The biggest unanswered question arising from the unholy mess of this election result is whether the Tories might have fared rather better had they offered the country a more robustly Conservative alternative to what was on offer from the other two parties, as Mrs Thatcher did in 1979. To future generations, it may seem that the most remarkable feature of the 2010 election was that, after 13 years of one of the most disastrous governments in history, as Britain faces its worst economic crisis for decades, the Tory party failed to win a clear victory. From the moment Mr Cameron emerged from nowhere as leader in 2005, his defining characteristic was his ruthless drive to create a new “Not the Conservative Party”, in his own image. On issue after issue, from his infatuation with “greenery” and global warming to his insistence that his followers should not “bang on about Europe”, he sought to ditch traditional Conservative values and to pursue the Lib Dem, Guardianista “centre” vote. As for his party’s more traditional core supporters, he did not so much take them for granted as treat them with contempt. Such was the deliberate gamble of Mr Cameron’s leadership, and the verdict of last week’s election was that the gamble has not come off. For five years, it has been evident to anyone in touch with grassroots opinion that a broad swath of natural Tory supporters – including many readers of this column – have watched the antics of Mr Cameron and his little clique of close allies with bewilderment, frustration and dismay. Rarely can any Tory leader have aroused in many of his potential voters so little positive enthusiasm, even if many did last week reluctantly support his party. One symptom of this on Thursday was the hidden “Ukip effect”. Although support for its individual candidates may have looked derisory, put together they polled some 900,000 votes, making Ukip easily the fourth largest party – and, more significantly, in around 20 seats which the Tories failed to win or hold, Ukip’s vote more than cancelled out the extent by which the Tories lost. If most of those votes had gone to the Tories, Mr Cameron might just have scraped that overall majority. The truth is that the direction in which Mr Cameron has led the Tory party goes right back to 1990. Since the fall of Mrs Thatcher, successive Conservative leaders have sought to distance themselves from the distinctive values and principles that made her the most successful Tory prime minister of modern times. Instead of forging a new kind of Conservatism, based on diminishing the role of the state and standing up robustly for the national interest – most obviously in our approach to Europe – her successors have, one after another, embarrassedly caricatured this as “nasty” old Toryism, seeking instead to appease the political values of the “soft centre”. The Cameron gamble, bewitched by the success of Tony Blair, was to take this even further, to the point where, on most of the major issues confronting the country, his position has been virtually indistinguishable from that of the other main parties. To see where this has left us, one has only to imagine what might have happened last week had we had a Tory leader more like a reincarnation of Mrs Thatcher, exposing the destructive emptiness of almost everything the New Labour project stood for: on the bloated powers and intrusions of bureaucracy, on Europe, on immigration, on defence, on our delusional energy policy, and above all on by far the most serious issue confronting Britain today, that unprecedented public spending deficit which will soon force us to cut back the public sector on a scale no party dared mention in their irrelevant election campaigns. Arguably the most important section of the electorate last Thursday consisted of those millions who stayed at home because they could see nothing in the three centrist parties to inspire them with the idea that there was any real alternative, offering genuine leadership. As politicians and media obsess about electoral reform, the pressure to drive us all into some central “consensus” is greater than ever. There is no sign of a distinctive leader with the character to break out of that stifling consensus, to tell us some crucial home truths and to inspire us in a new direction. To impotent “consensus”, it seems, we are now doomed.General Election 2010:
The Tory gamble that failed us all
Imagine what might have happened last week if we had a
Conservative leader like Mrs Thatcher,
says Christopher Booker.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
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