Tories must make the case for the freedoms we have almost forgotten
There is no rush about installing a new Tory leader. Labour are doing an excellent job of demolishing their own credibility without any distraction from an official Opposition.
If anything, this whole process might as well be done at the slowest possible pace so as not to create any distraction from the shambles that Sir Keir Starmer has managed to create in such a breathtakingly short time.
But the leadership contest is underway, and the party conference will provide it with as much public attention as it is possible to grab from the Starmer circus.
How will it go and what should it accomplish? The official task this week, of course, is to reduce the number of candidates to two. The result will be a surprise to no one.
It will be Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, both of whom would make able and plausible leaders even though they have very different personalities and forms of appeal.
I shall return to this point later, but it is at least as important to discuss what the party as a whole should be saying regardless of who leads it because the need for a unified direction has bedevilled it for years.
The crucial question of the moment is, what do the Conservatives stand for, rather than who their leader will be.
There are clearly some points on which disagreement within the ranks are, for the moment at least, unresolvable.
Some of them are the detritus of the Leave-Remain split which remains bitter to this day but others are more fundamental to its entire programme for government. The most profound of these is whether a modern party of the centre-Right should accept the social democratic model of big state intervention.
Should the Tories, as Sir Keir did in his sermon last week, accept state control as an unmitigated good?
Indeed, the Starmer doctrine stated that it was not just the proper business of government to exercise control (his favourite word) but its duty – whether over borders or markets.
If you want your borders to be controlled by government, he stated quite explicitly, you must also accept that markets should be too. In a neat bit of word play, free markets were linked directly to open borders and social breakdown.
The logical conclusion of the Starmer analysis would be that only big, authoritarian government could “take back control” in the way that the population indicated it wanted by voting for Brexit.
This is factually quite wrong, needless to say, but it was a brazen extension of the logic of the Left-wing case for state power which should provide the Tories with a perfect target for attack.
Justifying the increasing size and reach of the state is the underlying fixture of this philosophy: government intervention is always inherently for the good because people left to their own devices will wreak havoc on each other and the country at large.
Without state intervention, society becomes a nihilistic war of all against all, a rigged competition where the most privileged will win. Those who want more power to reside with individuals are inevitably promoting shameless selfishness. This is why Starmer and his team do not accept that their own transgressions (known as “sleaze” when committed by Tories) really matter.
When wealthy donors give them wildly expensive gifts and receive favoured access in return, or party leaders seem to engage in active deception of the public or parliamentary rule-breaking, it counts for nothing on the ultimate moral scale because Labour and its generous supporters are the embodiment of political virtue.
Whatever abuses they commit, or hapless mistakes they make, these are never self-serving or cynical: they are simply minor mis-steps on the road to the greater good.
Starmer actually implied that the society based on “collective” principles was beyond reproach and therefore incorruptible – which would come as news to the populations of the Eastern bloc countries who, within living memory, were ruled by infamously corrupt elites in the name of collectivism.
It was a kind of historical oddity to hear ideas which had once been repudiated by his own party, being resurrected. But it should be a gift to the newly launched Conservative party, whoever leads it.
This was the great argument of the 1980s when the Left insisted that capitalism amounted to nothing more than “selfish individualism”.
That generation of Tories had the fight of its life to promote the notion that individual self-determination, moral responsibility and the opportunity to fulfil one’s personal potential were the sacred rights that a free society should guarantee to its people. Having just emerged from the 1970s when the population was regularly held hostage by the collectivist forces of trade unionism, this was a pretty clear cut confrontation.
It turned out that much of the electorate – even in what are now known as the Red Wall regions – agreed with the Thatcher programme. A remarkable number of Labour voters did not want to be told to stay where they were and trust their benign rulers to take care of them. They wanted to make their own way and be treated like self-respecting grown ups.
This is the new-old territory that must now be fought for again. And who is to lead the troops?
My own preference would be for Jenrick as leader. He is intelligent and articulate enough to make the case with subtlety and just enough force. I would hugely enjoy seeing him come up against Sir Keir at PMQs.
And, to help offset the Tory Boy image, I would like to see Kemi Badenoch as deputy leader. Her capacity for robust, no-nonsense, give-as-good-as-you-get strop would be a great match for Angela Rayner who would find it difficult to make use of the usual insults about Tory scum.
Together they would, I suspect, be able to relaunch the battle of ideas that we thought was over.
Apparently a new generation is going to have to relive this struggle but the debate is more muddled now.The Conservatives’ most important task will be to make the case clearly once again for the virtues – in the genuine sense of the word – of economic and political freedom.