Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism by Nick Timothy – review

What Dominic Cummings, the teacosy-wearing consigliere of Boris Johnson, is to the current regime at No 10, Nick Timothy was to Theresa May. He even had a svengalian beard.

During that brief, and now largely forgotten, period when May appeared to be wildly popular, Timothy was her domineering co-chief of staff. In so much as there was anything you might call Mayism, he was the author of it. Then she fought her disastrous 2017 election campaign, in part at his urging and with a manifesto he co-authored, and the Tories lost their majority. “My phone rang. It was Theresa ... I could hear the disappointment and hurt and anger in her voice. There was terror, too. I had seen or heard her cry before, but this was different. She was sobbing. I remember thinking she sounded like a child who wanted to be told everything was just fine.”

He was thrown out of his job as May frantically struggled to cling on to her own.

In a brisk opening chapter, he accepts some of the blame for what he calls “a catastrophe” while settling a few scores along the way. “This is bullshit,” spits Lynton Crosby, the Australian campaign consultant, when the exit poll accurately forecasts a hung parliament. Philip Hammond was never on board for ending austerity and improving the life chances of the less privileged. Timothy reports the then chancellor sneering: “You don’t need to actually do any of this stuff. You’re miles ahead in the polls just talking about it.”

Though the author is describing quite recent events, this now reads like an account from a very distant time. This was the era before the 2019 election when Johnson won the Tory majority that May couldn’t. Before we’d left the EU. Before the coronavirus crisis, the scale of which makes all other politics look exceedingly small and gives a petty flavour to tales of past personality clashes.

That said, there is continuing relevance to this book, the greater part of which is an attempt to diagnose what Timothy calls a “political and cultural crisis” in the democracies. Though primarily addressed to Conservatives, it is a thought-provoking read for those who are not. Since some of his analysis is shared within the Johnson government, it also offers some clues about their philosophy and intentions.

His diagnosis of what is wrong with Britain accurately includes corporate bureaucrats who have vastly enriched themselves while the real incomes of many of their workers have been stagnant. A fixation with driving up the number of young people going to university has seen the woeful neglect of vocational education. Prosperity has been far too concentrated, leaving many sections of society to feel that it has passed them by. Much political discourse has been toxified.

All this and more he blames on what he calls the “ultra-liberals” who “have taken community and nation for granted”. In its rightwing form, this has led to an over-reverence of free markets and an unthinking embrace of globalisation. In its leftwing form, it has corrupted classic liberalism (representative government, pluralism, checks and balances, free speech) into an obsession with “group rights”, a “no-platforming” intolerance of contrary opinions, and a neglect of the importance of place.

He strikes home with some of his criticisms, but his attack on “ideological ultra-liberals”, a category so baggy that it could include George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Jeremy Corbyn, is too bludgeoning and sweeping to be persuasive. A son of the West Midlands, he is right to say that we have a significant problem with regional inequalities. From infrastructure spending to research and development, resources have been overly concentrated in London and the south-east. Where he is too crude is to suggest that this is simply because successive governments have not been bothered. Following the urban riots of the 1980s, Michael Heseltine, a Welshman, put a lot of energy into the revival of inner cities. The government of Tony Blair, who grew up in Durham, devoted a lot of attention to the regeneration of conurbations in the north. You can make a case that they didn’t care enough, but Timothy is wrong to suggest that they didn’t care at all.

A supporter of Brexit and very hostile to supranational institutions, one of his biggest beefs is with globalisation. Here you will find the familiar complaint of the anti-globalists that increased flows of capital, technology and migration have enriched poorer people in countries such as China while leaving lower-skilled workers in the west in more precarious and less rewarding employment. Like nearly all anti-globalists, he flinches from pursuing this argument to its conclusion.

Should globalisation have never happened? Ought it now to be comprehensively reversed? Supposing that was anyway possible. It is not an attractive proposition to suggest that the many hundreds of millions of people around the world whose life chances have been lifted by the expansion of free trade should have been left in poverty for further generations. And I have yet to hear an anti-globalist who is honest enough to explain to people here that they would have them give up all the cheaper goods from Asia that they have come to enjoy.

This book is at its best when it challenges conventional right-wing thinking. He calls for a “civic capitalism” in which companies feel a sense of obligation to their employees and communities as well as their shareholders. He makes the case for tilting the burden of taxation away from income and towards accumulated wealth. He contends that everyone should be given a lifetime learning budget. These ideas are not altogether novel, but it is unusual and refreshing to hear them from a British Conservative.

Overall he presents a blueprint for his party that would mean a revolution in thinking on the right. His Toryism does not crave an ever-shrinking state, which sets him apart from some of his fellow Brexiters. He argues for a Conservatism that rediscovers and embraces the power of active government and uses it to reform dysfunctional markets, deal with gouging corporates and redress inequalities between regions and generations.

Elements of this thinking are clearly informing the “levelling-up” agenda that the Johnson government has sworn to deliver for the less affluent parts of Britain. How that will be changed – for changed it surely will be – by the coronavirus crisis we cannot yet be fully sure. This is an interesting book with stimulating arguments, but it is currently the fate of anyone writing about politics to know that their thoughts will be less influential in shaping society than a microbe.

• Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism by Nick Timothy is published by Polity Press (£20)