Back in the halcyon days of the coalition in 2010, Nick Boles was one of a handful of Tory MPs to call for an electoral pact between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. At the time this was seen as an ingenious means of detoxifying the Tories’ brand and of permanently realigning British politics in the centre-right’s favour.
But as Boles explained in a speech to the liberal conservative group Bright Blue this lunchtime, he no longer supports the idea. The Tory moderniser cited two reasons for this. First, that he had “misjudged” the Lib Dems, whose instincts remain left-wing and “statist”. In reference to Nick Clegg’s recent attack on Michael Gove’s “ideological” free school reforms, he accused Clegg of “a desperate attempt to position himself for coalition with a deeply illiberal Labour Party after the next election – and render himself a principle-free zone in the process. ” Second, that he had “miscalculated” how the Tories would respond to coalition. Rather than moderating their ideological fixations, too many in the party had played up to the Lib Dem and media caricature of the party as “heartless extremists”.
The conclusion the planning minister drew was that “we [the Tories] must be our own liberals; we cannot rely on anyone else to do it for us. Trying to outsource liberalism from another party not only does not work; it risks reversing the fragile gains of modernisation.” Now, rather than calling for the creation of a new pact, Boles is calling for the revival of an old one. In 1947, the National Liberal Party (formerly the Liberal National faction of the Liberal Party) merged with the Conservative Party at constituency level and maintained a separate national identity until it was fully incorporated in 1968.
Boles suggested that the Tories should now consider reviving the National Liberal Party, “or something like it”, as an affiliate of the Conservatives, and standing joint candidates. He compared the proposed relationship to that between Labour and the Co-Operative Party, which does not run candidates separately from Labour and to which which 32 MPs belong. He added: “Existing MPs, councillors, candidates and party members of liberal views would be encouraged to join. And we could use it to recruit new supporters who might initially balk at the idea of calling themselves Conservative.In three-way marginals and the key target seats that we have to take off the Liberal Democrats, an explicit National Liberal pitch might make the difference between victory and defeat.”
To me, this seems at best a distraction from the primary task of detoxifying the Tory brand. But unlike so many in his party, Boles is at least asking the right questions about how to widen the party’s appeal.
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