The recent Labour victory in Britain, fuelled by the first-past-the-post electoral system, has reshaped the political landscape. Securing only 34% of the vote but 412 seats, Labour’s dominance seems poised to last a decade. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party grapples with an identity crisis, oscillating between meritocracy and tradition. RW Johnson examines the historical shifts within the Tory leadership, the fallout from Brexit, and the implications for British democracy amid a chaotic political climate.
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By RW Johnson
The electoral earthquake which has put Labour in power in Britain was, of course, greatly magnified by the first-past-the-post system. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ Labour won only 34% of the vote but won 412 seats in the 650-seat Commons. The Tories were reduced to 121 seats, their lowest ever total, and the general feeling was that it would take two elections to shake Labour’s hold, so Labour would be in power for at least ten years.
In a sense this was a disaster foretold, for the Tories have been undergoing a remarkable evolution away from their traditional mould and no new equilibrium has been achieved. Looking back, the last traditional Tory cabinet was Macmillan’s in 1957-64. Macmillan (Eton and Oxford) was a multi-millionaire publisher and was married to the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, one of the greatest Tory magnates. His cabinet was full of people with backgrounds similar to his own and one third of them were related to him. Tory cabinets like that had been familiar to Britain since the 17th and 18th centuries. Macmillan’s cabinet contained many men of great ability, however: cleverest of all was undoubtedly Enoch Powell (the youngest professor in the Commonwealth at the age of 24), but Lord Hailsham, Ian McLeod and Sir Edward Boyle were not far behind and Macmillan himself was exceptionally sharp and shrewd, though he disguised that with his Edwardian charm and highly developed sense of humour.
When Macmillan fell ill he successfully intrigued to make Sir Alec Douglas Home his successor. Home – the 14th Earl of Home – was a shrewd and successful foreign secretary but he gave the impression of being an upper class twit. In the 1964 election Harold Wilson made much of Home’s lengthy aristocratic pedigree and Home’s jokes about “the 14th Mr Wilson” failed to blunt Wilson’s meritocratic appeal as essential to a modern society. Home thought it amusing to say that he tried to work out economic problems by playing with matches on a table but that he otherwise regarded economics as a weird and inaccessible science. Wilson had taught economics at Oxford and been a Research Fellow of University College, Oxford. His expert talk about the Eurodollar market, Britain’s trade deficit and the need to embrace the technological revolution made Home seem like a comical relic.
Once Labour won that election the Tories determined to pick a younger meritocrat with no privileged background as their new leader. The result was Edward Heath, a hard-driving, intelligent but charmless man. And when Heath failed in government, another state school meritocrat, Margaret Thatcher, took over. She had no regard for the old Establishment and appointed few aristocrats to her cabinet, though her cabinet included seven Jews – an amazing first for any British cabinet. (Harold Macmillan, reading of the new Cabinet at his club, wrily exclaimed that it contained “more Old Estonians than Old Etonians”.)
When Thatcher finally left the scene another state school meritocrat, John Major, became prime minister. Major was a decent and gentlemanly figure but had to deal with a growing split in the party over Europe. Once Major left in 1997 he was succeeded by William Hague (now Lord Hague of Richmond) who was the rising star of the party, aged only 36. I had always voted Labour but was intrigued when William, aged 18, became one of my students at Magdalen College, Oxford. Most of the undergraduates were fairly left wing and I wondered how he would fare. In fact he was an extremely pleasant man, kept his political opinions to himself, was popular with everyone and disappointingly cruised along in the lower second class. However by his final year he was President of the Oxford Union, president of the Conservative Association and took a wonderful First. One could not but like William though as Tory leader he clearly faced an extremely difficult situation: the splits in the Tory party were venemous and on the other hand Tony Blair was in his pomp and was pretty well unbeatable. So, after losing the 2001 election, William resigned. He later served as foreign secretary and wrote two terrific biographies of Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce. He was a man of great talent who had been elevated to leadership too soon.
In quick succession followed Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, neither of whom were a match for Blair. By 2005 the Tories were at something of a loss until, out of nowhere it seemed, David Cameron appeared. He was charming, young and articulate and immediately won the hearts of the Tory faithful. They were in no way put off by the fact that he was an Old Etonian and came from a highly privileged background. Moreover, his wife Samantha was a Baroness and came from an even wealthier family. The dominant figure in Cameron’s government was George Osborne, the son of a baronet, privately educated and a friend of Cameron’s at Oxford. So the insistence on state school meritocrats was cast aside and the Tories reverted to type.
