Conservatives on the verge of an intellectual breakdown

National decline roundup 16/07/2023

Greetings, and many thanks for reading. I am incredibly grateful to the hundreds of new readers who subscribed last week, and to all who support my journalism. Recently, I have written about climate “doomists,”  the limits of diversity politics and the nervousness in the British Labour party as it approaches power.

Yet its nervousness is as nothing when set against the nervous breakdown now raging through British Conservatism.

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Intellectual collapse precedes political collapse. The dozens of Conservative MPs,  who are giving up on politics because they no longer see the point in fighting the next election, are matched by Conservative commentators, who are giving up on argument because they no longer see the point in making sense.

Following John Stuart Mill’s stern instruction to disdain cheap victories and only argue with your “most plausible and persuasive” opponents  , I will pick the Brexit right’s most formidable apologist, Robert Tombs, to make my point for me.

No one better exemplifies the decline of English conservatism than the emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge University. Like the Tory party, he has gone from seeming reasonableness before the Brexit referendum of 2016, to chest-beating menace at the height of Boris Johnson’s authoritarian rule, to the barely comprehensible babble that now echoes through the emptying rooms of the Sunak administration.

Michael Gove’s claim that this country had had enough of experts was never true for Conservatives. The party has always welcomed intellectuals willing to support it. Tory newspapers and think tanks provide platforms to amplify their voices. Appointments to government-controlled quangos offer prestige and financial rewards.  As Tory rule has unravelled, the need to find support for Conservative ideas has grown. The Conservative movement is now pathetically grateful for any authoritative figure who is willing to support it.

In Tombs they had a professor, from Cambridge, no less. Tombs was the author of The English and Their History. Published in 2014, it was as well written as it was well argued. I suppose you could say that its point of view was conservative with the smallest of “cs”.  Tombs debunked anti-capitalist accounts of the industrial revolution and blanket postcolonial denunciations of the British Empire. But to focus on Tombs’s politics in 2014 was to think like a nit-picking fanatic. He was how civilised Tories like to see themselves: tolerant, informed and ironic: the precise opposite of the shrieking commissars of the left.

“Theirs is something to be said for national nonchalance,” Tombs’s description of the English character concluded. English life contrasted well with France’s unending quarrels about Muslim dress, and America’s unending quarrels about race. Even the left-wing Guardian was impressed. It was rare to find a book  “of such lucidity and authority that does not hector its readers,” its reviewer concluded.

For Tombs as for so many others on the right, the Brexit crisis has banished lucidity and any semblance of open-mindedness.

Tombs explained that he supported Brexit in 2016, after weighing the evidence, as a civilised man should. At a public meeting in Cambridge, he asked a fellow academic whether economists were right to warn that Brexit would harm the country. No, his colleague replied, “there will need to be some adjustment, but certainly no disaster.”

From the vantage point of 2023, it’s clear that Tombs and his colleague were horribly wrong. (Indeed, it was clear in 2016, but I will let that pass.)  

Brexit has slashed growth, exacerbated inflation, and pushed the country into decline. “When the facts change, I change my mind,” said John Maynard Keynes, the great Cambridge economist. But, Tombs could not change his. Instead, he turned into a caricature of a left-wing dogmatist. He refused to admit a mistake. Class resentment powered his writing, as surely as it powered any Twitter Corbynista.

Tombs explained that a chance meeting over wine and nibbles convinced him that he needed to launch a class war against the elite.

“I remember a fellow guest at a party in Cambridge telling me she had finally understood why people voted Leave because her gardener and cleaning lady had explained it. When it became clear that influential groups were trying to neutralize or overturn the referendum result, I was convinced this was potentially disastrous.” 

Before I go any further, I should say that I do not doubt for a moment that members of the Cambridge upper-middle classes can be risible and infuriating in equal measure. But, seriously, you base your political convictions on their chit-chat about their gardeners?