“What goes up must come down” may be a vulgarisation of Newtonian physics, but it is nonetheless a pretty firm rule of politics. As it happens, Isaac Newton was educated in Grantham, the Lincolnshire market town in which the local MP Nick Boles, a onetime Tory high flier, has recently undergone his own crash course in coming down.
Boles resigned the Conservative party whip last week, having stepped down from his Conservative Association in March and then seen his “Common Market 2.0” proposal rejected by parliament in the second round of indicative votes.
Boles had been under threat of deselection by local party members, a position in which his fellow Remain-supporting Conservative MP Dominic Grieve also finds himself. The tensions afflicting the Tories, amid the Brexit crisis, have triggered speculation that the party is on the brink of splitting apart.
In Grantham it was hard to find any Conservatives who were upset about Boles’s departure, at least certainly none as emotional as the MP was himself when he announced his departure. His most vocal supporters, including one woman who described his enemies as the town’s “swivel-eyed tendency”, were not Conservatives. Still, the Grantham Journal reported that a poll found 64% of its readers wanted Boles to continue as their MP.
Among Tories I spoke to, the concern was less about people such as Boles and Grieve being forced out than the likelihood that MPs on the Eurosceptic wing of the party will leave if Theresa May agrees to a customs union.
“I think it’s a major crisis,” said Robert Foulkes, a Conservative county councillor who defected from Ukip in 2016. He believes the political landscape has shifted since the referendum and cites research that suggests the choice is now a stark one between left and right.
“In other words, the centre ground is not there any more,” he said. “The Labour party is going through the same process. The Conservatives need to be more on the right. All that stuff about being a progressive Conservative, which Nick Boles was espousing, seems to have lost favour among the electorate, and not just the Conservatives.”
Foulkes envisages a situation in which upwards of 100 Conservative MPs could either leave the party or lose their seats in an election in which the Brexit party and Ukip would pick up a large number of protest votes. “It will mean, of course, the Conservative party being out of power for goodness knows how long.”
It has to be said that he didn’t sound entirely depressed by the prospect. I asked him what he thought Grantham’s most famous daughter, Margaret Thatcher, would make of this damaging divide. “She would probably have been appalled, but then she wouldn’t have got us into this position in the first place.”
Next door to the South Kesteven district council offices in the centre of town is a library and museum housing a permanent exhibition about Thatcher’s life, from living above her father’s grocer’s shop through her rise to MP, leader and finally prime minister, before her fall from grace. She is quoted as saying that she came into office with the intention of changing Britain.
She certainly did that, but she also changed the Conservative party. One-nation Toryism became an almost quaint ideological outlook under her leadership. And one thing that’s clear in Grantham is the belief that there are now two nations: London and the rest of the country.
John Kerr, a former managing director, and John Little, a retired engineer, both expressed this opinion at the Tollemache Inn, a Wetherspoons pub near the council offices. A former Tory supporter, Kerr said he’s so disillusioned with the political establishment that he doesn’t think he’ll vote again.
“What’s the point?” he said, noting that both Labour and the Conservatives stood on a policy of Leave. Both men said they believed the government in London has little interest in places like Grantham.
Martin Hill, leader of the council and vice-president of Grantham Conservatives, echoed the sentiment, describing an overcentralised London-focused political elite.
“Our party system is based on local associations but the PM has too much power over everybody. I don’t see it as an issue of the party splitting. It’s an issue of disconnect.”
Boles is not the first Grantham Tory MP to leave the party. His predecessor, Quentin Davies, defected to the Labour party. To lose one MP may be regarded as a misfortune, to misquote Oscar Wilde; to lose two looks like carelessness. Yet these experiences, seen as betrayals by local activists, have left a bitter taste.
“There are a lot of people who are playing up like Nick Boles,” said Hill. “They sit in super-safe rural seats and pontificate about modernisation. They need to take that battle to urban constituencies.”
The argument is not without a certain representative merit, but the logic of it means either an ever-widening gap between rural and urban Conservatives, rightwing and liberal, or one or other wing breaks away. Of course a strong and charismatic leader might be able to hold the two together, but May doesn’t qualify on either count and her efforts to do so have if anything only widened the breach in her party. What’s more, most of the leadership contenders are, as a result of the Brexit dramas, now identified with a position that’s unacceptable to one or other of the antipathetic party sections that have formed.
Half a mile away from the town centre is a shop on the corner of North Parade. This is the former grocer’s shop that Thatcher’s father owned, and the little flat above is where the family lived. A commemorative plaque over the shopfront states that Great Britain’s first female prime minister was born here. But what seemed to capture the mood of the current Conservative party was an advert in the window of the shop, which is now a counselling service. “Feeling you’re stuck in a rut?” it asked.
Another advert simply listed a number of symptoms: depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, trauma, anger, bereavement. That will probably be an accurate summary of Conservative emotions if the party succeeds in tearing itself apart. But the gravity of the moment should give MPs and activists pause for thought because, as Newton knew very well, what goes down doesn’t necessarily come back up.
