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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Conservatives are back, and back with a bang two election wins in a row and, providing they can hold things together, in a pretty good position to win another. But many questions about their recent past, present, and future still remain. Just why did the world�s oldest and most successful political party dump Margaret Thatcher only to commit electoral suicide under John Major? And what stopped the Tories getting their act together until David Cameron came along? Did Cameron change his party as much as he sometimes liked to claim, or did his leadership, both in opposition and in government, involve more compromise - and more Conservatism than we realize? Finally, what does the result of the EU referendum mean for the Party in years to come?
The answers, as this accessible and gripping book shows, are as intriguing and provocative as the questions. Based on in-depth research and interviews with the key players, Tim Bale explains how and why the Tories lost power in 1997 and how and why they have eventually been able to rediscover their winning ways, even if internal tensions and external challenges mean they still can�t take anything for granted. Crucial, he suggests, are the people, the power structures, the ideas, and the very different interests of those involved. This second edition of The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameronis a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what makes the Tories tick.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
A Note on Sources
1 Solving the Puzzle: An Introduction
The puzzle
Why parties don’t always do what we expect
Ideas, interests and institutions – and individuals: high politics and the Conservative Party
‘The party in the media’
A route map
Notes
2 Losing the Plot: Thatcher to Major, 1989–1997
Means, motive, and opportunity: setting Thatcher’s fall in context
Contest and resignation
Why she couldn’t hold on: ideas, interests, institutions – and individuals
‘The best we had’: John Major becomes Prime Minister
Clearing up and cleaning out
‘Keep a-hold of Nurse for fear of finding something worse’: beating Labour in 1992
‘Ashes in our mouths’
The party in the media turns on Major
Central Office and the constituencies
The leadership in question
‘Put up or shut up’: the 1995 leadership contest
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Going, going, gone: the long campaign for the 1997 general election
Notes
3 Tactics over Strategy: William Hague, 1997–2001
Hague wins the leadership
Initial complacency
Institutional fixes and individual missteps
Instincts not ideas
Search for a strategy
Up to the job?
Running back to mummy
A question of survival: ‘Project Hague’
Going hard on Europe
Locking in the new line
Common sense: populism emergent
Judgement calls
One step forward into modernization, two steps back into the comfort zone
False dawn
Trying to have it both ways
Playing the race card?
Trouble at the top
Banging the drum: the 2001 campaign
Notes
4 ‘Simply Not Up to It’: Iain Duncan Smith, 2001–2003
The 2001 leadership election I: the party in parliament
The 2001 leadership election II: the party in the country
On probation from the off
Softer image, same old solutions
Institutional tinkering
‘No cop in the Commons’, no traction in the country
Helping the vulnerable . . . but not the NHS?
‘Hague all over again’?
Mixed messages
The nasty party
‘Unite or die’
Into the bunker
The even nastier party?
Out of the woods?
‘Wabbling back to the Fire’
Endgame
Notes
5 Like Moths to a Flame: Michael Howard, 2003–2005
Assuming the crown
Different men, similar measures
Looking up
Too clever
Moths to a flame
Right to choose
‘Doing a William’ – or an Iain?
Notting Hill and beyond
‘Juices flowing’
Mixed messages
Law and disorder
Raising the temperature
Harping on the familiar
Down to earth with a bump
Notes
6 ‘Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Dave’: The Long Leadership Contest, May–December 2005
Post-mortem
Rules of the game
Setting out their stalls
The rules of the game – again
Beneath the froth
Blackpool
All over bar the voting
Notes
7 ‘The Politics of And’: Opposition, 2005–2010
Hitting the ground sprinting
‘Cut-through’
‘Non-stop political pyrotechnics’
‘Plenty more change to be made’
Pushing on, pushing through
Tougher times
No let-up
Airborne
Calibration
Steel core
‘Skid-mark’
Sticky patch
Gravitational pull
Rebalancing
Nerve
Breakthrough?
Cutting the complacency?
Missed opportunity or historic achievement? Election 2010
Of lemons and lemonade: forming the coalition
Notes
8 ‘The National Interest’: Coalition and Majority Government, 2010–2015
Hacks
Conflict: foreign and domestic
No pleasing some people: backbenchers, Europe, and a Budget
Burning bridges with the Lib Dems: Lords reform, boundaries, health, and the environment
Win some, lose some: gay marriage and immigration
Building a Conservative Britain
Crossing the line: referendum to election
Notes
9 Getting the Message: A Conclusion
The puzzle restated
Laying out the pieces
Putting all the pieces together
The complete package
Harsh realities: the politics of power
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION
‘There haven’t been a lot of good books published about the Conservative Party in recent years, but Tim Bale has written one that fills the gap . . . he tells the story well, combining breezy prose with academic rigour and anecdotes from the key participants.’
Andrew Sparrow,Guardian.co.uk
‘A wonderful insightful account of the Conservative Party from the denouement of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership in 1989/90 through to the ascent of David Cameron.’
Party Politics
‘A hugely impressive achievement – and required reading for anyone who wants to understand the party most likely to run Britain in the new decade.’
