Badenoch understands the importance of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as Reform would risk. Those trotting along on their ideological ponies, tilting at windmills, need to have a word with themselves. The post George Trefgarne: Time for critics to stop tilting at Tory windmills – Badenoch understands conservatism appeared first on Conservative Home.
George Trefgarne is the former Economics Editor, and Comment Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
The defection of Robert Jenrick has exposed an entire class of online political activists on the Right who have been turning their fire on Kemi Badenoch. What they have in common is that they are tilting at windmills inside their own heads. They are tilting at a notion of Kemi Badenoch or conservatism which does not, in fact, exist.
Contrary to what some of them say, Kemi is her own person, a classic market-oriented conservative. From a British perspective, she had an unusual upbringing in Nigeria as it descended into socialism. She moved to this country 16 years later and via a combination of patriotic affection and hard work adopted it as her own because Nigeria was falling apart. Understanding her childhood and early adulthood is important. Putting her leadership into a stereotypical lexicon of “culture warrior” or “a Wet takeover” or “surrounded by Lib Dems” or “embodies the centrist graveyard” as some do, defies empirical observation.
I put this misreading of Kemi Conservatism down to the trauma of the last decade.
As a nation, a majority of voters conjured up Brexit as a force for national renewal, only for it to result in the opposite: the degradation of our culture and institutions, out-of-control migration, rising taxes and public expenditure, and the highest energy prices in the world. All culminating in a crushing, deserved Conservative defeat at the 2024 General Election. Lord Frost’s Brexit agreement is fine, but the Brexit settlement, the policy choices which followed next, was disastrous. People think she agrees with this settlement, when emphatically she does not and has said so repeatedly.
Ministers and their advisers of that era may enter substantial pleas in mitigation, such as Covid, or its predecessor, the ‘Woke Mind Virus’, or the Ukraine war, but fundamentally this was a failure of strategy, of philosophy and practice.
So let us think rationally, starting with observation and then the application of first principles.
Kemi Badenoch is currently on track to be the most popular politician in Britain, in the sense of being the most approved of. Get used to it. The Times average approval rating poll shows a clear trend that she has recently overtaken Nigel Farage and is now at minus 9 per cent, compared to his minus 15 per cent. Zack Polanski and Ed Davey are only narrowly ahead at minus 8 per cent. But her trajectory is upwards from minus 26 per cent six months ago.
In other words, actual voters are starting, hesitantly, to like her as she learns on her feet. Millions of them. What they do have is a problem with the Conservative Party and its legacy, hence the understandable attraction of Reform. Reform is right to draw attention to many of the problems we face.
Why is she growing in stature?
Well, we can hazard some guesses. Kemi is personally different. She doesn’t fit into those stereotypical buckets, which commentators and pollsters like to concoct. She knows her own mind, is tough, intelligent and a family person. She is getting better at her job each week. She is a woman surrounded in Parliament by crowds of men. Some collegiality and humour is beginning to come across. Finally, let us not beat about the bush: she is a new Thatcher just when this country needs one. Lagos is the new Grantham.
Now let us look apply first principles. It becomes immediately obvious that the root cause of the colossal failures of the last few years was a departure from conservative principles. Kemi is right about that.
The Conservative Party is based on, um, er, conservatism. This is not an ideology, but an attitude, a method of practical thinking based on a series of common-sense insights derived from experience. The most important insight is that in life it is best to nurture what works and fix what is broken.
In the founding Tamworth Manifesto, Robert Peel said in 1835 that the purpose of conservative government is to conduct “a careful review of institutions…. undertaken in a friendly temper combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances”. Nurture what works, fix what is broken.
Why do that? Well, partly out of a deep, patriotic affection for the country and our fellow citizens; partly because it is a philosophy which has been proven to work in life; but also because it is politically successful. As Peel put it, conservatism appeals to “that great and intelligent class of society…. that class which is much less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government.” There are lots of people like that.
But the biggest reason? For most people, politics is a secondary, subservient activity to honest everyday life, including work, wealth, society and creativity. The simplest Tories prefer fox hunting, the wisest religion, as Lord Hailsham once joked. Those on both the Right or Left who are obsessed with political intrigue and social media are, frankly, a bit odd.
Failures like Net Zero or the post-Brexit immigration system or rampant public spending are not only failures in their own terms, they are failures of principle, which, worst of all, have resulted in abominable interventions in everyday lives.
