Conservatives would rather burn the house down than accept responsibility for their failures

Why the intellectually bankrupt turn far right

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After crashing the economy, Liz Truss blames the “economic establishment” rather than, for example, herself

I do not believe that you can understand the right’s turn to extremism unless you understand its aching disappointment. Opponents don’t often think of Conservatives as losers. They see them as master manipulators: the liars who sold Brexit to the country on a false claim that it would deliver billions to the NHS; the scheming capitalists, who bought up the media and funded right-wing think tanks in Tufton Street.

But to understand modern conservatives you need to realise that they are filled with the resentment of the defeated. In their minds, they are victims not victors.

From a Tory point of view, almost 14 years of Conservative government have been a disaster. The right in power has produced everything the right professes to abhor: national decline, economic stagnation, mass immigration and rocketing taxation. Their great projects – austerity, Brexit and Trussonomics – have failed so badly they can barely bring themselves to mention them now.

It is as if Conservatives are the reverse of King Midas: everything they touch turns to dirt.

With political failure, as with personal failure, you have a choice. You either try to establish where you went wrong and resolve to do better in future. Or you blame everyone else for your mistakes and preserve your vain illusions by pickling yourself in bitterness. As I am sure you have already noticed, Conservatives have embraced the second and easier option.

There is a whiff of Weimar in the air as a result. The Tories resemble German nationalists in 1918 trying to say that their defeat in the First World War was not the fault of German generals in the field,  but of a “stab in the back” by the Jews, socialists, and pacifists in Berlin. Or perhaps a better comparison is with  today’s Russia, where Putin and his supporters blame the collapse of the Soviet Union on Western plots rather than the failures of communism.

Writing in today’s Sunday Times, which is owned, as it happens, by the Murdoch family, Robert Colvile, director of a right-wing think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which is, as it happens, based in Tufton Street, has the good grace to admit that the excuse-making seems like “desperate flimflam”.

Yet rather than accept that the Tories are casting around to try to find someone or something to blame for their failures, an acceptance which might help his party come to terms with the modern world, he leaves it there. Colvile describes rather than challenges the view that the courts, the police, the CBI, lawyers, civil servants, doctors, academics, the National Trust, the BBC, the Bank of England, the Office of Budget Responsibility and just about every one else you can think of are ideologically committed to destroying conservatism; and that, in the words of one Tory politician, even the “rule of law is woke.”

It’s not that you cannot find individual instances to back up right-wing paranoia. But a belief in a Tory Dolchstoßlegende as a general explanation for failure will inevitably take the party to the far right.

Before explaining why let us imagine what an honest Conservative would write today.

Tories deplore high taxes, as do most of the rest of us. But they are high because of a succession of disastrous economic policies. An admirably pithy and necessarily brutal demolition of David Cameron’s time as prime minister in the current issue of the Economist says of his austerity programme in the early 2010s that it was a radical experiment that largely failed. “The size of the state was not sustainably reduced; his tax cuts have been unpicked; years of underinvestment, which began under him, have resulted in decrepit schools and hospitals.”

There is at least some evidence that the misery Cameron’s austerity brought encouraged working-class voters to support Brexit, which in turn brought more misery as it cut GDP by three percent. Philip Larkin’s line that

 “Man hands on misery to man

It deepens like a coastal shelf”

applies to the succession of Tory prime ministers since 2010.

They handed on misery after misery until we hit Liz Truss, who managed to convince the global financial markets that the UK was a nation governed by morons. The stagnation and lost tax revenues brought by a failing economy inevitably ensures that we endure a combination of high taxation and poor public services.

Yet nowhere in the Conservative press or in Conservative thank tanks do we find an honest account of economic failure.  How can there be when an honest account would conclude that we need to rejoin the European Union as soon as possible? This thought cannot be uttered in the British Conservative party. Nor in the British Labour party, come to that. The same failure of honest discourse subverts their discussion of immigration.