29 May 2019

Individuals, Institutions, Ideas. The character of the Conservative Party as it elects a new leader

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Even by recent standards, it has been a breathless week in British politics since the last edition of BVCA Insight was published. That missive predicted that Theresa May’s version of a Withdrawal Agreement Bill would never see the light of the day, that the Conservative Party was desperate to move on to a leadership election, and that the claim that 31 October was an absolute deadline in terms of the UK’s departure from the EU was dubious. Events then moved at a speed which blew both the proposed Withdrawal Agreement Bill and Mrs May out of the picture. Another version of that Bill will come back into play. When the UK departs from the EU is still very much up for debate.

So, we have moved on to an election for the leadership of the Conservative Party which will be the dominant element of politics for the next six weeks or so. The party would like the parliamentary stage of the contest wrapped up before the end of June with a new Prime Minister installed before the summer parliamentary recess (currently scheduled for 25 July). This would allow the PM the chance to exploit a honeymoon period to win the required approval from the House of Commons to exit the EU by 31 October, either in the first two weeks of September or when Parliament returns from the party conference break on 8 October. If that cannot be secured, then the familiar game of chicken over no-deal would be resumed with a similar outcome as last time: another extension.

Assuming that the procedure operates as it should, with Conservative MPs whittling the (multiple) aspirants down to two contenders whom the wider membership will then choose between, this will be the first time that a Prime Minister has, in effect, been selected by someone other than MPs. Gordon Brown was ultimately unopposed when he succeeded Tony Blair in 2007, and Mrs May was deemed to have been elected without the need to consult the Conservative Party faithful in 2016, when Andrea Leadsom withdrew her name after a spectacularly inappropriate newspaper interview.

As this is, therefore, something of an experiment, and one which will doubtless be the result of several editions of Insight over the next few weeks, it would be worth starting by asking what it is that is distinctive about UK conservatism and the UK Conservative Party. This is an under-posed question. The reality is that the Conservative Party and British conservatism is very different from continental Christian Democracy, the US Republican Party and even the centre-right parties of such countries as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, which one might have thought would be similar.

The Conservative Party and British conservatism enjoys and endures the tension which comes from having three competing elements to its collective culture. These will be exposed (if not recognised as such) by the leadership election that is about to start and reveal itself in the result when it arrives.

The three traits might be crudely summarised as those relating to individuals, institutions and ideas.

Individuals

Leadership matters more to the Conservative Party than any other British political party. This is because it is willing to award its leaders with more authority and autonomy than other parties do. The caveat or condition to this delegation of power is performance in obtaining and holding power. In the aftermath of the stunning 2017 election result and its impact on the standing of Mrs May, it was asserted that the Conservative Party is ‘an absolute monarchy tempered by periodic regicide’. This is totally correct. No other party offers its leader more glory or disposes of them so brutally.

This is not an accident. The long history of the Conservative Party and its predecessor forces through the centuries is of a strong inclination to what is now referred to as the ‘Great Man’ (or the ‘Great Woman’ – notably between 1975 and 1990) view not only of politics but on life more broadly. This holds that individual leadership qualities are disproportionately important to outcomes. While this is most obviously to be witnessed in Whitehall or Westminster, it is equally applicable elsewhere, such as in military combat, business or in a school. The person at the top really matters.

This is not a view held to anything like the same degree on the centre-left in British politics or Christian Democracy in continental Europe (in part because the Great Man thesis was tested to destruction in the 1930s). It is also not unique to the Republicans in the United States (both of the main parties there hue to the ‘Great Man’ outlook). It does not really apply to the Australian, Canadian or New Zealand Right too.

Institutions

This emphasis on individual leadership qualities sits somewhere uneasily next to the core of what is British conservatism over many, many decades, namely confidence in and loyalty to key institutions of the country. These include, to various degrees, the Monarchy, the Union, Parliament, the legal system and common law, the Armed Forces, a depoliticised and uncorrupted civil service and the established Church.

For most of the past two hundred years, this has been the essence of British conservatism. There has sometimes been internal friction as to the extent to which these crucial entities might require updating or modernisation in order to retain relevance, but the secret of the success of the UK in maintaining the impression to outsiders of an atypical stability (a pretence that Brexit appears to have shattered) has been managing a process of change within continuity.

This in turn has meant that a fundamental attribute that has always been sought from Conservative Party leaders is the capacity to ensure that the central institutions of national public life remain intact. The same weight is not applied by the centre-right in Europe, the United States or ‘old Commonwealth’.

Ideas

For most of the Conservative Party’s existence, ideas and, even more strikingly, ideology have been treated with extreme suspicion. Intellectuals have rarely been sought for high office and even intelligence itself has not always been deemed an asset. The phrase ‘too clever by half’ acquired currency after it was deployed by the 5th Marquess of Salisbury (a traditional Tory) as a damning verdict on Iain Macleod (a very different sort of Conservative) for his policy of decolonialisation. In far more recent times, David Cameron was quoted in an interview not long after becoming party leader as expressing his distaste for ‘all ism’s’, including capitalism. Indeed the only ‘ism’ that has found favour within conservative circles is pragmatism and one might argue that, as it is basically an anti-ism ‘ism’, this is an entirely legitimate exception to the rule. The philosopher for whom the UK conservative would have most natural empathy (and it is a short list) is Michael Oakeshott, whose emphasis is on the wisdom acquired by experience and a strong preference for the tried and trusted.

This outlook is under challenge in Conservative circles. The impact of ‘Thatcherism’ (the first ever example of any kind of ‘ism’ associated with the UK Conservative Party) and the three decades of internal argument about the UK’s relationship with the EU, have undoubtedly opened the door to the once heretical concept that a central purpose of the Conservative Party is to advance a blueprint of society, rather than find unusually able figures to serve as its leader, maintain existing institutions and react to events with a degree of competence.

The parliamentary Conservative Party today is (as Brexit has demonstrated in spades) a fundamentally different creature to that of the 1980s, let along the 1950s. What is less certain is whether that transformation has been so pronounced as to render a majority of Conservative MPs actors operating more on the basis of ideas than institutions and if the (admittedly comparatively small) wider party membership has also become an ideological entity. It is, again, hard to think of another centre-right party in the world which has the same feature to it.

These different strains will emerge in the leadership contest. Boris Johnson is aiming squarely for the ‘Great Man; mantle. Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid are all closer to the more orthodox institutions approach (with a nod in the direction of ideas). Dominic Raab is after the ideology vote. The final ballot might well tell us something far more than merely the name of the next party leader.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


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