Simon Kuper: Toryism Seeks Connection To Past Supporters
Ten years ago I had a boss who wanted to be a Lib-Dem MP. He spent his weekends campaigning in a Tory-held seat, and he showed up on Mondays tired and depressed. "This is a Tory nation," he explained. The voters he encountered on the doorstep disliked taxes, immigrants, gays, Brussels and welfare cheats. What they liked was hanging criminals. In other words, their instincts were the instincts of the Conservatives, which explained why the party was having an 18-year run in power.
Things change. My ex-boss is now a Labour minister, while the Tories have lost four straight elections. The latest plague to befall them is that their voters are dying. Before the last election on May 5, candidate Nicholas Boles had thought he would at least win Hove for the Tories. He didn't. Boles later realised that his sums had been wrong. One of the reasons, he says, was that "a couple of thousand local Tories had died since 2001. It's a worrying result, and actually it's been repeated in lots of other places".
The party kicks off its annual conference in Blackpool on Monday leaderless, trying to work out which candidate for the job has the fewest flaws. Since 1994 the Tories have remained stuck at just over 30 per cent in opinion polls and elections. Their voters are increasingly ageing white men from the south-east. In big cities, Conservatives barely exist: it's a remarkable fact that of Manchester's 96 local councillors, not one is a Tory.
The greatest electioneering machine of any modern democracy may never return to government. These things happen: the Liberals last had a prime minister in 1922, and few people now remember the German Zentrumspartei or the American Whigs.
Yet it's more likely that the present is just a blip. Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative cabinet minister who is now somewhat hopefully running for party leader, pointed out to me that in the 1980s people made similar predictions about Labour. Rifkind laughed: "I remember somebody saying, 'When I refer to Jim Callaghan as the last Labour prime minister, I mean the last Labour prime minister!'"
Rifkind is not just being brave. There is a strong argument that the Tories will be back. What sent them from dominance to subjection was just 10 per cent of British voters deserting the party after 1992, either because they died or changed their minds. In the age of the floating voter - social class determines vote much less than it did before 1983 - it is perfectly possible to win back the same proportion.
Tony Blair himself said this year that he "could sort out the Tory party in five minutes" (a ninth of the time it would supposedly take for Iraq to launch weapons of mass destruction). He cunningly refrained from giving tips. However, the so-called "stupid party" - after John Stuart Mill's dictum, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative" - has spent the summer working out what Blair meant. All over Westminster there is the whirring sound of Tories thinking. They have been able to do so in relative quiet - most Britons having forgotten the party exists. This is a strangely thrilling time for Conservatives, with resonances of 1994 when an unwrinkled lawyer named Blair took over the Labour party.
When you ask Conservatives what they can learn from their last popular leader, Margaret Thatcher, the usual answer is: little. "We're in a very different era now. The style then was right for then, and a new style is needed for now," says David Cameron, another candidate for leader, in one of the few firm statements he risked making to me. It's dawning on the party just how much Britain has changed since Thatcher was driven out of Downing Street in tears, 15 years ago. The average Briton has 50 per cent more income now than then. They are much more likely to have been to university, they don't believe a woman's place is in the home, they work longer hours, travel abroad on budget airlines, are as likely to be single or divorced as married, and are not obsessed with the second world war.
[Editor's Note: This a short excerpt from a much longer piece. See the Financial Time's website for the rest.]
Things change. My ex-boss is now a Labour minister, while the Tories have lost four straight elections. The latest plague to befall them is that their voters are dying. Before the last election on May 5, candidate Nicholas Boles had thought he would at least win Hove for the Tories. He didn't. Boles later realised that his sums had been wrong. One of the reasons, he says, was that "a couple of thousand local Tories had died since 2001. It's a worrying result, and actually it's been repeated in lots of other places".
The party kicks off its annual conference in Blackpool on Monday leaderless, trying to work out which candidate for the job has the fewest flaws. Since 1994 the Tories have remained stuck at just over 30 per cent in opinion polls and elections. Their voters are increasingly ageing white men from the south-east. In big cities, Conservatives barely exist: it's a remarkable fact that of Manchester's 96 local councillors, not one is a Tory.
The greatest electioneering machine of any modern democracy may never return to government. These things happen: the Liberals last had a prime minister in 1922, and few people now remember the German Zentrumspartei or the American Whigs.
Yet it's more likely that the present is just a blip. Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative cabinet minister who is now somewhat hopefully running for party leader, pointed out to me that in the 1980s people made similar predictions about Labour. Rifkind laughed: "I remember somebody saying, 'When I refer to Jim Callaghan as the last Labour prime minister, I mean the last Labour prime minister!'"
Rifkind is not just being brave. There is a strong argument that the Tories will be back. What sent them from dominance to subjection was just 10 per cent of British voters deserting the party after 1992, either because they died or changed their minds. In the age of the floating voter - social class determines vote much less than it did before 1983 - it is perfectly possible to win back the same proportion.
Tony Blair himself said this year that he "could sort out the Tory party in five minutes" (a ninth of the time it would supposedly take for Iraq to launch weapons of mass destruction). He cunningly refrained from giving tips. However, the so-called "stupid party" - after John Stuart Mill's dictum, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative" - has spent the summer working out what Blair meant. All over Westminster there is the whirring sound of Tories thinking. They have been able to do so in relative quiet - most Britons having forgotten the party exists. This is a strangely thrilling time for Conservatives, with resonances of 1994 when an unwrinkled lawyer named Blair took over the Labour party.
When you ask Conservatives what they can learn from their last popular leader, Margaret Thatcher, the usual answer is: little. "We're in a very different era now. The style then was right for then, and a new style is needed for now," says David Cameron, another candidate for leader, in one of the few firm statements he risked making to me. It's dawning on the party just how much Britain has changed since Thatcher was driven out of Downing Street in tears, 15 years ago. The average Briton has 50 per cent more income now than then. They are much more likely to have been to university, they don't believe a woman's place is in the home, they work longer hours, travel abroad on budget airlines, are as likely to be single or divorced as married, and are not obsessed with the second world war.
[Editor's Note: This a short excerpt from a much longer piece. See the Financial Time's website for the rest.]