Sunday Business Post
‘Excellent . . . a very useful first account of how the oldest and most successful political party in the western world lost its electoral advantage and then, finally, took years to find its way again.’
Total Politics
‘An intelligent and informative account of the Party’s decline from 1990 to its recovery from 2005 onwards. This is a refreshing and hugely enjoyable study which brings the subject matter and dramatis personae to life, written by a highly respected political scientist who has interviewed many of the people involved, and who also has a wry sense of humour which makes his writing sparkle.’
Politics & Policy
‘A highly insightful, and often very funny, commentary on the party’s dysfunctionality in the post-Thatcher era.’
Irish Times
‘A detailed yet splendidly readable study.’
British Politics
‘In his new, rather good book, the academic Tim Bale provides a history of the Tories in the 15 years that preceded Mr Cameron’s ascent. Read it and it isn’t hard to work out the party’s problem.’
Daniel Finkelstein,The Times
‘For a contemporary history of British politics, deliciously free of the jargon which usually masks the failure of academics to understand their subject, you will read nothing better than this.’
Tribune
‘A mountain of insights about the tiny amount of space in which political leaders make their moves.’
Independent Arts and Books Supplement
‘[An] exhaustive and authoritative account.’
London Review of Books
‘A solid, meticulous account.’
Financial Times
‘It’s hard to think of anyone with an interest in British politics who will not enjoy, and profit from, Tim Bale’s outstanding book. His chapters on the Hague and Duncan Smith years in particular – the latter a man for whom the word “hapless” could almost have been invented – form a kind of “how not to do it” manual for any political party in opposition. I suspect Messrs Miliband and Balls have already ordered theirs.’
Waterstones.com Bookseller’s Review
‘Contains the best account so far of the “decontamination” strategy pursued by Cameron after his surprise win in the leadership contest of 2005.’
Progress
‘Bale provides a well-researched and very readable account of [his] thesis.’
Times Higher Education
‘Bale’s book is a useful reminder of the chronology of the main political events, often stormy, which have taken place over the past 20 years.’
House Magazine
‘Tim Bale’s book firmly avoids “big picture” explanantions focused on single issues like “sleaze” or Europe, and instead offers a detailed analytical narrative of the party leadership from the fall of Thatcher to the rise of Cameron. Bale in essence updates the old approach of High Politics, epitomized by the late Maurice Cowling, in which political history is the actions of a narrow band of senior politicians, and fuses this with a modern social scientist’s understanding of the interrelationship between ideas, interests, and insitutions.’
Planet Magazine
‘Tim Bale’s study of the death and re-birth of the post-Thatcher Conservative Party is a delight to read. It is perky, cheeky, irreverent, packed with revealing quotes and in places deliciously funny. But Bale is not just an entertaining guide to the tribulations of the accident-prone Conservative leaders of the recent past. Only half-concealed by his jaunty prose and witty asides is a thorough scholar and insightful analyst. His anatomy of the modern Conservative Party will hold the field for a long time to come.’
David Marquand, University of Oxford
‘How did David Cameron find the key to success which the Tory Party has lost since 1997? Tim Bale’s book, while thoroughly readable, covers this subject more convincingly and in greater depth than most political journalists. He has done an excellent job.’
Douglas Hurd
‘Much the best book that has been written on the contemporary Conservative Party. Bale’s analysis is extremely impressive. It will make this book the leading book in the field, and very unlikely to be quickly surpassed.’
Andrew Gamble, University of Cambridge
‘Tim Bale’s well-researched volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the Conservative Party’s recent history. It is extremely accessible to the lay reader and chronicles not only some of the party’s darkest days, but also its rediscovery of the will to win under David Cameron.’
Jonathan Isaby, Co-Editor,ConservativeHome.com
‘Tim Bale has produced the best guide to the changing nature of the Conservative Party yet published. He appears to have read everything and spoken to everyone that matters to produce an eminently readable and interesting book. It should be required reading for all students of politics, as well as anyone wanting to know more about the contemporary Conservative Party.’
Philip Cowley
‘This is an excellent book immaculately researched. Tim Bale traces the downfall of the Conservative Party leading to the catastrophic defeat of 1997. He sheds new light on the party’s continuing slide, which was only conclusively ended when David Cameron became leader and moved back onto the centre ground of politics. He reveals the “villains” of the story – not least the ideologically driven commentators – but his central question goes wider. He asks how it was that a party which had consistently sought power through the years lost the will to win? It is a book which Conservative politicians would be well advised to read now that, at long last, they have the opportunity of returning to government.’
Norman Fowler
‘This is the first comprehensive treatment of the Conservative Party since Margaret Thatcher. The period has seen extraordinary changes in the Party’s fortunes and now we have a well-researched and balanced account of what happened.’
David Willetts
‘Now poised for national success again, Conservatives should treat Tim Bale’s timely account of their recent history as essential reading. Detailing the Party’s highs and lows, this book reminds us of the scale of the challenge that faced David Cameron’s new leadership, and illuminates his strategy for recovery.’
