Today the Conservatives officially outlast New Labour, with a Tory prime minister in Downing Street for the last 13 years and a week or so. After so long in power, and after so many dramas, the Tories might be forgiven for simply lying down and waiting for the inevitable. Weirdly, though, I remain optimistic. Rishi Sunak is proving to be a formidable prime minister, with extraordinary energy and a refreshingly practical approach to problem-solving. He could pull it off. This makes it all the more galling that pressure groups and organisations are springing up around the party that make victory less, not more, likely. All of these campaigners will argue that they have reputable aims and legitimate issues to air. But the public will see a party at war with itself, and unwilling or unable to confront the real problems the country faces. That is not a winning position.
The Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) complains that Rishi Sunak was crowned without a vote of members. They ignore the fact that there were no other candidates by the end, and the vote only came about as a result of a disastrous predecessor resigning from office.
As William Atkinson pointed out in Conservative Home, not a platform instinctively behind centrists, the CDO seems to be an organisation for whom “being angry is so much easier than doing anything worthwhile”. Their recent conference in Bournemouth was not designed to be helpful. Incredibly, senior Conservatives actually turned up to speak at the National Conservatism Conference, a three-day festival where there was precious little evidence of unwavering support for the government in which they serve. As the former Conservative minister Alistair Burt wrote, the conference was marked by “indignation and anger …[T]here always has to be an enemy”.
This is spot on. Events like these are characterised by a refusal to face reality or confront the difficult problems the country actually has to deal with. The view of those who spoke seems to be that the sunlit uplands await, if only we didn’t have the civil service, the BBC and the rest of some vague establishment blocking our way. The politics of grievance is not a winning formula. We have been here before. After our defeat in 1997, so many Conservatives blamed the outcome on our party not being Conservative enough. It was a long and hard struggle to get the party back to the mainstream, and to relearn the lesson that you only win in politics by looking forward, not back. You actually have to like the country in which you live, and want to make it better, in order for the public to want to back you. Harking back to a golden age, with a wishlist of policies that are completely absurd in a modern, developed nation, is for the birds. People like Alistair Burt and I are regularly denounced as not being proper Conservatives, despite spending all our adult lives working for and supporting the party we love, to secure a better future for our country. We are criticised by people whose meandering ideology has taken them to different parties, and none, some of whom have never even knocked on a voter’s door. Whatever the outcome of the election, there will be a battle for the soul of our party in the years ahead. Practical policies, for Britain as she is today not as she never was, that evolve with our changing circumstances, are what attract support. Railing against different communities that might have supported you is no way forward. Margaret Thatcher would tell you that. Ed Vaizey served as culture minister for six years under David Cameron and now sits in the House of Lords