Much press discussion appears to assume that there is something called the "Conservative right wing" that is a small minority of the party who, if there were a Conservative minority administration or a small majority, would in some way "hold the party to ransom", extracting concessions far out of proportion to their numbers.
Furthermore, much of the discussion of "modernisation" in the Conservative Party appears to assume that the "modernisers" are in some sense on the left or centre of the party, and that this set was unhappy with the strategies employed in 2001 and 2005, with there being a shift of gravity and personnel after 2005 away from the "right wing" that had been in control up to then and towards the "modernisers".
I want to challenge both of these propositions.
I'll begin with the latter. Who are the "modernisers"? Here are some names: Cameron, Lansley, Osborne, Finkelstein, Maude, Letwin, Hilton. The way they tell the story, they would have you believe that the 2001 and 2005 electoral disasters were due to strategies devised by "the Conservative right". But who was actually in control of strategy at that time?
- Finkelstein was Hague's key political advisor between 1997 and 2001, preparing him for Prime Minister's Question Time and, together with Osborne, joint secretaries of the Shadow Cabinet.
- In his capacity as Vice Chairman of the Party, with particular responsibility for the political strategy followed at the 2001 General Election, Andrew Lansley devised the "core vote strategy" following the success of the 1999 European Elections in which a low overall turnout combined with motivating the Conservative vote produced a good result for the Conservatives.
- Cameron and Osborne were (like Hague, earlier), protégés of Michael Howard. Howard appointed Osborne as Shadow Chancellor (probably after Cameron turned down the position). Cameron had worked for Howard at the Home Office in the 1990s and played a role in preparing the 2005 manifesto.
- Maude might more reasonably claim to have been an earlier advocate of a different strategy, having been a key ally of Michael Portillo's, though not so much so that he was unprepared to serve as Shadow Chancellor under Hague. Hilton was also a long-term advocate of a different strategy - and indeed is rumoured to have voted Green in 2001 in despair at the Conservative campaign.
- Letwin is another Portillo ally, but perhaps has credentials for an even more radical alternative strategy, having come to public attention after apparently proposing moderately significant spending cuts (£20bn) in the run-up to the 2001 General Election.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that when these modernisers attack the strategies of 2001 and 2005, for most of them (Hilton excepted) they are attacking strategies in which they were centrally involved and of which in certain cases they were key architects. Now, anyone is entitled to change his view, but many of the modernisers appear to hope we will believe that the strategies employed in 2001 and 2005 were those of "the Conservative right wing" which thereby showed itself to be unelectable, so therefore the modernisers should have carte blanche to do whatever anti-right-wing things they feel necessary in order to get elected.
The truth, in my view, is that the strategies employed in 2001 and 2005 were devised precisely in order not to go along with the ideas of the Conservative "right wing". The "right wing" - this strange and shadowy beast that has comprised more than 75% of the Party from the early 1990s onwards - was interested in and focused upon issues that the leadership - i.e. the same individuals, by and large, that are now the "modernisers" - felt were unelectable, so the "right wing" was never permitted to offer its platform. The Conservative "right wing" - i.e. the core three quarters of the party - has not had any election remotely like 1983, in which its programme was offered and rejected.
"What?" I hear you say. "The 2001 and 2005 platforms weren't right wing enough for you?" That question confuses the point. The Conservative "right wing" - i.e. the core three quarters of the party - believed in certain things from the early 1990s onwards. They wanted to introduce market forces into health and education - perhaps even privatising parts of them; certainly allowing more demand-side reforms to enhance choice and enable people to top up state provision with their own money. They wanted to privatise things like Royal Mail. They might even have wanted to privatise parts of benefits provision (many a pamphlet was written in the 1990s about workfare or private unemployment insurance). They wanted to keep public spending down to the levels of the late 1980s or late 1990s. They wanted to offer large rises in the income tax threshold to remove many of the poor from income tax altogether. They wanted to renegotiate our position within the European Union. They liked prison, but would have preferred more focus on traditional English civil liberties. They were very split on issues like drugs and many wanted to explore issues like cannabis legalisation. In terms of a publicly-known platform, the closest reflection of the mainstream Party view was probably that of the Portillistas - a key reason why Portillo's presence was destabilising for so long; he was just a better reflection of the Party's true opinions (though even in that case the Party members were probably subject to a little self-deception - they wanted to elect the Portillo of 1995; they might have ended up with the Portillo of today).
But the party leadership - the people who now call themselves "modernisers" - believed that this sort of platform was unelectable, and would doom the Party to a 1983-style defeat, perhaps even end the Party altogether. Furthermore, from immediately after the 1997 General Election the aspiration of many in the senior leadership was to copy Blair. We immediately "modernised" our backdrops - remember Hague in front of those purple screens? We tried to make our leadership seem young and modern - remember the baseball cap? The focus groups and opinion polls said that Labour was well ahead on economic competence and out of sight on trust on health and education, so we decided we should barely speak about those things. The Party would not have tolerated not speaking about Europe, so we got to argue for saving the pound, and the polling said that Labour was vulnerable on asylum-seekers, so our strategy was set: try to avoid speaking about the economy or public services at all, or the 75% core of the Party will be exposed as the nutters they are, and instead occupy all the time talking about Saving the Pound and asylum-seekers.
Unsurprisingly, we were crushed. I remember yelling with frustration and contempt at Hague's defeat speech on the TV screens on Election night - on the most important issues, he and his team gave us nothing to say. They felt it was impossible to argue for what the Party actually believed in, so they preferred to say nothing at all.
I was not a fan of IDS, but in fact the period 2001-3 was the one time that the Party made any progress on thinking about welfare reform or reforms to health and education. But with the removal of IDS in 2003, we went back to a narrow core-vote campaign, this time spending our speaking-time on immigration and "simple messages". "How hard is it to keep a hospital clean?" became the summit of our thinking on NHS reform.
The point of this history lesson is to convey that it just isn't true that the Conservative Party's "right wing" got to argue for what it believed in 2001 and 2005 and lost. We have no idea whether the platform favoured by the "right wing" 75% core of the party could be elected or not. What we do know, because they've tried the same tactic three times and failed with it three times, is that the tactics of the modernisers are unelectable. Three times we have listened when they said that if we talked about the things that interested us - the economy, keeping down public spending, reforming health and education and welfare, renegotiating our position within the EU - the voters would regard us as nutters and the Election would be a landslide victory for Labour. Three times we listened when they insisted that they were the cunning masters of PR, with their core vote strategies, their dog whistles, their detoxification programmes. Three times we let them pick eccentric concerns far from the mainstream of the voters' interests - asylum-seekers, gypsies, a referendum on the single currency (guaranteed by Labour anyway), MRSA, green issues, gay rights - and waste their time focusing our energies on these issues, in strategies so eccentric and so obviously bizarre that we assumed there must be some cunning plan behind them that mere mortals such as us were unable to comprehend.
And three times they lost.
The "right wing" 75% core of the Conservative Party has not the slightest reason to believe that it is unelectable. But we know that the modernisers are unelectable, because they've failed to get themselves elected time after time after time.
Some people seem to think that the lesson of 2010 was that "right wing" parties can never be elected again in the UK, so we need to change the electoral system to recognise that and give us some chance of aligning ourselves with the Liberal Democrats. The lesson I want to draw is that failing to engage with the main issues of politics, aiming instead to drive the debate to fringe concerns because you are afraid to reveal the true beliefs of your party on the the key issues to the voters, makes you look inauthentic, untrustworthy, and lacking in real ideas or substance. And that definitely makes you unelectable.