Jo-Anne Nadler, author ofToo Nice to be a Tory
THE CONSERVATIVE PARTYFROM THATCHER TO CAMERON
SECOND EDITION
TIM BALE
polity
Copyright © Tim Bale 2016
The right of Tim Bale to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2010 by Polity PressThis edition published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-7456-8748-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bale, Tim, 1965- author.Title: The conservative party: from Thatcher to Cameron / Tim Bale.Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016000782| ISBN 9780745687445 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745687452 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Conservative Party (Great Britain)--History. | Great Britain--Politics and government--1979-1997. | Great Britain--Politics and government--2007-Classification: LCC JN1129.C7 B25 2016 | DDC 324.24104--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000782
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, whose generosity allowed me to make time to write the first edition of this book, as well as to all those politicians and staffers who have allowed me to interview them on and off the record. I would also like to record my thanks to all the journalists whose reports and insights have contributed hugely to my own grip on, and understanding of, recent events in the life of the Conservative Party – with especial gratitude going to Matthew d’Ancona of the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and Queen Mary University of London. The same goes for academics, many of whom are also friends and colleagues, and many of whom are involved with the Political Studies specialist group on Conservatives and Conservatism (http://psaconservatism.blogspot.co.uk/). Finally, of course, my thanks go to my family – Peter and Wendy (yes, really, they do exist) and Simon, and Jackie, Javier, Bel, and Jack.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
When interviewees chose to speak off the record, their words or the information they imparted are not accorded a note, since to cite an anonymous and confidential interview would pointlessly take up space. For the same reason, once a book or article is cited in a chapter, it can be assumed to inform the account thereafter and is not cited again unless the text makes reference to a specific quote, fact, or idea. References to speeches are not routinely cited since their approximate date is given, thus allowing the reader to find them easily on http://www.conservatives.com/.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS
Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost. . .. I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter Two
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in this same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter Three
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. . . it’s a habit. . . but,
my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter Four
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter Five
I walk down another street.
Reprinted with the permission of Beyond Words/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. from THERE’S A HOLE IN MY SIDEWALK: THE ROMANCE OF SELF-DISCOVERY by Portia Nelson. Copyright © 1993 by Portia Nelson. All rights reserved.
1SOLVING THE PUZZLE AN INTRODUCTION
Politicians, most people think, will say anything to get elected. Parties, if they are in opposition, will do whatever it takes to get into power and, if they are in government, whatever it takes to stay there. This book qualifies that common wisdom and tries to explain why it is often wrong. It does this by focusing on a party that for decades had a reputation for its ruthless pursuit of power but which, until very recently, seemed to have forgotten how to win. If at the heart of every story there has to be a question, then it is this: how and why did the Conservative Party, of all parties, not do what it had to do in order, firstly, to stay in Downing Street after 1992 and, secondly, to get back there as soon as possible after 1997? Just as importantly: why and how was it able, after 2005, to put things right so quickly? And why, despite that, has its recovery been partial rather than comprehensive?
This book’s task, then, is not so much to explain why the Conservative Party lost elections between 1997 and 2005 – there are, after all, any number of reasons why that can happen, many beyond the control of politicians, especially when they are in opposition and not government. Rather it tries to explain why those politicians were unwilling and unable to act in a way that might have given them more hope of winning or at least losing less badly during that time – and of winning much bigger than they actually did in 2010 and in 2015. In so doing, it argues that, while there is no point trying to find and then flog a simple, superficially attractive answer to such a difficult problem, we can nevertheless provide an explanation that is both realistic and intelligible – and one that not only works in this case but might get us thinking about others, too.
The key to such an explanation lies in realizing, firstly, that party politics, indeed all politics, is essentially the interaction of ideas, interests, institutions, and, of course, individuals – people who, however intelligent and well intentioned, are, like the rest of us, hardwired to make what, objectively speaking, are sometimes irrational decisions; people who are both the product and the producers of the organizations they work in and the ideas they work with. Secondly, we need to bear in mind that politics is ‘path-dependent’: things said or done early on can constitute ‘critical junctures’ which then make certain courses of action (even if they are misguided) almost inevitable and others (even where they would seem to make more sense) almost impossible.
Thirdly, it is worth paying attention both to the people who actually do politics (which is why this book makes use of extensive interviews with politicians at all levels of the Conservative Party) and to the people who make their living reporting on it. This is not simply because they can give us a crucial insight into what, significantly, is a very small world. It is also because the line between players and recorders in politics is a very blurred one. Indeed, one of the main contentions of this book is that one cannot understand the Conservative Party, its recent travails and its future triumphs, without acknowledging the existence of what I call ‘the party in the media’ – the editors, commentators, and journalists who have a huge impact on Tory strategy, or whatever passes for it.
Finally, it is worth taking notice of another group of people who are paid to observe politics – the academics – just to see if they have anything to say which might give us a few clues. As an academic myself, I am well aware of and sympathize with the standard criticisms made against us – that we live in ivory towers working up abstract theories which have little or no purchase on the real world, that we phrase our findings in language that obscures rather than illuminates, and that we seem to know more and more about less and less. But I also know that academics do have something to contribute if only we can communicate it in a way that readers who simply take an intelligent (and possibly an active) interest in politics can understand and even enjoy. Judging from high-street bookshops, historians have managed to do this. There is no real reason why political scientists – especially if we, too, can weave together narrative and analysis – cannot join them.
