We Tories have no idea what an effective, modern leader looks like – that’s why we struggle to find one | Henry Hill

3 hours ago 1

What would the ideal leader of the Conservative party look like? Despite the party’s newly developed regicide habit, this question doesn’t receive enough serious consideration. The sitting leader naturally becomes the locus for dissatisfaction, while speculation understandably focuses on the actual alternatives.

On one level, this is perfectly sensible. As a matter of practical politics, there is limited short-term use in dreaming up an ideal candidate who does not exist: like the serial online dater with the long list of must-haves, you risk ending up in a place where no living candidate can measure up to the one who lives in your head.

But too little imagination has its own dangers, most obviously that of assuming one of the candidates on offer must be the right answer. While chasing an impossible fantasy is a recipe for dying alone, taking the plunge without a clear idea of what you are looking for will lead to swift disillusionment (as successive Tory leaders have found out).

As the party shows no sign yet of having put the era of rapid-onset buyer’s remorse behind it – there are already nervous questions about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership bubbling up in the press – unhappy Conservatives should at least put it to productive use by digging beneath their unhappiness with the current leader and working out what they actually want.

Everyone will stitch together a slightly different Frankenstein’s monster when assembling their ideal leader. But most Tories will at least be raiding the same graveyard, so to speak, drawing inspiration from the party’s pantheon of past heroes. So, what might they be digging for?

For many, the honest answer is simple: a winner. More specifically, someone who makes them feel like winners. Politics is a team sport, especially for those committed enough to join parties, and partisans chase the highs of victory no less zealously than sports fans.

This is what unites Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson. Notably, it allows lots of self-styled rightwingers to pine for the leadership of a man whose programme consisted of mass immigration and higher government spending. Both ex-leaders presided over periods of triumph, and triumph feels good.

Of course, they went about it in almost diametrically opposed ways. Johnson needed to be liked and wanted to please everyone. Thatcher, on the other hand, had a very clear vision and was prepared to take great political risks to pursue it.

That second quality is too often skated over by Conservatives. In our collective imagination, the 1980s can easily devolve into a triumphant highlight reel. When modern Tories pine for our “next Thatcher”, the projection omits not only her shortcomings but her actual strengths.

For starters, she had a clear intellectual and ideological project. This gave direction to her government and something bigger than personal loyalty to Thatcher towards which other “big beasts” could work. (At least for a while; it’s no coincidence that her tolerance for tall poppies declined in tandem with the fortunes of her government.)

Just as importantly, the Conservative party of that era still had an instinctive understanding of its social coalition. It’s a bit vulgar to admit openly now, but back then Labour and the Tories were more obviously sectional interest parties and aware of it, too.

Thatcherism was an explicit attempt to change and broaden the part of the country served by the Tory interest, but it never lost sight of who those voters were – and it succeeded because it made sure it looked after them. From the big bang in the City to the sale of council houses, Thatcher’s governments produced clear winners who knew who they had to thank.

There were enough of them, in fact, that John Major’s 14m votes in 1992 remains the highest popular vote secured by any party at a British general election, ever. Even in his fleeting prime, and with a much larger electorate, Johnson couldn’t match that.

Such clarity of purpose is visibly absent from today’s Conservative party. From David Cameron’s detoxification agenda to Johnson’s “cakeism”, repeated efforts to broaden the Tory coalition have nonetheless left it at perhaps its narrowest since the advent of universal suffrage, and in extinction territory among working-age voters.

Events such as Brexit and Partygate played a part in that. But Brexit was itself a product of a deeper problem: trying to keep everyone happy by putting off or papering over deep and substantive political questions, rather than picking a side and having the fight. Cameron tried to implement austerity, for example, without making big decisions by just cutting something from everything, leaving a sprawling state that doesn’t work for anyone.

Throughout their time in office, the Tories were easily bounced by their opponents out of the sort of policies that produce clear winners, such as flexible right to buy or tackling cliff edges in the tax system, while pandering to local nimbys (and recruiting too many local councillors as MPs) and overregulating childcare destroyed the social processes by which people used to age into Tories.

Conservatives would probably be best letting go of the hunt for the next Thatcher. She did not, after all, win the leadership in 1975 talking about Stanley Baldwin.

If not, we should at least understand that what we need is not a reheated version of her specific agenda or aesthetic, but rather her will to radically overhaul the party and confront the deep structural problems afflicting Britain. We should remember that this was for many Tories an extremely uncomfortable experience. Worthwhile revolutions always are.