Politics on the Edge; The Abuse of Power; The Right to Rule: Tory shape-shifting and buck-passing

Over the past 13 years of Tory rule, the party has chaotically and destructively managed Britain’s exit from the European Union; sifted through five prime ministers; endured the paroxysm of madness under Liz Truss; been gripped by internecine warfare in the House of Commons; and shaken up its political identity countless times.

Now the party is cruising slowly towards the opposition benches. A well-adjusted system might find this record alarming – not least the turnover rate of leaders. David Cameron was felled for misjudging the depth of Eurosceptic sentiment in the country; Theresa May at the hands of the DUP and the Brexiteers in her own ranks; Boris Johnson ultimately buckled under the weight of repeated scandal; Truss was ousted for her dalliances with economic lunacy; and Rishi Sunak – well, who is to say what fate awaits him?

But the defining feature of this period – as suggested by the Telegraph’s political editor Ben Riley-Smith in his new book The Right To Rule – is the party’s willingness to sack its leaders, “alter its image, and retain power”. Killing off their own seems a feature, not a bug, of the Conservatives’ self-preservation.

May – who ultimately resigned after three failed attempts to get her Brexit deal past her own colleagues – is one such victim. Rory Stewart, once a prime ministerial hopeful, was expelled from the party by text while receiving GQ magazine’s Politician of the Year award. In their books, both attempt to diagnose this apparent sickness in the soul of the Conservative machine.

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May’s treatise on the state of modern Britain, The Abuse of Power, is well-intentioned but hard work. In it, she chronicles miserable episodes in the country’s recent history – hopping between the Hillsborough disaster, sex abuse scandals, Brexit and modern slavery. Those who run the country, she contends, too frequently put their personal interests before the greater good. She applies this rather banal logic to parliament: Labour, Speaker of the House John Bercow (whom she clearly loathes) and many on her own team wielded their power to disingenuously thwart her Brexit deal and harm the nation.

[ Rory Stewart interview: ‘I fought an existential fight against Boris Johnson, who is a terrible human being’ ]

The entire chapter reads as one long plea: if only my colleagues were more like me, then we wouldn’t be in such a mess! She makes this case with little concern for subtlety: “the institutions of the state, and those who work within them, put themselves first and the people they are here to serve second,” she says, later adding that “I came to see public service very much in terms of putting other people first and yourself second”.

In fact, much of The Abuse of Power is a similar exercise in self-styling as duty-bound, honest, fair, conscientious and co-operative. It is hard to leave the book without believing that at least some of this is a fair portrayal (though no one will leave the book with the impression that she is a wordsmith).

Stewart has a better handle on the art of subtext. Politics on the Edge is at once a gossipy memoir and a weighty critique. There is a crisis of seriousness in the Conservative party: an eschewal of expertise at the altar of political expediency, where blind loyalty is rewarded ahead of intellectual interrogation and principled public service. Stewart’s story is one of a broken system, packed to the rafters with ineffectual, rude charlatans who are at times cruel and at other times stupid. Many, he seems to believe, are at all times both.

When serving as a minister under Truss he recalls her requesting him to slash the budget of his department by 20 per cent. Stewart expressed natural consternation at such an ask, but Truss reassured him: “I have a mentor who is a very successful businessman who says all businesses can always be cut by 20 per cent.” So, when Stewart rattles off the innumerable social, moral and political failings of some colleagues he – more often than not – seems to have a perfectly legitimate case.

Both May and Stewart present themselves as noble critics of a sick system; among the few trying – but ultimately failing – to recapture their party from the barbarians. May’s repeated insistence that her Brexit deal really was the best one available, that nothing could match it, that the country failed itself by not ratifying it, speaks to this impulse.

Stewart’s account of his own crusade against a no-deal Brexit – leading him to eventually be ejected from the Conservatives – comes bearing a similar instinct to wallow in one’s doomed righteousness. Stewart now hosts the wildly popular podcast The Rest is Politics with former Labour spindoctor Alastair Campbell. He inspires fervent devotion from a particular brand of moderate – attracted to his eloquence and sanity. It is perhaps the most popular the man has ever been.