Academics are lucky people. We can get behind the headlines and beyond the collective memories and conventional narratives about parties that often disguise and distort what actually went on inside them. Academics can get at what people were thinking, saying, and doing at the time rather than what those same people hazily recollect. And, by treating politics as a science as much as an art, academics collect data about parties and elections all over the world, thereby discovering patterns and regularities which suggest that stuff that seems strange – the failure of politicians and parties to do whatever it takes to snatch and cling onto power, for example – can actually make perfect sense, at least to those directly involved. Knowing all this means that we stand a much better chance of producing a satisfying rather than a simplistic, silver-bullet-style explanation – an explanation which fits with how things work in the messy, nuanced, accident-prone, and incident-packed real world in which politicians (and, yes, even academics) try their best to live.
And that, when it comes down to it, is the purpose of this book. One of the nicest things said to me by a Tory politician as I was trying out my ideas on this topic was that I had ‘really got under the skin of the Conservative Party’. I don’t know if he was right. But what I do know is that only by doing that can we see where and why it went so wrong under and after Margaret Thatcher and how David Cameron put things right – or at least half-right.
The puzzle
Once upon a time, every book written about the Conservatives contained an obligatory reference to what one expert calls ‘the party’s quite remarkable facility for adaptation and, closely allied to this, its appetite for power, often indeed its readiness to subordinate all other considerations to that one objective’.1 The Tories, after all, could claim to be not just the world’s oldest political party but also one of its most successful. First emerging in the eighteenth century, they governed Britain for much of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth. Naturally, they suffered the occasional reverse. But part of the key to their success in the twentieth century was their uncanny ability, following the loss of an election or (at most) two, to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again. In short, the Tories could claim to be the country’s ‘natural party of government’ because, whenever they found themselves in opposition, they rapidly managed to do whatever it took to get back into office.
Precisely what that was is actually no mystery. Without forgetting the wisdom of the old saw that ‘governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them’, the party out of office essentially has to present itself as a convincing alternative. In the words of one investigation into how the Tories traditionally managed to recover power, this normally means the opposition is able to demonstrate that ‘it has a credible leader, is united, . . . and has policies which are not unwelcome to the electorate and which have enough coherence and content to be sustainable against attack’. Consequently, the same study concluded, there are five ways in which the Party normally places itself in a position to win next time around.
The first of these is ‘fresh faces’: a new leader or leadership team, and especially the sense of a change of generations. The second is ‘cohesion’: the maintenance of unity and discipline within the party, which is essential to convey a sense of purpose and effectiveness. The third is ‘visibility’: a new agenda or a distinctive position, and a distancing from past unpopular policies and their legacy. Here it is important to have an impact upon the political elite and opinion formers, in order to give credibility to revival and reorientation, and for this to be communicated to a wider audience. The fourth element links to this, and is ‘efficiency’: not just an improved or revived party organization, but the sense that the party is at least master in its own house and can respond with speed and authority when the need arises. The final element is ‘adaptability’: a hunger for office, and a pragmatic or unideological approach which gives room to manoeuvre and seize the openings that appear.2
When the Tories ran into trouble at the end of a decade of success during which Margaret Thatcher won three elections on the trot, they failed to do these five things – or certainly failed to do them all simultaneously – until at least 2005, when David Cameron was elected leader.
Some of Cameron’s predecessors over the previous 15 years (John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard) could claim, more or less convincingly, to be a fresh face. But all of them, bar one, led a fractious party and none of them managed to convey a sense that the Conservatives were really moving on and coming together organizationally. As for elevating pragmatism over ideology, forget it. Inasmuch as they did so at all, they were left looking not realistic but opportunistic. For the most part, however, they did nothing of the kind, focusing instead on policies which made them look, at best, out of touch and old-fashioned and, at worst, mean-spirited and obsessive.
This might not have mattered so much had the Tories been facing the same Labour Party they had managed to beat so easily in 1979, 1983, and 1987 – or indeed the Labour Party led by Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn.3 But they were not. Labour had been making progress, at first halting and then headlong, towards what it continually and persuasively claimed was the centre ground of British politics.4 As a result, first in opposition under Neil Kinnock and John Smith and then in government under Tony Blair, Labour managed to tap into the widespread belief among the British that there need not be – indeed should not be – a trade-off between social justice and economic growth, between fairness and efficiency, between quality public provision and higher net disposable incomes. At the same time, it also managed to persuade people that a trade-off does exist between lower taxes and investment in the NHS and state education, which, along with economic well-being and the control of crime (and immigration), remain at the top of voters’ lists of things governments are supposed to deliver. In so doing, Blair effectively neutralized – at least until 2007 – the classic Conservative argument, deployed to devastating effect since 2010 by George Osborne, that Labour’s heart might have been in the right place but that it couldn’t run the economy. ‘New Labour’ also made any claim by the Tories that they could simultaneously deliver lower taxes and maintain public services look like a pathetically transparent attempt to have their cake and eat it too. That Conservative politicians between 1997 and 2005 – when they weren’t too busy talking up threats to national identity and law and order – continued to make that claim suggests that they, to some extent at least, were the authors of their own misfortune.
