Evening Standard comment: Onwards to a modern Tory party — once again

Sixteen years ago, the then Tory chairwoman Theresa May told her conference: “You know what some people call us? ‘The nasty party’.” It was one important moment in the internal battle for change that eventually led to government under David Cameron, and a set of achievements in office that included legalising gay marriage, increasing overseas aid, supporting the arts and science and embracing environmentalism.

The electorate rewarded the effort with the re-election of a majority Conservative Government, even if there was still more to do.

So what went wrong? How come, just two years after that electoral success, under the premiership of the woman who gave the “nasty party” speech, Conservatives are asking the same soul-searching questions as two decades ago?

The Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, at the launch last night of the interesting new think-tank Onwards, challenged her audience: “We look a bit joyless, a bit authoritarian … hectoring the people we need to vote for us.”

She’s right. On every measure of modernity, the Conservative Party has found itself in retreat. Young and urban support has deserted it in droves; its backing among ethnic minority and gay voters has collapsed.

What can be done?

In part, Ms Davidson is right that there needs to be a change of attitude. This self-described “pregnant lesbian” tells the party she hopes to lead one day that “we need a sense of being comfortable with the modern world”. Absolutely.

The leadership’s foray into a provincial, net-curtain twitching war against the citizens “of nowhere” was a total political disaster that cost the Tories seats in places such as Brighton, Battersea and Bath, and with them their parliamentary majority.

Changing attitudes only works if it means fundamentally changing policies too. That’s the task for the director of Onwards, Neil O’ Brien, and his generation of new Tory MPs.

Ms Davidson has given them two concrete examples: ditch the target to reduce net migration to the 100,000s and stop including foreign students in the numbers.

As she says, “Do we want to be a sunny, optimistic, outward looking country that says to the brightest and the best ‘we want you here’?” Yes we do. But there’s one problem.

Policy choices

The Prime Minister is the sole defender of both these failed policies left in the Cabinet.

Will she back down and allow her new Home Secretary to get rid of them, or will she wait for the House of Commons to impose defeat on her?

The same is true of housing. The choice is clear, as the Treasury Minister, Liz Truss, warned Tories last week: either we build on the green belt or we get Jeremy Corbyn. Again, an obstacle has been Mrs May.

Will she give up her Maidenhead instincts to defend every scrubby patch of green belt, and allow an entire generation to be priced out of their own home, or allow the diggers in?

Finally, there is the Tory obsession that dared not speak its name at the think-tank launch: Brexit.

Ms Davidson mentioned it only to observe, archly, that it was such a big task no wonder the holders of the great offices of state (her code for the Foreign Secretary) could achieve little else.

Michael Gove, one of the original modernisers, tried to claim that Brexit actually helped the Tory Party embrace immigration and diversity. Admirable as his optimism is, he forgets too easily the ruthless anti-foreigner campaign he and others ran. The country does not.

Many Conservatives, from the Prime Minister down, believe they just have to get Brexit over and done with next March, and then they get on with other things such as how robots and artificial intelligence are going to change the world.

That is hopelessly naïve. As the decision last week to stay in the customs union for at least three more years (a policy still laughably described as “a backstop”) reminds us, these central questions about our trade, immigration, charter of fundamental rights and the like will remain wholly unresolved after we formally leave — and stay that way for years to come now.

It’s wishful thinking for modernising Tories to ask “apart from Brexit, what can we do to change?”.

It’s how they answer the Brexit questions that will largely determine whether their party can represent again a modern, outward- looking and optimistic country.