Why the Tory party is breaking apart

I don’t, I freely admit, remember all that much about my chemistry lessons at school. Covalent bonding delighted me not, no, nor moles neither. But I do recall being absolutely thrilled the first time I saw paper chromatography. The idea was – I expect I’m getting this slightly wrong, but don’t write in – that you’d take some murky liquid that was a solution of all sorts of this that and the other, and you’d dab it on a bit of blotting paper, which would then be stood in a basin of some solvent…  

As the solvent soaked up into the blotting paper, it would carry the different substances in the original solution further up the paper with it to different degrees. You’d be able to watch as your original blob smeared out into a rainbow of constituent parts. And if you were good at chemistry, I expect, and could remember what a mole was, you could even identify all these constituent parts. 

We are now recreating the basic thrill of paper chromatography with the Conservative and Unionist party. The great strength of the Tory party has always been its ability to mix a whole range of different inclinations and opinions and tendencies in the interests of getting and maintaining power.

Its Burkeans and its Friedmanites, its imperial preferencers and its free traders, the Thatcherites and the wets, the hoodie-huggers and the bring-back-the-birchers… they have all, when times are good, jostled along just well enough to present a plausibly united front to the electorate. One nation, big tent, broad church: that sort of thing. Not like the fissiparous People’s Front of Judea gang on the other side of the House.    

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But now (the solvent being panic at the prospect of going into an election with Keir Starmer – Keir Starmer! – having an unshakeable double-digit poll lead) the whole party is coming out of solution and spreading out into its constituent parts. Look here, racing up the blotting paper, you have the neoliberal ultras of the PopCons. And this blot, here: why, it’s the social conservatives, aka the NatCons. And there’s that crusty bit of contaminant, which is the Reform or Reform-adjacent. And this very faint, spreading stain of the sort that might have you dabbing furtively at your chinos with a napkin? That’s whatever Rishi Sunak and the mainstream of the party stands for. 

It’s possible that I’ve taken this metaphor as far up the blotting paper as capillary action, so to speak, will carry it. The point I make is: all this splitting, all this factional baring-of-the-differences, seems to me the sign of a party that has gone clean off its rocker. Traditionally, the thing to do is to lose the election first and then conduct the vicious civil war. But when the favourite to be next leader has to go on the record to deny that she’s a member of a WhatsApp group called Evil Plotters, you don’t have to be a seasoned Westminster rune-reader to think that there might be a problem.  

At its most confident, Conservatism has always been able to say, with Walt Whitman: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large. I contain multitudes.)’ At its least confident, it snarls that one faction or another is a betrayal of true Conservatism. And, boy oh boy, here we are. I don’t think this is just electoral panic and lack of personal discipline, either. That may have precipitated this gaudy bout of splitting and spitting. But the problems are structural, and they are generational. 

A key snag was well articulated yesterday by the ever reasonable Michael Gove. The ‘property-owning democracy’ has always been a core Tory offering. But in an interview with the Sunday Times, he said candidly that ‘it’s a barrier to people feeling that democracy and capitalism are working for them’ if there’s no hope of them getting on the housing ladder: in other words, Generation Rent isn’t going to be voting Tory. He has all sorts of wholly admirable ideas about how to make that generation feel like it has more of a stake – banning no-fault evictions, reforming the rent-seeking excesses of leaseholds, stamp duty reforms, mortgage guarantee schemes for first time buyers and whatnot.   

What he didn’t say explicitly, though, is that a very baked-in component of his own party’s core support is exactly those people who are most invested in property prices going up, who are likely to be keener than otherwise on no-fault evictions, and who will tend to resist the building of new houses. The whole appeal of the ‘property ladder’ is that prices go up. It’s hard to bang the drum for laissez-faire for half a century or so, to celebrate the way property as a store of value rewards those lucky enough to own it, and then to hope somehow to square the circle by intervening in the free market on behalf of the have-nots. 

It has always been an odd paradox. Mostly, we like the idea that the brisk discipline of market competition serves consumers by making goods cheaper. But when it comes to one of the most important goods of all – a place to live – we seem to take exactly the opposite view: the more expensive the better. This was sustainable, until it wasn’t.    

For a while, the electoral calculus just about held. Enough people, generation by generation, had the hope of getting on the ladder. You could somehow be on the side of the aspiring homeowner, the established homeowner and the landlord alike. But the free market has done its thing (not least thanks to the influx of foreign money that we so welcomed), the free enterprise of buy-to-let landlords has compounded that thing, and now the electoral calculus doesn’t work anymore: you can try to please the under forties or you can try to please the over-sixties, but you’re really going to struggle to do both.  

Is it any wonder, then, that the big idea now being floated is to bring back Boris? If your party faces being wiped out because it can’t make a choice between having a cake and eating it, why not bring back the king of cakeism? The cake’s going to taste a lot like blotting paper, though.