Doing things differently would probably not have won the Tories the elections of 1997 and 2001. It might not even have seen them win in 2005, when Labour was much more vulnerable. But it would almost certainly have seen them perform significantly better than they did, in so doing, perhaps, ensuring that, when they eventually did win elections in 2010 and 2015, they won them rather more convincingly. Moreover, what the Conservatives needed to do in the years following their big defeat in 1997 was not rocket (let alone political) science. Following on from the list of the five things a Tory opposition traditionally did to get back in the game, the Conservative Party needed a leader who would cause it consistently, cohesively, and therefore convincingly to project some kind of progress back to the moderate mainstream or centre ground on which British elections are (unless the other main party vacates that territory) generally won or lost.5 None of those in charge between the Tories’ landslide election victory in 1987 and the election of David Cameron in 2005 came even close to meeting that need. Instead, especially after 1997, they ‘banged on’ about issues which people may have cared about (tax, crime, immigration, and Europe) but which were never going to help the Conservatives endanger Labour’s overall majority. Meanwhile, they ceded ownership of the issues that did really count (health, education, and the economy) to a Labour Party determined to portray its Tory opponent as divided, extreme, and stuck in the past. Accordingly, most voters (notwithstanding attempts by the odd academic to insist otherwise) believed that the Conservative Party was stranded on the right, while Labour continued its relentless progress to what they saw as the centre ground.6
This book, then, is not so much about what the Conservative Party needed to do after 1989 as it is about why and how the Party proved unable (or unwilling) to do it. It also looks at how and why it suddenly decided to do things so differently from 2005 onwards – but also at why that has not won it the comfortable majorities they routinely secured in the 1950s and 1980s. All this constitutes a puzzle worth solving not only because it tells us something about the Tories, but because solving it may add to our understanding of political parties more generally.
Even if we forget about the Conservative Party’s supposedly characteristic ‘appetite for power’, its behaviour after 1989 and especially after 1997 is, at first glance, hard to explain – especially if we believe that politicians, and therefore the parties they lead, are, at root, selfinterested ‘rational actors’. On the face of it, after all, the prospect and certainly the experience of a bad defeat should encourage the party that looks like losing, or that has in fact lost, to move towards the position of the winner, potential or actual. As one study which looked at parties across a range of different countries puts it, ‘Past election results serve the same function as a very good opinion poll’: they show the losing party – especially if it is beaten badly – that its prior beliefs about the voters were wrong; they also point to where it has to move in order to do better next time around.7
Moreover, even if it does do better next time around and ends up going into government, election results can still tell a party something, although what that something is may well be contested: a big win may represent a ringing endorsement of the party’s current thrust or it may simply be a consequence of weak opposition; a narrow victory may have resulted from it lacking the courage of its convictions or it could be a signal that it needs to compromise even more than it already has done if it is ever to win convincingly again.
Why parties don’t always do what we expect
Theory, however, is one thing. Practice is another – and not just when it comes to Britain’s Conservative Party. Large-scale cross-national comparisons often show, of course, that parties can and do change8 – most commonly in response to defeat and a change of leader, and often in the direction of their more successful rivals.9 But they also show that parties are prone to inertia and that they often adopt more intense or even extreme policies than one would expect if the default option really was to close down the space between themselves, the electorate, and their sometimes more successful competitors.10 Studies in the same field also suggest some clues as to why. Stripped of the specialized jargon that accompanies them, some of them would seem to make a lot of sense and are therefore worth taking seriously when observing the Conservative Party’s behaviour since 1989.
Of the reasons put forward by political scientists to explain why a badly beaten party might not make a more sensible and attractive offer to the electorate next time round, there are several which, as we will see, seem particularly relevant in the case of the Tories. These include the following:11 the threat posed by smaller, newer parties; the influence of party activists and campaign donors, neither of whom see their party’s stances as quite as ‘extreme’ as ordinary voters might do; the fact that less moderate stances are at least distinctive and therefore reduce confusion among potential supporters and may even persuade them; the possibility that politicians cannot be certain (at least initially) that their preferred policies will actually lose them an election and the fact that (contrary to common wisdom) politicians do genuinely believe in the policies they prefer. Associated with this tendency to take ideas seriously is a tendency among politicians to believe that they can draw voters towards them instead of accepting the worrying possibility that little they say and do makes much difference. We might expect parties to ‘accommodate’ (i.e. move towards) the preferences of the electorate – preferences which are ‘exogenous’ in the sense of being determined outside politics by a combination of voters’ personal backgrounds and their reactions to economic, social, and cultural developments. However, the politicians who run those parties are often convinced that those preferences are in fact ‘endogenous’ (determined by political argument and events) and can therefore be ‘shaped’ – not only when they are in government (when the power to make tangible and perceptible changes is surely greater) but (believe it or not) in opposition too.
