Low Church Conservatism: A conference that confirms how different Theresa May is and will be

The Conservative Party conference which the Prime Minister is closing today has been a different creature to the same event in Manchester 12 months ago. The atmosphere has been serious, even sombre. The stage and set have been more restrained than in recent years and the chosen slogan - “A country that works for everyone” - has been close to clunky. Cabinet ministers appear to have been ordered to reign in their rhetoric and avoid seeking out the headlines (and whilst almost all of them managed to render themselves dull, it was an ask too far for Boris Johnson).
Nothing here has been unduly ‘flash’, let alone ‘gimmicky’. New announcements have been few and far between and the ones that come will be articulated by the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government. Warm white wine rather than champagne has been the order of the day (which is regrettable when you rely upon alcohol to sustain oneself through the party conference season). This is emphatically not the spirit of the David Cameron/George Osborne age. It is instead a reversion to a ‘Low Church Conservatism’ era.
Much of this reflects the character of Theresa May and those whom (with the conspicuous exception of Mr Johnson) she has appointed to senior office and the Downing Street apparatus. It and she also play well with party representatives, who sense that one of their own is now in charge again. In many ways this is true and it deserves elaboration because it is at the heart of what has made the events of July 2016 feel much more like a wholesale change of government than was true in May 2015 when a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was replaced by a majority Conservative one (a shift which one may have thought was bigger than swapping one Conservative PM for another).
An examination of Mrs May’s path through politics, and how it differs from her predecessor and his inner circle, is of value. She became interested in public affairs while at grammar school, was then a student politician at Oxford University but after that was a humble constituency activist, then a local councillor, then a candidate in a totally safe Labour seat in 1992 before finally being selected for and becoming MP for Maidenhead in 1997.
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, had a very similar route to office. The same is true of Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, who was her campaign manager in the summer (except that he attended Cambridge). Indeed, in a revealing moment at a fringe event on Monday evening sponsored by the BVCA, Mr Grayling let slip that at one point about 25 years ago the Wimbledon Conservative Association Quiz Team consisted of Philip May (Association Chairman), Mrs May, himself and his wife Sue (he was silent on their record in competition). Mrs May’s closest friend at Oxford was Alicia Collinson, a fellow geography student at St Hugh’s, who married Damian Green, now the Work and Pensions Secretary, who also attended grammar school, was involved in student politics, became engaged in a local party thereafter and fought an impossible Labour seat in 1992 (against Ken Livingstone in Brent East) before finally being chosen for the safe seat of Ashford.
This is very much the ‘Low Church’ blood, toil, sweat and tears means of advancement within the Conservative Party. It is the distinguishing feature of the May Cabinet and 10 Downing Street. It transcends ideology. Contrast it with that of Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne who went to elite public schools and skipped the student politics/constituency association/councillor/hopeless Labour seat chores altogether in favour of deploying personal contacts to travel the ‘High Church’ way via the Conservative Central Office (Mr Cameron’s godfather, a Royal Equerry, allegedly put in a word on his behalf), then became a Special Adviser and then went on to direct selection for a prime Conservative constituency.
With that ‘Low Church’ takeover theme in mind, what can be discerned from this party conference?
We have learnt less about the Government’s approach to Brexit than might appear
As previous editions of BVCA Insight have observed, Mrs May was always going to have to put some flesh on the Brexit bones at her party conference. Not to have done so would have been to invite a loss of control over the occasion. Her team clearly decided to issue all that they would announce on the theme over the weekend in the hope of satisfying any lingering internal concerns on backsliding, establish a firm line that almost everyone would be content to, or be compelled to, rally around and then move on to other subjects and demonstrate that this Parliament would not be Brexit-fixated. As a party management and a media management strategy it has to be said that it worked well.
Yet what more have we really been able to divine about the Brexit process? Before Saturday, the informal working assumption was that Article 50 would be triggered in January 2017 (with a minority camp asserting that waiting until the French elections were over might be better). Mrs May has now formalised matters by declaring that Article 50 will be invoked in the first quarter of next year, thus acquiring a little more flexibility for herself by doing so.
The process of leaving the EU always had to involve abolishing the 1972 legislation in order to take legal effect; describing this as a ‘Great Repeal Bill’ might tickle the collective tummy of the Conservative Party but it does not alter fundamentals. Indeed, the decision to then reincorporate all existing EU law as UK law, and only then start scrapping it again, preserves negotiating flexibility but does nothing to reduce medium-term Brexit uncertainty. And Mrs May’s firm line on controlling migration can again have come as a surprise to no one who is aware of her view on why the referendum result occurred, but it continues to raise a host of questions.
The Treasury has little idea at this stage what a ‘New Plan for New Circumstances’ actually is
If the Prime Minister did not give much new away, then the Chancellor offered virtually nothing. He simply confirmed that he was no longer bound by the deficit reduction targets bequeathed by his predecessor and that a ‘New Plan for New Circumstances’ would be produced at the Autumn Statement on 23 November. What this might be is something of a mystery.
This is in large part because the Treasury has little idea what estimates the Office of Budget Responsibility will make for economic growth in 2017 and 2018 but is aware (as the OBR itself is) that in the strange domestic and international situation in which the UK finds itself, the chances of these predictions being not slightly but massively mistaken are quite high.
There is thus every incentive to keeping the New Plan for New Circumstances deliberately ambiguous and amendable as there is every possibility that at some point in the next two years an ‘Even Newer Plan for Even Newer Circumstances’ might be needed. The range of options here is considerable, with at one end of the spectrum the Treasury returning to the old Osborne format but a year or two later than originally advertised, to a very different model based on balancing the budget but excluding some or all capital spending.
There is some very interesting new thinking about industrial strategy emerging
Perhaps the most intriguing behind-the-scenes activity hinted at by this conference concerns the mutual interaction of corporate governance reform (on which Mrs May is determined to act) with a new conception of industrial strategy. Up until now, industrial strategy in the UK (in so far as it has existed) has been of the top-down Heseltine/Mandelson/Cable school of thought, in which those sectors where the UK is already strong are identified and the kitchen sink is thrown at them by ministers.
The new line of inquiry is much more bottom-up with a lot of effort being put into the productivity paradox in the UK and what can be done to encourage the scaling-up of exciting businesses and in ensuring that in the tech sphere, particularly, companies are not sold to larger entities (often located abroad) earlier than they should be. This is a real opportunity for the venture/growth capital sectors.