Cameron must reclaim his party from rationalists

Critics of conservatism usually equate it with irrationality. They sense something of the counter-enlightenment in the US Republican party’s religious fervour and no less faith-based approach to economics. But British conservatism is different. Its electoral agonies flow from too much rationality, not too little. Twenty-one years since the Tories last won an election, eight since they began to “modernise” under David Cameron’s leadership, the party still takes a view of politics that is best described as stupidly logical.

This view, which has spread from the right-wing to contaminate the leadership, runs as follows: parties must find out what people think about the issues of the day, align themselves with those opinions and watch the votes pile up. And so Tories cockily recite their polling advantage over the Labour opposition on welfare, immigration and Europe to the last percentage point. Call them right-wing and they brandish a chart showing their views are mainstream.

Theirs is a model of almost mathematical clarity — and childlike credulity. As a guide to how politics really works, nothing has bettered the research finding that sits halfway through Smell the Coffee, a psephological study of the Conservatives’ third consecutive election defeat in 2005. When a tough immigration policy is read out to voters, they approve.

When they are told it is a Tory policy, they recoil. In other words, the party’s reputation is so foul that some people would rather shun an idea they like than endorse its Conservative authors. “Brand” is a shallow-sounding word for a very important thing. “Policy” is a serious-sounding word for something that politically matters much less.

This is why Cameron opened his leadership with no great intellectual treatise but vivid and surprising gestures in favour of the environment, delinquent youths and anything else that would disrupt settled impressions of Conservatives. This is why the suspension of that good work when the recession came was a folly of existential consequence for his party. And this is why the continuing retreat from it in government is so unwise.

In the struggle for the Tory soul that predates and will outlast Cameron’s leadership, the deepest fault-line does not lie between right and left but between rationalists and those with a more impressionistic take on politics.

Data-driven case

Rationalists make a data-driven case for Cameron’s tough noises on Europe, immigration and green taxes; issue-by-issue polling is on their side. But impressionists know the spectacle of a Tory leader saying predictably Tory things about classical Tory subjects keeps the party’s overall image in the same low place where it has festered for a generation.

Rationalists hold excruciating weekend conferences of the “101 policies to win the next election” variety. Impressionists search for spectacular gestures to remake the party’s reputation at a stroke.

Rationalists lament the loss of Tory voters to the fringe UK Independence party. Rationalists are more worried about the 42 per cent of voters who refuse even to consider ever voting Conservative. Rationalists are literal and study detail. Impressionists are intuitive and see the big picture. Rationalists are from Mars, impressionists are from Venus.

Were both tribes vying for Cameron’s ear, he could at least craft some kind of synthesis, what with his English taste for balance. But his best impressionists have gone: Steve Hilton, a roving strategist who left Downing Street in 2012, and Andrew Cooper, the first moderniser, who has just departed from an advisory role. The prime minister is left with a kitchen cabinet of clout, forensic intelligence but almost uniform rationality.

Modernisation is being jeered out of fashion, and out of existence, by cynics who say that eight years of it have failed to decontaminate the Conservative brand. Last week they shouted down Nick Boles, the planning minister and moderniser’s moderniser, for suggesting the Tories should set up a parallel National Liberal party and campaign alongside it.

In truth, there were only two years of modernisation, and they managed to lift the party to 50 per cent in the polls by 2008. The modish greenery, the smarmy talk of inclusiveness, the reticence on tax cuts: it all worked. And it worked because, when a party’s brand is hideous, creating a different impression — almost regardless of what that is — constitutes an improvement.

The crash was not the time to suspend these efforts but to extend them to the heavier terrain of economic inequality, house-building and consumer rights. Boles’s only mistake was not going far enough. Modernisers should ask whether the entity known as the Tory party is salvageable, or whether the centre-right must relaunch to save conservatism from the Conservatives.

The swing voter is not an electoral brother of homo economicus, coldly appraising each party’s manifesto for compatibility with their own interests. They respond to the general aroma emitted by a party. That, modernisation’s central insight, is being forgotten. And so the Tory brand continues to reek, and a party in thrall to vulgar rationalism still strains to smell the coffee.

— Financial Times