Indeed, political scientists can provide us with even more, potentially useful explanations of why parties might not necessarily act as ‘rationally’ as we might expect. For instance, the fact that a party is seen as (or complacently assumes it is) more competent or credible than its opponent can lead it to think it can get away with policies that most voters would consider ‘ideological’ or radical. And a party can still expect a large number of voters (in the UK somewhere between a quarter and a third if we are talking about Labour and the Tories) to remain loyal to it whether it moves to the centre or not. Furthermore, a party expecting a low-turnout election may believe an ideological appeal to those loyal partisans will ensure they show up at the polling station whereas the more centrist but alienated majority is less likely to vote. Again, as we shall see, all these have a role to play in helping us to explain how and why the Tories did what they did after 1989.
But even with these additional explanations, the list of reasons put forward by political scientists for why a party might head for the hills rather than the centre ground is incomplete. And those that complete the list also make a lot of sense when we look at the Tories after 1989. We would do well to assume, for example, that, given how little even the experts really know about what voters think and what motivates them to choose one alternative over another, parties are likely to stick to, rather than compromise, their ideology. The latter, after all, performs so many functions: it not only ‘provides politicians with a broad conceptual map of politics into which political events, current problems, electors’ preferences and other parties’ policies can all be fitted’, it also has a vital ‘role in maintaining the separate identity of the party and promoting activist involvement in the first place’.12 Inertia may also be the default option for parties because change is, quite frankly, a bloody difficult, lengthy, and risky business. Because it involves convincing suspicious voters who are familiar with the party’s existing brand, its electoral payoff might not come quickly enough for leaders either to attempt change in the first place or to stick with it even if they do, especially in the face of severe internal and public criticism.13 Recent research covering the entire post-war period and 25 countries shows there are almost inevitably time lags between any shift in position and the electoral benefits to which that shift might contribute – not least because it takes time for a change in a party’s policies to help bring about a change in its public image.14
This focus on what might put a party off doing things differently, of course, assumes that its leaders even realize they are doing something wrong. As hinted at by some of the reasons already mooted for their failure to adjust in the expected direction, however, this may not be the case. Political parties might actually find it harder to get the message than we might expect, not least because they share certain characteristics with other large organizations where communication (as well as acting on what is communicated) is inherently problematic. Without lapsing into too much jargon, the way parties are put together means that, even when they are faced with ‘exit’ (of members or voters), they are systematically likely to value and reward ‘loyalty’ (to an ideology as well as to an individual leader or to the institution) rather than ‘voice’ (insisting that something is going wrong and has to change).15 In an ideal world, of course, a political party – indeed any organization – should seek to institutionalize feedback so as to maximize the chances that it will notice things aren’t right. At the same time, it needs to promote loyalty so that people (a) don’t give up on it without giving it a chance or (b) don’t kick up so much fuss that they end up damaging its reputation or capacity to respond. In the real world, unfortunately, it is difficult to strike this balance.
This trade-off between exit, voice, and loyalty is hard to get right, for three main reasons. Firstly, while the long-term interest of those at the top is not to cut themselves off, maintain their autonomy and continually prove their authority, their short-term interest lies in doing precisely that: exit then becomes treason and voice mutiny. Secondly, those in charge will be able, for the most part, to rely on the majority of people under them wanting to carry on without too much complaint, either because those people feel their time will come or because they fear their going will leave things in even worse shape than they already are. Thirdly, both the leader and those around (or just under) him or her are prone to believing that things aren’t fundamentally as bad (or simply sub-par) as they seem, and to making excuses which blame unlucky contingencies or unfair competition. Interestingly, though, it is sometimes those (including those at the very top) who are most heavily invested in the organization – and therefore most likely to deceive themselves that things are OK – who, once they wise up, begin to advocate, facilitate, or even drive change. This, as we shall see, is relevant if one is interested not just in how a party can take so long to sort itself out but also why, when it decides to do so, it can happen relatively quickly. On the other hand, that is by no means a guarantee that they will pursue change as thoroughly or as long as they should: as we shall see, it is all too easy for ‘modernizers’ to take their foot off the gas and fall back into bad habits once, for whatever reason, they believe they have done enough to get them over the line.
One can of course push the analogies between parties and commercial firms too far. Indeed, in the words of a young Tory MP with a private-sector background interviewed for this book, ‘You get from business to politics by taking your organization structure, removing it so there’s no direct reporting . . . , have every employee think that they could be the chief executive within quite a short period of time, and then have them not all quite agreed on what the product range is, or the customers.’16 Yet, as we go on to look in detail at what went on inside the Conservative Party after 1989, it becomes obvious that many of these apparently generic explanations have some traction – even now when it appears (how convincingly is clearly a matter of opinion) that the dark days are over.