Cameron miscalculated badly with the EU referendum in 2016, resigned and was replaced by Theresa May, an Oxford graduate but a far more middle class figure. This was not a success and she was rapidly followed by another Old Etonian, Boris Johnson. Johnson was hugely popular with the Conservative base which continued to hanker for him long after he was forced out for his serial dishonesty. He was succeeded by Liz Truss, yet another Oxford graduate but she lasted less then 50 days before giving way to Rishi Sunak. Sunak, apart from his Kenyan Asian background, had a classic Tory profile – head boy at Winchester, a First at Oxford and he was by far the richest man in the Commons. When he lost the 2024 election and said he would stand down half the candidates for the succession were people of colour – Kemi Badenoch (the favourite), James Cleverly and Priti Patel. This was astonishingly at odds with all previous Tory history.
As this summary suggests, once the Tories abandoned their traditional habits in favour of meritocracy they have found it hard to retain balance. Once the old hierarchy and the old certainties were gone, anything could happen. Having never had a woman leader before 1975, they have now had three and may be about to choose a fourth. They may well face the electorate next time with a black woman leader, hitherto an almost unthinkable possibility. The Tories, indeed, have been far more open to change in this respect than any other British party: a woman leader for Labour is still a distant prospect..
Under pressure the Tories attempted to revert to their previously preferred social types only for that to end in the most outrageously chaotic governance that Britain has ever seen. The Tories may have been more open to social change than any of the other parties but at the same time there is a feeling of change spiralling out of control and of the old ruling class having left the scene and not being adequately replaced. Partly this may be because many of the older established Tory families have pulled back from politics – and the great hereditary ennobled families will soon be excluded from the House of Lords by law and will thus leave the political scene.
As the Tories look back they have to admit the truth that most commentators have arrived at, that Cameron’s government, though it seemed competent enough at the time, was a failure in that Osborne’s austerity policies neither reduced the debt overhang and yet did enormous damage to a wide range of areas – local government and the universities were set on the road to bankruptcy, the NHS was underfunded, a growing housing crisis was ignored and so on. And nobody is willing to defend the Tory governments of 2016-2024, a whirligig of new leaders, constant instability, utter irresponsibility (Johnson and Truss) and only finally a decent leader (Sunak) attempting to restore stability. At the outset of their fourteen years in power the Tories vowed they’d bring down immigration numbers and stop the small boats illegally crossing the channel – and yet at the end they had achieved nothing. This alone helped the new Reform party to steal millions of Tory voters.
The result is that Starmer castigates the Tories at every turn for “the mess” they left behind and the Tories are hard-pressed to deny it or to find anything to boast about from their fourteen years in government. To be sure, hardline Brexiteers may boast that Brexit was achieved but public opinion at large has concluded that Brexit was a mistake, thus nullifying such boasts.
It is surely not accidental that this collapse of traditional Tory governance has coincided with the implosion of traditional Tory hierarchies. One cannot imagine a Macmillan, a Rab Butler (the eternal runner up for PM) or an Iain Macleod presiding over the unstable, irresponsible and achievement-free Tory governments of 2010-2024. And yet a return to the traditional Tory hierarchy seems impossible. Immediately after the election Jeremy Hunt, the outgoing Chancellor of the Exchequer, ruled himself out of the cat-and-dog fight for the leadership, and Hunt was the perfect example of what the Tories would once have looked for: the son of an admiral and his family from the landed gentry, head boy at Charterhouse and a fine First at Oxford. Jeremy was my student and was an extremely decent and honourable man. But he was no longer what the Tory party wants.
This crisis of the Tory party is no small matter. It is both Europe’s oldest political party and also its most successful. Yet having ruled Britain for most of the 20th and 21st centuries, it is now reduced to its lowest-ever level in Parliament and finds itself in a fight for its survival against Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Nothing now can be guaranteed. I have never voted for the Tories and have, indeed, always voted against them but no one who wishes British parliamentary democracy to prosper can be unconcerned at their present plight.
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