The Conservatives must rebuild their party from top to bottom, says the leadership hopeful
Three weeks ago, Britain relieved our party of the responsibility of government with the most brutal efficiency. The message was clear: enough. After such a terrible result, some will assume that things will naturally get better. The truth is that it could get much worse.
The election after the one that changes a government often sees the opposition party going backwards or standing still. We saw this with Labour in 1983 and 2015, and the Conservatives in 2001. It happens when that party believes the electorate made a mistake and will come to their senses after the next election.
The electorate did not make a mistake. We deserved to lose because the past decade saw us twist and turn in the wind, unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country. And so the first task for the next Conservative leader is renewal.
Conservative values matter. They are more than platitudes. They matter because of their enduring power to transform lives. The ladders they provide for those who want to make something of themselves. The hope they give as they lift people up based on hard work and personal responsibility. The shared endeavour binding communities up and down the land.
History shows us what we can achieve when we win the trust of the British people. Disraeli expanding the franchise. Churchill bringing our country together in its darkest hour. Thatcher turbocharging our ambition and drive.
If we want to do the same again, we must be honest with ourselves that none of that was by chance. They were the result of previous generations of Conservatives, often after election defeat, making the right choices rather than easy ones.
It would be easy to give in to the fatigue we all feel. To just focus on being a credible opposition or lose ourselves debating individual policy positions, as if we remain in government. But there is a bigger question of what it means to be a conservative today. If there wasn’t, the Reform party would not exist. It is not enough to call for “unity to win”. We need to ask ourselves, what are we uniting around? What are we winning for?
The 2019 election won us a majority to Get Brexit Done. That 80-seat majority disappeared after Brexit as disagreements emerged over lockdown policy, housebuilding, state spending and more.
I believe that the majority of British people share our values. We cannot let them down again by exiting the political arena for a decade or more, handing the initiative to a Labour Party that has no fundamental analysis of what is going wrong in the country or in the world beyond Orwellian chants of “Labour good, Tories bad”.
So, it is time to renew. The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be. That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again. However, I cannot do this alone. In recent years we’ve placed our faith in the talents of one individual. Those days are over. Presidential politics don’t work in the UK. Conservatism must become a team effort once again as we renew our party from top to bottom. A new respect for our members who, in their daily lives, are the backbone of communities across our country but are sneered at and pilloried by elitist commentators. We need to do right by our local councillors, many who ran successful councils but lost their seats because of behaviours in parliament.
Some will argue our loss was down to this policy, that person or some decision. The truth is our policy offer was incoherent, and we could not articulate why conservatism should matter to our fellow man. We thought we could just be managerially better at governing than the other side — a weak foundation at the best of times. Too often, we were led by focus groups. We talked right yet governed left. The public felt manipulated. Real leadership sets a principles-based vision about where to take the country and then inspires people to join that shared mission.
Alongside this, we failed to spot the forces lining up against British values. We sought to build an increasingly liberal society. But liberalism has been hacked. Our empathy with those fleeing persecution has been exploited to create an asylum system that is effectively open borders to anyone willing to lie about their circumstances. Legislative improvements ensuring that everyone can be treated equally, irrespective of their race, sex or religion have morphed into a nasty identity politics that seeks to divide based on these characteristics.
Under the guise of politeness and good manners, free speech and the freedom to dissent is curtailed, exemplified by Labour scrapping the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In its place we have a coarsening of language and promotion of a post-modernism that can best be described as joyless decadence. We must renew.
If I have the privilege to serve, we will speak the truth again. That is why today, my campaign is launching with an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 — the first full year we can be back in government and the first year of a new decade. We will renew by starting from first principles: we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens. Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly.
At the foundation of our renewal, and indeed the reassembly of the conservative family, is a confident set of principles about how our economy should work, and for whom it should work. The wealth of our nation is built upon our historic ability to capture the ingenuity and industry of our people, and the willingness of many to trade risk for reward. It’s become a dirty word, but our renewal must also mean a renewal for capitalism.
Sixty years ago, Ronald Reagan delivered the speech that eventually launched him to the presidency. It’s known as “A time for choosing”, delivered in the year of the worst defeat of his party for a generation. Today, as we face our own crossroads, we can learn from defeat. The task in front of us is bigger than any one person, policy or campaign, but with the right leader it could be the most exciting opportunity we’ve had for decades. I will start my campaign, not with pledges but with listening to our MPs and members on how we can create a movement that restores the Conservative Party and, in time, our country. It is a time for renewal.
This article was originally published in The Times