Appropriately, though, for a party which has traditionally looked askance at abstract schemas and solutions (especially when they originate overseas), most writing on the Tories makes little or no reference to these generic explanations, preferring instead those that are essentially historical and home-grown.17 The (very considerable) upside of this is that its authors – many of whom know the Conservative Party inside out – seek, quite rightly, to situate the Party firmly in a particular context and to pin responsibility on real people in real time.18 The downside of such an approach is that it misses out on the suggestive insights that come from treating the Tories not as unique but as a party like any other. Worse, it can in some cases lead us into making arguments which sound striking but have little real substance. To assert, as does one author of a recent book on the Party, that one ‘great truth of the age is that the right has won politically while the left has won culturally’ assumes, rather bizarrely given both the record and the polling, that a Labour government that spent unprecedented amounts on the welfare state had self-evidently capitulated to Thatcherism while the socially liberal attitudes held by the educated middle class are all-pervasive. Meanwhile, the same author’s claim that the Party’s collective guilt at the matricide of Margaret Thatcher saw it take ‘refuge in the form of group therapy that Tories have always understood, based on nostalgia, mythology and selective memory’ is, like all armchair Freudianism, enormous fun but just too pat.19
There are, however, a couple of recent exceptions to the rule just outlined. One of these argues, for example, that the Tories in 2001 were out of sync with the prevailing ‘policy mood’ and stranded way outside the so-called ‘zone of acquiescence’ in which any party hoping to win must be located.20 In so doing, it touches on (though it doesn’t have the time or space to investigate) a number of explanations that are clearly informed by those we have already referred to, adding one – a candidate recruitment process that results in MPs who are ‘one-of-us’ rather than in tune with the times or the electorate – that is clearly worth bearing in mind. Thinking about why Tory candidates and MPs surveyed tended to think Tory voters were more right-wing and Eurosceptic than in fact they were also leads the study into some suggestive speculation on the role of what social psychologists call ‘selective perception’ – the tendency to interpret evidence according to one’s existing convictions, even to the extent that discordant information actually reinforces those convictions. Evidence to support such a proposition, of course, would require the approach taken in the study (a ‘quantitative’ one, based on survey research) to be complemented by a ‘qualitative’ approach (involving things like interviews and the analysis of written sources) – in other words, by the approach used in this book.
The potential of such an approach is amply demonstrated by the other stand-out study of the Party, which brings to bear generic explanations in an attempt to overturn what has become something of a consensus among journalists, academics, and even some politicians. This is that the Tories’ focus on, say, Europe and immigration at the elections of 2001 and 2005 represented an attempt simply to mobilize what Americans would call ‘the base’ – the so-called ‘core vote’ strategy. In fact, the study points out, even in theory the Tory leadership after 1997 had far less need than is popularly assumed to pander to its ‘core support’ in the electorate: such voters were more likely than not to follow their party than to put pressure on it, not least because they had nowhere else to go. After talking to some of those involved in the campaigns, the study makes what this book also suggests is a convincing case that the Party’s decision to focus on such issues during the elections in question was about more than simply enthusing its own supporters. In fact, it also believed – not unreasonably by that stage – that it had little alternative but to stress the issues it ‘owned’ (and on which it had opinion poll leads amongst all voters) rather than fight on those, like the economy, health, and education, which had become Labour territory.21
Ideas, interests and institutions – and individuals: high politics and the Conservative Party
This book, of course, touches on general elections, including those of 2001, 2005, 2010, and 2015, as well as those of 1992 and 1997. But they are by no means its main focus. Instead, it is much more interested in how and why, by the time those elections came round, the Conservative Party ended up feeling it had no choice but to fight them in the way it did. And while this book, too, holds that generic explanations can help solve that puzzle, it also believes that any solution will involve not one but several explanations and inevitably involve the particular as well as the general.
Any solution, certainly, has to reject from the outset the notion – commonplace, believe it or not, among academics but probably crazy to everyone else – that anyone seeking to explain something political should have to choose between a focus on ideas (the ideology that drives those involved and the policies they favour), a focus on interests (the material considerations that motivate them or at least those that fund and support them), or a focus on institutions (organizations, rules, and customary ways of doing things). Instead we have to appreciate that politics, including party politics, can only be understood not just by melding contextual and generic explanations but by focusing on the intersection, the interrelationship, and the reciprocal influence of ideas, interests, and institutions.22 Just as importantly, we have to remember that, because we are trying to understand the real world (a place more akin to a movie than to a snapshot), we are dealing with a situation in which actions and decisions taken early in the piece influence, constrain, and even determine what happens later on – the commonsense idea that academics call ‘path dependence’.23
Because of all this, finding a solution to our puzzle will involve delving deep into the sequence of events that began with the ousting of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and saw the Party go through four more leaders until finding one who finally appeared to have saved it from what, getting on for 250 years ago, the greatest of all Tory thinkers referred to as ‘the unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare’.24 To do this is to enter the realm of what is sometimes called ‘high politics’. As characterized by the Conservative historian who made that phrase his own, this is an environment in which only ‘fifty or sixty politicians in conscious tension with one another’ really count – a world where politics is ‘primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre’ driven not by genuinely held ideas but by ‘[a]ntipathy, self-interest and mutual contempt’, a place where arguments over policy, strategy, and tactics are ‘inseparable from disputes about persons’.25
Clearly, of course, there is rather more to it than this essentially pessimistic, even cynical, caricature implies: we have already stressed, after all, that politics boils down not to interests, or for that matter institutions or ideas, but to the interaction between them. To pursue to the letter an approach to understanding the political world which has so little time for ideology and so little appreciation of institutions, as well as one which focuses only on parliamentary elites and not on the relationships they have with other actors and groups, would be blinkered indeed.26 That said, the idea of ‘high politics’ contains more than a grain of truth – as anyone who has read the best insider accounts of New Labour will realize.27 When it comes to the Conservatives after 1990, for example, the cast of characters can seem surprisingly small. Indeed, it is striking the extent to which people who play a part early on (perhaps behind the scenes, perhaps in parliament or maybe in the press) pop up again a few years later – some of them fêted as geniuses when previously they were written off as failures, and vice versa.
