The Tories and their entourage, buoyed by four general election wins in a row but looking ever more nervously towards the next one, have found a new way to dodge blame for Britain’s ailing state: pretending they’re not in power.
“Why is the left in the driving seat of government after 13 years of Tory rule,” the journalist Charles Moore asked in the Daily Telegraph last month. A recent cover essay of the Spectator struck a similar note, claiming a “new woke elite” is now “destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society”. Pieces in the Sun, Mail and the Times raised the same alarm. The diagnosis is clear: don’t be fooled by the Conservatives’ long residence in No 10 – a cabal of middle-class liberals, out of step with the public and covertly led by Gary Lineker, is really ruling Britain.
It’s hard not to feel like we’ve been here before. Wasn’t the Tories’ triumph over the European Union supposed to free Britain from the grip of unelected elites, once and for all? Alas, no sooner did the Conservatives slay one set of out-of-touch rulers than another one arose in their place – the bureaucrats in Brussels have morphed seamlessly into a new progressive aristocracy, comprising everyone from civil servants to junior doctors to the judiciary, opposing the Conservatives’ singular right to rule over Britain unopposed. Yet again, the Conservatives are the ones who represent “real” Britain, while their opponents are anti-democratic and unpatriotic, deploying all kinds of nefarious means to obstruct the people’s will.
Psychologists have a word for this phenomenon: projection – the process by which someone displaces their own negative traits or insecurities on to someone else. The Conservatives have long excelled in using projection as a political weapon. While it is their party that defends the interests of bosses, property owners and those with inherited wealth, they claim Labour is driven by elite self-interest. While they happily take donations from oligarchs, it’s the left that is under the sway of foreign powers. The Tories love nothing more than to reign over Westminster and Fleet Street while raging against what Margaret Thatcher called the enemy within.
Such narratives have been pushed by the party and its supporters ever since the Labour party came into existence. “The British Labour party, as it impudently calls itself, is not British at all,” the Mail declared in November 1923, as its proprietor impudently cosied up to Benito Mussolini on the continent. And they have been endlessly useful. Not only does the persistence of an “enemy within” or “new elite” exonerate the Tories’ failures in government – implying that actually existing Conservatism has never been tried and so justifying the seizure of more power – but it also implausibly places the wealthy Tory elite and the proverbial “man on the street” on the same side, jointly opposed to this undemocratic foe.
Ever since the dawn of Britain’s democracy, Conservatives have had to find extravagant ways to make this outlandish positioning convincing. For a long time, empire and monarchy gave them the unifying cause they craved. With the globe beneath Britain’s paw, even those at the bottom of the hierarchy at home could be encouraged to look down on all others abroad: to be born English, the famous saying went, was to have won first prize in the lottery of life, whether you were a butler or a baron.
But after the second world war and the dissolution of empire, the Tories needed a new way to distort and disguise Britain’s divides. They found it at Britain’s borders. “It is possible that Tory attitudes on immigration will strike a working-class response and replace the old-style imperialism,” the influential Conservative MP John Biffen wrote in 1965. Enoch Powell delivered his “rivers of blood” speech three years later. They never looked back.
In Powell’s reconfiguration of post-imperial Britain, the world was no longer beneath Britain’s paw but instead queueing at the gates, desperate to be let in. This narrative, advanced by his disciple Thatcher and sustained by every Tory leader since, has proved similarly empowering, and even more useful: it offers the Conservatives not only a way of appealing across classes, but an alibi for the miserable state of the country’s public services and economy. If Britain is no longer great, it is because it is too generous, spreading its greatness so thinly that the nation’s “native” citizens suffer for it. Any leftwing or liberal defence of immigration can be held up as proof of treachery: whose side are they on?
But despite their patriotic odes to the British people, the Conservatives remain a fundamentally elitist and anti-democratic force. They are wedded to an unrepresentative political system that allows the party to frame fine-margin victories – often involving the votes of little more than a quarter of the electorate – as towering majorities. Just as austerity deliberately eroded local democracy, curtailing the power of opposition-led councils to improve people’s lives, the Tories’ latest move to push through voter ID under a fictitious threat of voter fraud – a measure that is likely to disfranchise millions of people, most of them less well-off – represents yet another move to disempower the public. It is a naked articulation of the Conservatives’ method: muzzle Britain in the name of protecting it, shoring up their own power.
The result is confounding: a ruling class that refuses to take any responsibility for ruling, an elite that enriches its chums while calling their opponents self-serving, a vandal that imagines itself the victim. As long ago as 1871, the novelist Anthony Trollope saw this duplicity as a feature of the Conservative mind. “They feel among themselves that everything that is being done is bad – even though that everything is done by their own party,” he wrote in the novel The Eustace Diamonds. “To have been always in the right and yet always on the losing side … A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have.”
More than 150 years later, Trollope’s words have an eerie resonance. Conservatives feel that everything that is being done is bad, even though almost all of it is done by them. They lament the state of the nation even as they lead it. Last week’s local election results suggest the public’s patience may be fading. But while the Tories may mourn Britain’s decline, so long as they remain in power, they seem happy in their unhappiness, confident that there will always be someone else to blame, someone else to suffer the consequences.
Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over
