Why governing parties degenerate in this way is an intriguing question. It seems pretty obvious that all administrations eventually succumb to entropy. People grow old; they get tired; they make mistakes; they run out of ideas. Under the pressure of office, even the most dynamic tyro becomes exhausted. The diaries of Bernard Donoughue, who was Harold Wilson’s policy chief in the mid-Seventies, offer an object lesson in how a bright young thing soon turns into a dying star. “I have been round this course so often that I am too bored to face jumping any more hurdles,” Wilson tells his young adviser at one point. “The trouble with me now is that I only have the same old solutions for the same old problems.”
A few weeks later, working on a speech for the Durham Miners’ Gala, Wilson produces a draft that his aides find “stale, boastful, full of his old clichés, with whole paragraphs repeated from previous speeches”. His press chief, Joe Haines, points out that there’s nothing new in it. “I don’t have anything new to say, do I?” says Wilson wearily. “Well, you might put some of your old ideas in new words,” Haines snaps back. But he is, of course, wasting his time.
I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but today’s Conservatives strike me as a gigantic version of Harold Wilson circa 1975: tired, seedy, cynical, pointless, so bereft of ideas that they have been reduced to arguing about the cost of their own shoes. It speaks volumes, for example, that to get a sense of Liz Truss’s ideas, her critics had been forced to dig out Britannia Unchained, a volume she co-wrote in the dying days of the Brown premiership, full of policy prescriptions for a vanished era.
What’s even more revealing, though, is that Truss is currently leading the leadership race not as herself, but as an effigy of Margaret Thatcher. And if I, who managed to get more than 800 pages out of the first few years of the Thatcher premiership, find this utterly ridiculous, what on earth do normal people think? What sane person attends the most important job interview of their life dressed as somebody who won the same role almost half a century ago? Can you imagine Thatcher doing the same, dressing as, say, Stanley Baldwin or Winston Churchill when she stood against Edward Heath in 1975?
But entropy isn’t the only explanation for what has gone wrong. To look slightly further back, the Conservatives were in office for 13 years between 1951 and 1964, and by the end the game was clearly up. Even so, they weren’t a joke: Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s Cabinet included Rab Butler, Ted Heath, Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Peter Carrington, all of whom were pretty serious people. Or take another example of a government kicked out after 13 years, the Labour administration of Gordon Brown. Sure, it was tired and divided. But there were plenty of canny people around the Cabinet table: Peter Mandelson, Alastair Darling, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham. Maybe they weren’t the greatest ministers in the world, but they weren’t reduced to squabbling about the price of shoes.
So here are two thoughts. The first, which some may find very objectionable, is that as parties become more responsive to their activists, the further they descend into self-indulgent idiocy. This is the Tories’ third leadership election in seven years, and as we all know, it’s the activists who decide the winner. But it’s easier to talk about ideas sensibly, to admit doubt and contradiction, to acknowledge the necessary compromises of office, when you’re not pandering to a hard-core mob. In that sense, the parallel may be with the Labour Party after 1979 — or, indeed, during the Corbyn fiasco — when demagogues like Tony Benn relentlessly whipped up party members against their own representatives. That’s exactly what Rees-Mogg and Dorries are up to now, abetted by fellow-travelling journalists at the Daily Telegraph. But if you want politicians who play to their activists, then you won’t get good politicians. Governing well is messy; good government means disappointment. And that of course, is the one thing activists don’t like to hear.
And here’s the second thought. It really is all the media’s fault, but not for the reason many people seem to think. The Tories aren’t in a mess because the media are biased against them, but because the media are biased against complexity and in favour of lunacy. On every channel — the BBC, Sky, GB News, the lot — producers look for loudmouths and ideologues, the kind of people who will generate “must-watch” social media clips. Even supposedly serious formats, such as the BBC’s Sunak-Truss leadership debate, have degenerated into embarrassing knockabouts.
If you doubt that things were different a generation ago, just watch a clip of the equivalent Cameron-Davis debate in 2005, in which the two contenders look like Pericles and Demosthenes by comparison with their modern-day successors. Or if you want to feel really wretched, go to YouTube and watch the BBC’s Panorama interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1977 or Thames’s This Week interview with her rival Jim Callaghan a year later. The contrast is painful to behold.
So here we are, trapped, perhaps forever, in Ward 8 at Broadmoor. Still, there is one consolation. It could be worse. The Conservative Party may be a clown show, but at least it’s not the Republican Party. Well, not yet, anyway.
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