Jacob Rees-Mogg: Will nobody challenge him?
You can tell that the Conservative party is going the way of Trump’s Republican party by the compromises of its “moderates.” To keep “skin in the game,” and remain “in the room,” supposedly reasonable Tories feed the Brexit right’s stab-in-the-back myths.
In the process they show the rest of us that you can be a truth-teller on the right or you can be “a player”. But you cannot be both.
For all the conspiracy theories that fly around, the only real conspiracy in the UK today is a conspiracy of silence. Intelligent men and women who ought to know better, who indeed do know better, protect their careers by biting their tongues.
To take the most glaring example, moderate Tories ought to be the first to understand that 13-years of accommodating nationalist and small-state fantasies have left a debilitated country. They ought to be exposing their enemies on the Brexit right. Instead, they protect their positions by pandering to them.
For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake. As public support has fallen away, the Conservative party has become a recalcitrant rump. It’s as if the UK was stuck in a family car that had taken a wrong turn. After realizing the mistake, the passengers tell the driver to turn around. But the driver is a red-faced, furious father, who does not tolerate challenges to his authority. We can never go back, he shouts at his family, never. We decided to take a wrong turn. We voted to speed off in the wrong direction and it would be a betrayal to reverse course.
At some level, Conservatives must realize that intransigence gives them a minority veto. The EU would never accept a Labour government taking the UK back into Europe, if the Tory opposition remained under the control of an ultra-nationalist faction that could return to power and take us out again.
As with Brexit, so with economics. Many on the right genuinely believed that unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy would revive the economy. Here is the Daily Telegraph columnist Allister Heath writing in September 2022. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng would show “our declinist reaminer class” what for, he said. The militant right would wipe the smirks from their privileged faces by using the shock tactics of Reaganite economics to “boost energy output, housebuilding, private investment, scientific innovation and entrepreneurship”.
That went well.
The Tory right’s failure ought to be the Tory moderates’ opportunity. But moderate Tories barely exist now. Let me prove it by asking you a question: who is the leader of the pro-European faction in the Cabinet?
No one publicly claims that role. Looking at our masters, you would probably guess that Jeremy Hunt knows better than anyone that Brexit is a disaster. The Chancellor of the Exchequer voted against it, after all, which is more than you can say for our supposedly serious prime minister. My guess is that Hunt was the anonymous “senior source” behind the story, floated briefly last year, that the government wanted Britain to seek a Swiss-style relationship with the EU. But the right squashed that idea in hours. Moderates learned then that it is as fatal to say “Brexit failed” in the British Conservative party as it is to say “Trump lost” in the American Republican party.
I know of few more admirable Conservatives than Sebastian Payne. He wrote a fine book explaining the rise of Conservatism in his native north east. ( You can listen to me interviewing him about it here) He edited me at the Spectator, and was a joy to work for, and did so well as a political journalist at the Financial Times, you could imagine him becoming editor one day. But instead of climbing the FT’s career ladder he went to work for Onward, a moderate Conservative think tank earlier this year. Once again, his behaviour appeared admirable. Fighting for moderate voices to retake the party is a matter of national urgency. A better and more intelligent Tory you could not hope to meet.
Except that there is no place for a moderate voice in today’s Conservative party – as Payne is finding. Onward does not fight the right and far right in the Conservative party. It accommodates them.
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