The Myth of the Good Tory
This is quite welcome. Johnson's efforts to gut the meagre accountability available to the Commons has hammered a few more cracks into the coalition of interests the party holds together, if not at the base then at least among ruling circles. Any opposition worth its salt would be doing all it can to lever these cracks open. But for some, it seems, Major's intervention is a moment for another thing, an occasion for unseemly gushing. Whenever a Tory, any Tory, emerges from the woodwork and ventures criticisms of the current administration, British liberalism breaks out the blu tack for their latest pin up. Regardless of past misdeeds and damage done.
Consider Major. During his seven wretched years in office, he tightened the screws on the labour movement, slung hundreds of thousands out of work, marketised public services and bedded down the forms of governance that blights our society and its politics today (Major gets a full chapter in the book about how his government was crucial for bedding down the class settlement struck during the Thatcher years). People suffered, and people's lives were cut short unnecessarily because of his devotion to the project. Watching so-called liberals throwing in the Persil and laundering his reputation is pretty grim. Grim, but not unsurprising considering it didn't affect them.
There is a pattern of behaviour among the overlapping worlds of liberalism, centrism, and continuity remain. You might recall when Rory Stewart ran for London mayor, or the Tory MPs who resisted Johnson (and Theresa May) on Brexit. These people were hailed as heroes and, in some cases, talked about as if they were the "proper" opposition. And it's happened again. Since Owen Paterson resigned, liberals and centrists got very excited about the possibility of an anti-sleaze candidate for North Shropshire, especially when news broke about brief talks held between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Cue speculation about who could fit the bill. Our man Rory was there. As was John Bercow, Ken Clarke, David Gauke, Anna Soubry, a proper who's who of ... former Tories. Even the one celebrity who got thrown into the mix - Carol Vorderman(!) - has something of the right about her. Coincidence?
The Conservative Party is a structurally dishonest enterprise. Its job is to present the minority bourgeois interest as the universal interest, and has had a great deal of success doing so. From this flows all the other features we associate with the Tories. Its propensity to lie. The resort to scapegoating. Its habitual impulse to divide and rule. Given its record in office, you could be forgiven for thinking anyone following politics would conclude these efforts are the party's defining characteristics, not occasional quirks. And yet at times of political crisis, particularly recently, liberals and centrists gather up their search parties and start searching the woods for the Good Tory. What is it about their outlook that conditions this curious and seemingly bewildering behaviour?
Liberalism and centrism aren't just a body of ideas, they're a movement in wider society. A class movement. In the first place a current with impeccably bourgeois credentials, the destruction of the old Liberal Party - their proper home - after the First World War saw its political expression fold into the Tories and Labour, with a small rump leading a twilight existence. Occasionally as an independent third party, occasionally as an adjunct to the Conservatives. To cut a long story short, by the European Union referendum they were out of sorts. Theresa May assembled an impressive electoral coalition by appealing to - mostly - older voters on a nationalistic basis, with the Tory press recruiting voters on the basis of seeing off the traitors who would do Britain down. She pointed at the direction the Tories needed to travel to win big, and Johnson duly followed. Except he was fortunate enough to be faced by a divided opposition whereas May was not. Meanwhile in the Labour Party, during the Jeremy Corbyn interlude the liberals and the centrists were no longer pre-eminent and calling the shots. They were fighting for their political lives, even if it meant shredding the party and, in some cases, their own chances of re-election. For the first time in liberalism's existence, it was locked out of front rank political influence.
The result? Crisis. Most, hitching their bandwagon to Brexit and overturning the referendum result, used it to try and reassert their power. Some did so outside of parliament via mass mobilisations. The other track was within parliament, both in the inner party struggles in the two main parties, and by positioning the Liberal Democrats as the party of remain. We know what happened next. Johnson evicted his centrist-tinged wing, while years of wrecking topped off by converting Labour to the second referendum (not that, in the end, it had much choice) saw the party lose heavily. Keir Starmer won the subsequent leadership election, and the centrists and liberals were in the ascendency in the party again. But, ultimately, it's grasping this precarity, of not having an authentic home of one's own that underpins the position the Good Tory occupies in the liberal/centrist imaginary. It comes from, politically speaking, being a junior partner.
To reiterate, it's a bourgeois trend spread over the two big parties and the "dedicated" party of liberalism is a distant third in England. They are, or were, variously integrated, but exist in their hosts under sufferance. This anxiety gives liberalism a certain rootlessness, which manifests itself in the infamous liberal/centrist conceit of being free from "ideology" and viewing the political scene without the encumbrance of "tribalism" - in a manner akin to how the petit bourgeois misrecognises their structural location caught between the vice of capitalist and worker as being somehow above it all. With just this illusio as their star map to the political firmament, liberalism like/dislike politicians not on the basis of making people's lives harder (or for that matter, better), but on the feels. In other words, those who make their dominated/dominant position welcome, accepts their rules as the proper way of doing things, or gestures in their direction. This is affective politics, so if someone does something that aligns with their values, or appears to promise to return liberalism to an imagined pre-eminence, then these figures become objects of their affection. For example, it's how, simultaneously, the continuity remain elements of liberalism and centrism simultaneously adored Keir Starmer (until last December, anyway), and Michael Heseltine. It wasn't just their pro-EU credentials, but the appearance that they played by the rules of their politics illusio: constitutionalism, nice suits, estuary accents, and knowing better than the hoi polloi.
But why should this result in the Good Tory trope? Because, more often than not, when push has come to shove liberalism has lined up with the Tories. They did this between 2010 and 2019. And they did it in the 1930s to try and crush the Labour Party. There is form, and this preference lies in the class origins of the trend. Liberalism is a fundamentally bourgeois philosophy and sensibility because property is the root of individuality. Socialism is antithetical because it turns the claims of liberalism against its class basis. I.e. liberty consistently applied is the enemy of private ownership in the means of production, the real relation liberalism, like Toryism, defends. Any kind of social democracy, no matter how mild, threatens to open this question. The Good Tory then is how they wish to see the Tories, a projection of class instinct, and so are predisposed to seek these figures out. The hope is the Good Tory will come to recognise themselves in liberalism. After all, what they disagree on can be resolved by polite conversation: how to keep the capitalist show on the road. And this also helps explain the affected hate for Johnson's corrupt bunch: They gnash their collective teeth with the bitterness of a lover spurned.
Surveying politics in 2021, it's obvious the Tories don't need liberals and centrists. And for those who haven't drifted back into Labour or washed up in the LibDems, life outside is a back and forth between searching and praying for the Good Tory, undergoing repeat public breakdowns blaming the evil Jeremy Corbyn for their ills, and feting the European Union as if it's the shining city on the hill.
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