It’s Time for a Conservative and Unionist and Reformist Party

The old joke about Reform is that it is Nigel Farage and an iPhone. The press – even the Spectator – seems to be determined to weaken Reform, or disparage it, and so, as happily as the Guardian, runs for stories that suggest that the party is still Farage and his phone and a lot of wheeler-dealers. A habit of anti-Establishment freedom-of-speech in the Reform way-of-talking plays into this. But it is obviously a colossal mistake that Orr and Jukes were caught out in chicanery or, at least, offstage worderies. One can blame the dubious (and dubiously funded) Centre for Climate Reporting, which is as reprehensible an outfit, I am supposing, as, say, the also dubiously-funded Global Disinformation Index. But pots and kettles, since it seems that Reform is also a bit dubiously funded too. It is odd that Orr is caught up in this, as a man of Cambridge and a man of Divinity. But there it is.

I have listened to Gove talking to Kruger, and I have read the Shipman-Heale piece in last week’s Spectator in which we hear something of Tice’s suggestions, and I have to say that I like what I hear. They sound very serious. Tice says things that are very sound about the demoralisation of towns, and has suggestions about how Reform will turn the towns around, with reduced business rates, demolition and rebuilding in centres, etc; while Kruger said extremely robust things not only about the 100 days executive-order bureaucratic-defenestration but also, specifically, about how the appointment of judges should be restored to Government, and also implied that the appointment of bishops should also be restored to Government, as if the existence of the Judicial Appointments Commission and the Crown Nominations Commission ought to be nullified. It has only recently become clear that the Blairite-Brownite desire to farm out decisions about appointments to, ha, ha, independent bodies only served to establish grotesquely one-sided cliques and cabals: almost always the appointments in the last 20 years have been of Establishment Blairites, or, if you prefer, Cleggites. Kruger said to Gove that Badenoch and the Tories are simply engaging in Kaa’s “Trust in me” politics: making a few tweaks here and there to policy without seeing that great and grave change is required. And, anyhow, as someone has said somewhere, the Tories are nine tenths LibDems of the Cleggite variety nowadays.

The point here, so everyone can understand it, is that Reform’s ‘politicised’ appointments – as everyone calls them – are necessary to undermine and reverse the silent politicisation of almost all appointments in the last generation. It sounds like a contradiction. But it is a necessity. This sort of thing is necessary, and Reform, as well as Restore, have said so. The Conservatives, tied to the recent past, cannot entirely say so, and are not saying so. For this would be to compound their collective culpability.

Here is a suggestion about what should happen.

There is form and there is content. I think Reform brings to any coalition or alliance content. There is no question of that. It is not necessarily even in the policies suggested, but in the will to have such policies. Though these policies are good and should matter. But what the Conservatives can still bring is form. And by ‘form’ I mean, specifically, or politically, a sort of dignity that Reform lacks and is likely to lack in the short term. This dignity is not the dignity of Hague or Howard or Cameron or Johnson or anyone else: they were all a bit undignified. And that is before we get to more scandalous figures. The dignity, on the contrary, is a historical dignity: the dignity of not so much a tradition (the Tories barely have a tradition) but a history. The Tories do have a history that includes Bolingbroke, Burke by adoption (over, or after, his dead body: let us remind everyone that Burke was a Whig), Peel, Disraeli and Salisbury, perhaps also Baldwin, and, unsteadily, Churchill – though let’s leave Churchill to one side, as an unreliable Cleggite LibDem sort of figure. This is a history with a lot of dignity: the dignity of memory, of statue, or literature: Patriot King, Reflection on the Revolution in France, Vindication of the English Constitution, The Tamworth Manifesto, the Salisbury articles collected in the 1960s and published by Cambridge University Press. To which we should add, perhaps, Maurice Cowling’s Conservative Essays, and of course Enoch Powell’s speeches, variable as they are: but all expressing, especially in Powell and Disraeli, the view that conservatism is English and England is conservative.

It is this that the Conservative party could bring to an alliance or coalition: dignity, history, deep conviction, or, if one prefers, deep as opposed to shallow lack of conviction. But I am being too cynical: it could bring dignity and history. But since the Conservatives are, in the present, a lost cause, corrupted by at least 16 years of mistakes, and quite possibly a lot more years than that of mistakes, they should hand the restorative baton over to Reform, especially Reform on its policy side. Shipman has suggested that Reform has a problem with character. A party takes its character from its leadership. Well, no. That is not how Campbell thinks of Labour. It is evidently not the way Burnham thinks of it either: Burnham plays into the history of the Labour party. But it is the only way we can think of Reform, since Reform is by and large in the public mind not much more than the character of Farage. So what Farage and Reform need is dignity and history, and this the Conservative party is in a great position to give them.

So all hail the Conservative and Unionist and Reformist party. This party may be led by Farage, but it has to be such that it can survive the destruction or displacement of Farage. And Farage has to be willing to agree to this, and the Conservatives have to be willing to agree that they will not subvert Farage. He will be a sort of Lloyd-George-in-War figure for them. Eventually he will be displaced, and there will not be more Farages. Instead there will be Jenricks and Badenochs and all the rest. But the ship has to be turned about, and it cannot be turned about without an anchor figure, and that anchor figure, for better or worse, is Farage. Kruger understands this, and has lent his own dignity to it. Now the Conservative party has to lend its own dignity to it. There is a certain risk in this, as Farage is, or has, an inevitably rackety character, but the risk has to be taken.

If you doubt the soundness of this suggestion, consider this. Trump was only able to dominate American politics because he commandeered the historic and dignified Republican party.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.