Ideologies, like nationalism, are fixed and are not conservative. To a conservative, there is no tension between ideas and competence because, in the end, being competent is about having the right motives and a proper understanding of people, culture, systems and markets. Kemi gets this. The majority of people involved in politics in the last decade, of all parties, sadly did not. Labour still does not. The gods drove them mad.
Having established the right philosophical principles, let us ask what we are trying to conserve? According to the “Britain is broken” mob: nothing. There is apparently nothing of value left in our country. Everything should be burnt down and the rubble should all be tipped into the sea. This is not only empirically incorrect it is a revolutionary doctrine, and one born of hysteria. It has failure built in, ab initio.
There is plenty which should be conserved.
The landscape, the ancient buildings, , private property, those unexamined lives, the hard-working wheel-spinners in our market economy. What Adam Smith called in the Wealth of Nations “the commercial society”. Our sovereignty, not just of the nation but also its roots in the rights of enlightened, sovereign individuals. These rights are liable to be overrun by the revolutionaries in Reform because their view is fundamentally collective, finding its strength in direct, not Parliamentary, democracy. Reform is not a conservative party; it is a revolutionary one.
Here is the irony: a functioning market economy, a liberal one if you will, is based on pre-Liberal institutions: our mixed constitution, the King in Parliament. The Established Church founded explicitly to see off all the revolutionaries: the Puritans, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchists, the Divine Right of Kings advocates, the whole rabble who cannot accept that, as the Prayer Book puts it, most people want to be “Godly, and quietly governed.” A religious settlement with a core but also tolerant of dissent and other moderate religions.
I can think of countless other things in Britain which are worth conserving and work. They are not broken (although they might need some urgent maintenance). The Brigade of Guards. Tesco. Next. The surprisingly-efficient Passport Office. Academies. Independent schools. Harry Styles. Rolls-Royce. Our university research ecosystem. Jeremy Clarkson. The City of London. Local curry houses. The Elizabeth Line. Newcastle’s Lit & Phil. The resurgence of shipbuilding on the Clyde. The Manchester Ship Canal. Choral evensong. The Premier League. Times Radio. Wimbledon. Cricket. Rugby. The Lionesses. The brilliant NHS App. The English Language. The list goes on…
We want to conserve these things not only because they have inherent value, but because Edmund Burke was right when he explained that society is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. We want to hand them on to the next generation.
Which leads us to another first principle. Conservatives believe in the rule of law. And not just any old law. Our law. Parliament and the Common Law. The Common Law has an excellent principle called the rebuttable presumption. Which is to say in most circumstances we presume something, like killing people is wrong. But that can be rebutted in specific conditions, e.g., self-defence.
When Stanley Baldwin stepped down as Prime Minister in 1937, he gave a valedictory, broadcast by the BBC. “Let me proclaim my faith, which is the faith of millions,” he said.
“And what is her secret? Freedom, ordered freedom, within the law, with force in the background and not in the foreground: a society in which authority and freedom are blended in due proportion, in which state and citizen are both ends and means. It is an empire organised for peace and for the free development of the individual in and through an infinite variety of voluntary associations. It neither deifies the state nor its rulers.”
You get the picture. But those who try and paint Reform as the real conservatives, such as Danny Kruger, James Orr and even Robert Jenrick, are deluding themselves as much as trying to deceive the rest of us. For them, Britain is just a place with borders, not an idea, still less a set of institutions and associations.
In most circumstances conservatives eschew radicalism, but that presumption can be rebutted. Reform and its thinkers are right that now is a time for radicalism. But rather than a revolution, which conserves nothing, it is a time “to correct proven abuses”, for a targeted radicalism in addressing the deep-seated problems in the way the British state, our institutions and our economy are managed and operated. Some social reform, for example in care for children and the elderly, would also be appreciated. Reform is right that there is a great long, serious list of mistakes and omissions which the Conservative Party must atone for before they can be fixed. Starting with Net Zero and the small boats crossing the Channel.
We have been here when radical reform was urgently required before: in 1979, 1945, 1846 and 1815. Kemi gets this too. But she also understands the importance of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as Reform would risk. Those trotting along on their ideological ponies, tilting at windmills, need to have a word with themselves.
When Don Quixote famously ignored his squire and charged at the turning windmills because he had convinced himself that they were actually giants he should slay, he found himself lying on the ground, lance broken, with his horse lying on top of him.
Let’s not end up like that.
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