Within the party, Stewart was thought of as esoteric, self-righteous and entitled. Before even being selected as a candidate, Stewart alleges David Cameron described him as “exactly the kind of person we don’t want in parliament”. The feeling is mutual. Stewart sees Cameron as the ultimate establishment insider, with an “undergraduate” grasp of the issues, locking out those who question his whims and ideas. To Stewart’s apparent horror, Cameron preferred to fast-track a coterie of loyalists through the ranks of the party rather than those with good judgment or a track record of running departments well.

Stewart, it seems, was confused that this roster of “the uncurious, uncritical, inept” were selected to build the modern Conservative Party instead of, erm, him. It is hard not to read into the thinly veiled subtext that the worst thing about Cameron is not his politics or his management style, nor his elevation of Liz Truss, but that he held little affection for Rory.

Because who couldn’t promote a man like Stewart? He had walked across Afghanistan, wrote a book about it, he was a lecturer at Harvard, he governed a region of Iraq. Stewart saw a job in the foreign office or ministry of defence as a natural fit for a man with such a decorated CV. But it wouldn’t be until 2015 that Stewart would receive a job – as a low-ranking minister at the department for environment, food and rural affairs. How could Stewart end up there when a man like Philip Hammond – “who had no previous interest in defence or foreign affairs, had never even visited Afghanistan” – was elevated to secretary of state for defence? A party that can’t put Stewart in the ministry of defence but can put Truss in Number 10 shocks the sensibilities of the moderate centre.

And a party that seeks to take down May rather than endorse her apparently ingenious Brexit deal completely confounds those who self-style as cool-headed rationalists. In short, the problem – as diagnosed by May and Stewart – is not in fact anything to do with the institutional “abuse of power” or the systematic eschewal of expertise. No, their problem is that the Conservative party does not specifically reward people like them.

It is a common theme. “The failure to get my deal through the House of Commons ... was due in large part to the misuse of power,” May claims before launching into an attack on Bercow, her colleagues and Labour. It is maddening to read a list of those who “abused their power” to scupper May’s deal without any suggestion that the votes never came her way thanks to her limitations as a politician.

Long passages in this chapter advocate for all the merits of the agreement – its sensitivity to Ireland, its best-of-both-worlds problem-solving. I find it convincing now as I found it convincing then. But her abject failure to interrogate, deeply, why Remainers and Leavers alike didn’t see promise in her arrangement is telling. She thinks they crashed her deal just “because they could” without considering that anyone might have good reason to.

This is a rather common proclivity among Conservatives – blaming on your boots the faults of your feet. Brexiteers, for example, spent years suggesting the European Union and Leo Varadkar were frustrating the passage of Brexit. Truss, who resigned 45 days into her tenure, said she was never given a “realistic chance” to implement her tax-cutting agenda. Jake Berry, former party chairman, said the Conservatives were held back by “the blob”.

The prevailing assumption at every turn is that it was always someone else’s fault. That soul-searching is a needless pursuit. It seems May is not immune from this very Tory trait. And now the outlook is bleak. As with its high turnover of leaders, the Conservative party has been stuck in a relentless cycle of ideological pinball. The pro-business reforming Conservative party of the Cameron era is gone; under Johnson, it became the Brexit Party in all but name. Whatever buccaneering, low-tax, high-growth vision Truss had for Britain was a far cry from the cautious and parochial styling of May.

In The Right to Rule, Riley Smith suggests that though such consistent upheaval may have kept the Tories alive for now, it is unlikely to work forever. “Shape-shifting to sustain power is not without its downsides” he concludes. For those who admire The Rest is Politics and the principles of expertise and political moderation, Politics on the Edge will be a prejudice-affirming read. Stewart is funny and self-aware and he can write. Plenty will pick it up and feel reasonable anger at the charlatans at the helm who took down May and never gave Stewart a chance.

But we will wake up the next morning and Stewart still won’t be in power. And May’s ever-so-sensible deal will still not be the terms on which the United Kingdom left the European Union. Finger-pointing and hand-wringing are well and good. But as May and Stewart have learned, the job of politics extends beyond the basic principles of being a decent person and terribly knowledgeable about Afghanistan: you actually have to know how to win. After 13 years and five prime ministers and with an election looming, perhaps the Conservative Party has forgotten the art.