I’ve always liked Max Hastings, the former Telegraph editor, although I haven’t always agreed with him. He speaks in the way we used to think was normal from high members of the Tory party. You can imagine him talking to men like Lord Carrington or Willie Whitelaw or Edward Heath, as an equal. He sounds serious. I’m sorry to say there’s nobody remotely like him on today's Conservative benches, Dominic Grieve was probably the last of a kind. Johnson got rid of anyone who was really a Conservative and I think it’ll be decades before the party gets back to its roots.
Hastings has been interviewed for The New European: The Era of Flat Earth Conservatism, and the article is a devastating critique of the modern Tory party. It's a great piece and well worth reading.
Farage, he says is “without doubt the most influential British politician of the last 30 years," and looking at the damage he has inflicted on this country, this is probably true.
The Tory Party, he thinks, "is now little more than a hard-right shell, run by delusional third-raters who mistake personal ambition for leadership, and who have brought Britain to the point of disaster. He calls Rishi Sunak’s government 'dreadful' and led by a 'loser'. Suella Braverman’s policies are 'grotesque'; Brexit a 'disaster'. And the party membership, who buy the papers Hastings edited and wrote for, are in his view 'Flat Earthers' and 'almost without exception fantasists'. His view of Boris Johnson is even harsher."
He blames Johnson for dragging Britain and British politics into “this madly reckless and irresponsible mood”, and he did it by "aligning himself, and the Conservative Party, with the political ambitions of Nigel Farage."
The article quotes Jacob Rees-Mogg telling the BBC, “I think Nigel is broadly a Tory and always has been. If he wanted to join I can’t think his membership would be refused.”
Now read this tweet from a few days ago by the founder of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomerie:
I walked into Conference earlier with @Nigel_Farage. He got quite the reception. I'm convinced party members would choose him as leader if they could.
— Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 (@montie) October 2, 2023
Montgomerie and Hastings are of course both right. Farage has been the most influential politician over the last 30 years and the Tory party would choose him as leader. What do these obvious truths tell us?
They tell us that the Conservative party is dead and it is effectively UKIP in all but name.
Farage was a Conservative from 1978 to 1992 but left in protest when John Major's government signed the Maastricht Treaty. He actually voted for the Green Party in 1989 because of what he saw as their then "sensible" and Eurosceptic policies - according to Wikipedia, how times change, eh?
But over the last decade, Farage hasn't changed one bit. The Tories are unrecognisable.
This, I am sorry to say, is what has happened. Any party that would elect Nigel Farage as leader has to be UKIP, or any subsequent variation of it, a vehicle for his personal ambition and hard-right nationalism. It's the "hard-right shell, run by delusional third-raters" that Hastings talks about.
Margaret Thatcher, I am quite certain, wouldn't have a single member of the present cabinet in her government and would be horrified by Braverman and Patel.
The Tory transformation shouldn't be a shock. In 2018 Arron Banks was urging UKIP members to sign up to the Conservative party, calling for 50,000 to swell Tory ranks which at one time had fallen to as little as 70,000. They are now probably in the majority.
Hastings says this about the grassroots:
“These people thought Liz Truss was the answer to the nation’s problems,” he says. “As long as these 200,000 Flat Earthers around the country have a decisive voice, then I’m very gloomy about the Conservative Party’s prospects.”
I take issue with that. The party has no future prospects. After next year it will disappear. I really don't see how the defeated Tories can ever again find enough moderates to produce centre-ground policies which any opposition needs to win broad support in an election. They face years in the wilderness.
Most of the deluded fantasists in the cabinet would have fitted well in UKIP. What we are experiencing now is what the government would have been like if Farage had won a majority in 2019. Perhaps it's not quite as bad. Farage has the luxury of being able to distance himself ("Brexit has been a disaster") but faced with reality I don't believe he would have made very different decisions to the ones Johnson made.
Farage pursued Brexit remorselessly. We laughed at UKIP because we thought they would never get into power, but of course, they didn’t need power, only influence over the people who had it. And he got that in spades with Cameron and Brexit, forcing a disastrous policy on the Conservative Party through a small cabal of sympathisers in the ERG.
We need an anti-Farage character with charisma to sell EU membership advantages to the masses.
Hastings again:
But then he offers a glimmer of hope. Does he think we will get back into the EU? “Oh, I’m sure we will,” he says, striking a rare optimistic note.
“But I suspect that people like me will be dead before it happens,” he adds. So – not so much an optimist after all. But he is a realist. And realism is what British politics has been missing for too long.