For the moment, a few illustrations will have to suffice, but they are important ones. David Cameron himself, and indeed many of his inner circle like George Osborne, Ed Llewellyn, George Bridges, and Steve Hilton, are obvious examples, joining the Conservative Research Department just after university, going on to work as special advisers when the Tories were in government, perhaps dropping out of politics for a while before coming back to play a significant role in the counsels of the leaders who took the Party through a period of opposition in which it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do a thing right, only to emerge, apparently, as its saviours. But there are other examples, too. Andrew Lansley advised Norman Tebbit under Thatcher, headed up the Conservative Research Department (where he was David Cameron’s line manager) under Major, was closely involved in the catastrophically bad election of 2001 under Hague, then ducked out of frontbench politics to emerge as a modernizer and a shoo-in for an important Cabinet position in the 2010 Conservative government – at which point his apparently undiminished belief in market solutions for public-sector problems led him to construct legislation of such monumental complexity and unpopularity that he was swiftly demoted by none other than David Cameron. Michael Gove, Cameron’s close friend, started out on the Times as a media cheerleader for Michael Portillo when he was still a Thatcherite. He travelled with Portillo towards modernization, led the press pack against Iain Duncan Smith, and, having become an MP, became a key part of ‘project Cameron’s’ apparent move to the centre ground – a location which, as we shall see, he had earlier professed to despise, and which, judging by his actions as Education Secretary, he had fallen out of love with yet again by 2010. Also part of that project, for a while anyway, was Michael Ashcroft. He helped bankroll the Party, attracted huge media criticism (not least from Gove) as Treasurer under Hague, became a big critic himself of the way the Party went about trying to win elections under Iain Duncan Smith and Howard, and was then brought into the heart of the Party’s effort to help David Cameron win next time round. But when that didn’t result in a job in government, and Cameron seemed to have forgotten some of the lessons which Ashcroft’s personally funded research had helped teach him, he became so disenchanted that, following the 2015 election, he produced a biography of ‘Dave’ that, to put it mildly, was not 100 per cent complimentary.28 A small (and very fraught) world indeed.
More generally, the ‘high politics’ approach is a useful reminder that institutions do not think, nor do ideas act. Only individuals do, even if they are more or less constrained and to some extent formed by those same institutions and ideas. To privilege measures (or anything else) over men is, as Britain’s shortest-lived Prime Minister once insisted, to suppose ‘that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along’.29 It may be going too far to say, as does one hugely enjoyable account of life on the inside, that ‘the story of the decline of the Tory Party’ in recent years ‘is largely one of human frailties and misjudgements’.30 But it is undoubtedly true, as one of our most prominent political journalists once put it, that politics, whether or not one regards it as an art or a science, ‘tests the frail personalities and skills of real people under pressure’.31 If we take human agency seriously, and if we accept, too, the notion that to be human is to possess quirks and qualities as well to indulge in the pursuit of self-advancement, we have to add individuals to ideas, interests, and institutions in order properly to understand and explain any political puzzle.
For all that, it would be a big mistake to follow the ‘high politics’ focus on a few individuals so rigorously that ‘Back-benchers and party opinion . . . appear off-stage as malignant or beneficent forces with unknown natures and unpredictable wills.’32 Nevertheless, one has to avoid the opposite error: it is too easy – especially with the advent of internal democracy – to give a party’s grassroots membership and dyed-in-the-wool supporters in the electorate much more weight than they actually have. Blaming, for instance, the anticipated reaction of ideologically purist activists and dyed-in-the-wool Tory voters for the Conservative Party’s failure to do what it should have done after 1989, and especially after 1997, is problematic – for two reasons.
The first is that the bulk of in-depth research, both by academics and by journalists, on the attitudes of ordinary members and activists, both in parties in general and in the Conservative Party in particular – research that runs all the way through to the present day – suggests that they are no more likely to be uniformly ideological zealots than those who run and represent the party at the national level.33 The stereotype of what a political scientist would call ‘the party in the country’ or ‘on the ground’ suggests, as one long-suffering Tory member memorably puts it, that ‘by default we are all racist, misogynist, uncaring, dimwitted, nationalistic, homophobic, selfish, materialistic, militaristic, jingoistic, meat-eating, double-barrelled, unsophisticated, fox-hunting, anti-intellectual, brutish, elitist, high-church, no church, reactionary, iconoclastic, country dwelling, two-house owning, bulldog walking, white, English men’.34
