This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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A decade into its rule and still fully protected by an invincible parliamentary majority and undented moral self-righteousness, what might the Labour government look and feel like? Let us imagine its tenor through those it might honour.

Take the senior policeman, whose many other virtues notwithstanding, “also plays a central role in delivering the Police Race Action Plan to ensure there is more diverse leadership across the service”. 

Starmer is liberalism pure and simple, shorn entirely of socialism and the concerns of labour

Or the doyen of university admissions who “is committed to helping students from diverse backgrounds [and] supports previously marginalised student groups, care leavers, LGBTQ+ individuals, those with disabilities, and others facing mental health challenges”. 

Or the future City of London bureaucrat, who “has influenced quoted companies to embrace NetZero targets and the wider ESG agenda and under her leadership, the LSE is now the leading provider of green and transition finance. 

She is a pioneer for women and the LGBTQ+ community in financial services, fostering diversity and inclusion in finance and championing initiatives to create more inclusive work environments.”

Except, of course, all this is real. It’s from this June’s King’s Birthday Honours list at the culmination of 14 years of Conservative government. The expansive prose used has broken free from the opaque, undemonstrative language formerly employed in official communications issued on the Crown’s behalf. 

Here, in its place, are the assumptions and aspirations of Britain’s civil service, nodded through by Tory ministers. This is what is good, these are the principles that guide us. Sir Keir Starmer will not change this; he will embody it.

It is entirely wrong to characterise Starmer’s Labour as being “progressive illiberalism”, for Starmer is liberalism pure and simple, shorn entirely of socialism and the concerns of labour. There won’t be the money to try socialism; they’re not proposing to; but they will continue the dreadful work of the government they have defeated.

Normally when a party sweeps back to power in the British political system, all the windy talk is about how the winners have “accepted” the best policies of those they’ve defeated. That Thatcher’s “greatest achievement” was Blair’s New Labour, that the Tory modernisers of Cameron, Osborne and Gove were the (true) “heirs to Blair”. 

Of course they must have been, for how else would they have won, save by sensibly tacking back to the centre they must have abandoned in order to lose power?

Or so runs the smug assumption. But this time the truth is stark and undeniable: far from being converted to the beliefs of Rishi Sunak’s Tories (and thus making themselves fit and moderate for office), the opposition party winning back power in 2024 simply realigns the politics of the country’s nominal masters with those of its actual rulers. And those are the judges.

Modern Britain is the creation of its worst prime minister, John Major. As his government dissolved in sleaze, and as pure short-term expedience tried to dodge one more shabby scandal, Major turned to the cranky Catholic jurist Michael Nolan, who presided over a committee of the bland and prejudiced to establish the “Nolan principles” for public life. These are now the DNA of the modern British state. 

This is the framework the 14 years of Conservative government entirely failed to challenge

They reach their absurdity in such nonsense as another learned KC, this time an Oxbridge head of house to boot, muttering to himself in book-length form such madnesses as — and how we wish we were making this up — Boris Johnson failing to appoint someone the blob wanted to chair a quango was “probably unlawful” (not least because this excellent chap “had an impressive CV and good background”). 

This is the framework the 14 years of Conservative government entirely failed to challenge. Not least as basic patronage: Ken Clarke, Michael Gove and Liz Truss, different as they are, all had in common their complete inability as Tory justice secretaries to appoint judges that liberals might dislike.

Hand in hand with Nolanisation is such self-serving civil service presumption as the cabinet manual (the product of Britain’s worst cabinet secretary, bar the current incumbent). It unilaterally purports to codify that which is merely conventional, all prior to inevitably placing Mandarin fantasies at the service of interventionist judges. 

They make up what they would like to be true, without any of the inconvenience of publicly legislating it as a fact, then wait for the courts to make it so.

None of this will be changed by Starmer. Why would it be? This is the system for which he honestly and sincerely stands. 

But how did this come to pass? What want of Tory honesty and sincerity made it so? It has been because Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Sunak, and, yes, Johnson and so many others wanted it so.

