Earlier this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Remaking Conservatism conference in London. The event was organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank created by Margaret Thatcher 50 years ago, a time when conservatism was also in the process of being remade. I am told the mood among conservatives then was as dour then as it is today. Britain, then as now, seemed doomed to fail, and, to the dismay of the Conservative Party, voters opted to hand Labour the task of managing decline.
Speaking at a different panel, the historian Niall Ferguson argued at one point that British Conservatives have to emulate the anarcho-capitalist Argentine president Javier Milei: break the back of the bureaucratic state and unleash the forces of market capitalism. George Osborne, sitting next to Ferguson, demurred politely that perhaps there are some differences between Britain and Argentina, to which the historian replied, with much enthusiasm, that “we are now much closer to Argentina than to America”. The audience applauded.
Kemi Badenoch closed the conference. At dinner I told one of my table companions that I feared I would very quickly forget the substance of her address but that I liked her stage presence and how she delivered the speech. Those fears proved well founded; the next day I could only recall her odd admonition that Nigeria illustrates the evils of socialism. More Argentina, less Nigeria. The Tories have the rudiments of a platform.
For my own speech, I opted to argue that conservatism is dead. I dropped a lot of conservative names to make sure no one thought I had entered the wrong building by mistake: William F Buckley, James Baker, Ronald Reagan, the Iron Lady herself. A giant statue of William Pitt the Younger stood to my left, but I missed the hint and forgot to quote the inventor of “new Toryism”.
But how about today’s conservatives? There we seem to have a problem because the people who have taken the place of these august personages more often sound like Maoists or Leninists. In the US, Elon Musk has taken over the state in a sweeping coup and is now more or less randomly smashing institutions, the symbols of the old order. The “four olds”, Mao would say, as his Red Guard set upon destroying ideas, culture, customs and habits. Donald Trump loves Russia and the reason, it seems, is that there is a long-standing taboo against that most dangerous of liaisons and he wants to break it.
If conservatism stands for order, what to say of Gaza, where conservative politicians and intellectuals have celebrated a policy of wanton destruction in the name of one or another messianic vision? I asked my audience: “Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I was under the impression that destruction for the sake of destruction, or destruction in the name of building a brave new world, is exactly what we conservatives stand against?” I would like to say that at this point the large audience at Guildhall in the City erupted in loud, spontaneous applause. In reality, half a dozen people discreetly nodded or arched their eyebrows as if intrigued.
Am I a conservative? I like to say there is no need for one to be singularly and uniquely a conservative. After all, we all seem to think there is a place in a good society for conservative, liberal, socialist and anarchist ideas. So why not in our own thoughts and beliefs? Do we really have to be less interesting, varied and colourful than the society around us? Why not try to combine the best of all political ideas?
I do believe in some conservative principles. The idea of order is a valuable one because it expands the mind. It forces us to step outside our own perspective, to look for balance and impartiality in a broader horizon where others have their place too. But conservatives today seem to represent the very opposite of this: over order they prefer conflict, convinced that the world is a permanent battlefield between good and evil. Can they build anything lasting? I doubt they can. But to repeat myself, what is conservative about destruction?
The conference devoted some time to a number of tactical points on how to deal with Reform or how to reassure voters that nothing like the Liz Truss farce will ever happen again. But in the end conservatism, as a political idea, faces an existential crisis that no tactics can address. The main issue is that there seems to be no order worth preserving.
The reason so many conservatives have suddenly turned into revolutionaries is that they were never conservatives to begin with. What they loved was not order but the specific elements of the existing order: they loved a world order in which Western societies stood at the top of the political and economic pyramid, and where Western culture remained dominant. They loved the old fossil fuel economy because they knew how to run it. Once these elements of the old world eroded or disappeared, they turned into political fantasists determined to bring them back by whatever means necessary.
If you want to pinpoint the change, think of the moment when Donald Trump decided to say that America was no longer great but had to be made great. As I write this, I suddenly recall one more sentence from Badenoch’s speech: “Make Britain great again.” To my relative surprise, Trump remains popular among the Tory rank and file. Less surprising: there was not a lot of talk about Ukraine, where all of these contradictions are most visible. Most would feel very at home in Reform.
We live between orders, and in the interregnum: what is there to conserve? There is only movement, death and birth, depending where we look. The old conservatism is dead and the new one awaits to be born.
[See also: The Gaza breakdown]
Content from our partners
