Whatever you think of these things, what is really worth noting is a) there aren’t very many of them, and b) two of them happened under David Cameron, who hasn’t been prime minister for eight years!

There is a longer list that could be done. But those other achievements — the introduction of the triple lock, which has accelerated the growth of what had been a pretty meagre state pension both by international standards and just in real terms in the UK, same-sex marriage, auto-enrolment pensions, developing more renewables, to take just a few examples — are not going to inspire much affection in a Tory leadership election. These achievements could just have easily happened under a centre-left government, and in some cases built upon the work of a centre-left government or the policy proposals of the Liberal Democrats.

(This is true of education, too, but the Conservative grassroots feel a greater sense of ownership over school reform, which is what matters most for the purposes of today’s newsletter.)

And again, they all happened under Cameron, too. The last Conservative government had six years in which it got many things done, and eight years in which it didn’t. Some of that was about the circumstances in which his successors operated: Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, a far better deal for the UK than the harder Brexit envisaged by Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement and subsequent trade deal, for example, was wrecked by an alliance of revanchist Remainers (who thought, wrongly, that voting down her deal would lead to Brexit being reversed) and Brexiter ultras (who thought, correctly, that they could get a looser relationship with the EU). You can also put down some of the difficulties to the disruption of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine, but not all of them. (It’s not like Cameron’s government didn’t also have to contend with external crises and challenges.)

The short list of achievements under Sunak — the Windsor framework, the AI safety summit, the “super-deduction” tax break — all have the same problem for the Conservative faithful: these are all things that large parts of the Labour party likes and might plausibly have done in office itself. (As it happens, the super-deduction would probably never have happened had Jeremy Hunt not chosen to prioritise it, but this is arguable: as it is, it’s a short list without a single particularly Conservative item on it.)

In recent days I have heard, essentially, the same thing from many, many Conservative MPs: that they presided over an ever-growing nanny state, that they had little to say on the economy that wasn’t either implausible, straight out of a Labour leaflet or both, and that they had little in the way of a distinctive Tory vision for public services these past eight years.

Yet the final eight years of the government’s life were ones of stunning electoral success: Theresa May and Boris Johnson got many more votes than David Cameron did and Johnson won a bigger majority. The party became better at winning elections even as it got much worse at doing anything with those victories.

One reason why I think the dynamic of the Tory leadership election favours a rightwinger and Robert Jenrick in particular is that talk of getting back to “winning” inevitably invites the question among quite a few Conservatives of “OK, but to what end?” A great number of Tories, both in parliament and in the country, feel that they didn’t do much in government other than hold on to it — a major achievement as far as Conservatives are concerned when the alternative was Jeremy Corbyn, but not one that makes them yearn for a return to winning ways now Keir Starmer is prime minister.

Jenrick has the most developed argument that the party lost its way in office — and that argument is going to be very powerful and hard to defeat among members, if he can make it that far.

Now try this

I saw Deadpool and Wolverine. It’s a fun and sweary popcorn movie that I very much enjoyed at the cinema but where the details are already escaping me. Worth seeing on a big screen or not at all would be my view. Christopher Grimes interviews the director Shawn Levy here.

Top stories today

• EU issues UK with list of demands | Brussels has warned the UK it must fully implement existing Brexit agreements on Northern Ireland and the rights of EU citizens living in Britain if it wants to build an improved relationship with the bloc.

• Churn ‘damages institutional memory’ | Civil service turnover has risen over the past year to almost 13 per cent as mandarins changed departments, according to official data, raising concerns that Whitehall lacks sufficient stability to operate effectively.

• Take that | UK inheritance tax liabilities climbed to their highest levels on record in the 2021-22 tax year, driven by increased asset values and a long-standing freeze on the tax-free threshold.

• IfG warning | The UK government should set out spending plans five years in advance to help restore stability to public expenditure, a think-tank has urged.

• Why true blue North Herefordshire went green | Last month the Green Party’s Ellie Chowns overturned an almost 25,000-vote Tory majority in a seat that had been blue since 1910. Rachel Wearmouth in the i takes a closer look at what helped lift her campaign.