Toryism has not happened for the last 14 years because it was impossible or because it was defeated, but because the people leading the Tory party did not want to do it. They might mouth its platitudes, not least at election time, but the Conservative Party has been led by orthodox and bigoted liberals every bit as much as the Labour Party now is.

Primarily this has been the fault of Tory modernisers, whose failure in Rishi Sunak is now total, if not terminal. It failed as a campaigning technique to secure an outright majority against Gordon Brown in 2010 and proved unsustainable without Brexit thereafter. 

Its infamous chumocracy selection of candidates has left a retardataire cohort of MPs picked for (unsuccessful) marketing purposes, demonstrably incapable of providing a slate of even moderately competent ministers. 

The leaving of the EU which these politicians did not want, and most of them sought to frustrate once the people surprised them with it, has been mulishly squandered. Real effort and determination was made, even to the brink, under the supremely incapable Theresa May, of almost prematurely destroying the party. 

Luck as much as anything else saw them gain a leader obliged to once again campaign for the sort of Brexit no one should imagine Boris Johnson ever truly sought, still less expected. 

Then came Sunak — the man who failed to beat Liz Truss but nevertheless ended up prime minister. Peevish, entitled, cloth-eared and cheered on by the most pompous bores in the country. 

The Tories offered incompetent managerial liberalism in an age too cold for its comforting delusions

Beloved as a “grown-up” by The Times, Sunak, from the groomed start to the catastrophically inept end of his political career, has been indulged where others would have been hysterically denounced by those who ululated over him.

A Chancellor, who wanted to be PM, whose wife was a non-dom and held onto a foreign state’s residency permit? Let us not be coy: Sunak benefitted here from an indulgence which would not have been given to any previous occupant of that office, still less one with, say, Russian oligarchical in-laws. 

His political career, which started at that forging house of Tory self-harm, Policy Exchange, should never have taken off, but it’s too late now to cry about that.

We are now at the point of myth, and the central one offered to us is Thatcher-in-opposition. This, apparently, is how the Tories should get out of the mess they have got themselves into. They should do what she is supposed to have done. 

There should be thinking, and think tanks, and thinkers, and beliefs, and coherence. This, to quote the great Tory thinker Maurice Cowling, is balls. As what there should be now in opposition is what there ought to have been in office: bloodiness.

According to George Osborne, a pettish John Major told him soon after the 1997 election, when Major had brought the party to the brink of ruin, “We will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party.”

This Major said in private to account for his defeat. It was not his fault, but that of the mysterious “hard right” (who weren’t in his cabinet and whose prescriptions it didn’t follow). 

Not one of his successors led the party from anything close to its “hard right” either. Nor can anyone honestly claim Cameron, May, the Johnson who governed and Sunak were “hard right”. This is a lot of historical weight to place on the 45 days of Truss and the leadership campaign of Iain Duncan Smith. As lies go, it is an insultingly transparent one.

It is obvious why the guilty men wish to avoid responsibility for what they have done. It is less clear why anyone right-wing should extend this indulgence to them. The legacy of the 1997 left was no more unpicked by the 2010–24 Tories than that of the 1945 left was by the 1951–64 Conservative government. 

In many ways, thanks especially to expansive judicial conceit and the lingering ravages of our immersion in a European legal order, the 2010 Equality Act that the Tories refused to change, allied to the Human Rights Act, will provide yet more solid bedrock for the premises of the left than the NHS and BBC have been. 

To these, Labour will now add a Racial Equality Act and finally implement the socioeconomic rubric of their Equality Act. What will the Tory party offer in response to this? Nothing save capitulation and collaboration, unless they finally reject the language of the left.

The Tories offered incompetent managerial liberalism in an age too cold for its comforting delusions. They were saved at the start by the prosperity that China appeared to gift the world, then by a Brexit most of them hated. 

Nothing will save them now, save finally disagreeing with everything they have done in office.