In the words of rising Conservative star Miriam Cates, “national conservatism” was born out of the 2016 Brexit referendum and Tory 2019 election victory. Those moments were an “instruction from the public that they expect us to govern with their interests, their values in mind. Not the values of the intelligentsia – the globalised elite whose loyalties are to everyone and no one.” The MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge will open the three-day “NatCon” conference in Westminster. Populist right-leaning speakers and senior rightwing Tory MPs are expected to flock to the event in order to freely discuss their ideas on what they see as British people’s values: post-Brexit, family-oriented conservatism.
There will of course be a focus on cultural issues, with a definite nod towards the sort of aggressive populism exemplified by Donald Trump and the hard-right Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán. Other elements will call for a low-tax, low-regulation model of the state, still popular in some Tory party circles even after the damage done by Liz Truss’s catastrophic 48 days in office. Among other speakers in London are JD Vance, the Trump-endorsed Ohio senator, and Rod Dreher, a US writer who is a noted Orbán supporter and now lives in Budapest, as well as a cohort of UK semi-bedfellows such as Douglas Murray and Toby Young. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will also speak at the event, said he viewed the idea of national conservatism as a “national political ideology by its nature in contradistinction to liberalism or socialism, which since their beginnings have had internationalist ambitions and have attempted to impose similar or identical structures on different nations”. But given the timing of this conference, MPs will be expected to use this conference as a snippet of what they could present in the event of a leadership challenge. Suella Braverman, the home secretary; Michael Gove, the communities secretary; the Devizes MP, Danny Kruger; and David Frost, the Brexit negotiator turned Tory peer who has confirmed his bid to become an MP, will all get their moments centre stage.