And so, our day is over. As Churchill said of Curzon, “The morning was golden, the midday bronze and the evening lead.”

I spent election night “babysitting” a Red Wall MP, outwardly preparing them for the worst but inwardly hoping for a miracle, frantically trying to decipher discrepancies between the exit poll projections and results to see if we needed to prepare an acceptance or a concession speech.

It was a difficult watch; not just for the cycle between abject despair and forlorn hope, accompanied by the grimmest of gallows humour, but because the coverage was so poor. We were tuned into Sky, but the consensus across the channels seems to be the same; election coverage was generally very poor. There was staggeringly little statistical analysis, as producer’s instincts seemed to be to flip to the pundits for Low Namierist nattering as soon as possible. The Podcastisation of political coverage is almost complete.

In between the information we actually wanted, we were subjected to a stream of commentators asserting that this was an effect of the Tories becoming what pundit-for-the-night Andy Burnham described as “Reform-lite”. 

This has rapidly become an accepted school of thought amongst not only left-wing politicians — who find the idea of a genuinely right-wing politics morally suspect — but amongst a certain set of people who, at least nominally, consider themselves conservative. 

This certain set can be called Eternal Centrists, and they have already set out their stall in the coming battle for the Conservative Party; the lesson of the last election was that the Tories had abandoned the centre ground, and there they must return.

The type is best exemplified by Rory Stewart, who tweeted that, “The only way that the conservatives will ever be in government again is by moving back to the centre and rejecting the fantasies of the Faragist right.”

This argument, however, is made in such complete absence of facts one wonders if Rory copied and pasted it straight from Chat GPT. 

Firstly, consider whether the assertion that the Conservative Party has surrendered to right-wing populism is, in fact, correct. At the setting of the sun, they were presiding over net immigration figures approaching one million a year, the highest tax burden since WW2 and the highest level of public spending since the 1970s. 

Does that sound like a party that has caved to unrestrained neoliberal free market anti-immigration populism to you?

Were this pointed out to them, Eternal Centrists would retort about the “rhetoric” the party uses; Tories used populist language, but simply found themselves unable to deliver. You have to grant them that for 14 years, the Tories have been staggeringly poor at implementing right-wing policies. But there is a difference between letting immigration rise slightly and tripling it, and that difference is between revealed and stated preference.

Yet this use of “rhetoric” is an elegant trick; when Tory politicians outside the Eternal Centrist stream talk about things they don’t approve of — such as the consequences of mass migration — they confect outrage and join the left’s inevitable condemnation. They first fabricate the “rhetoric”, then use it as proof that the party must abandon these positions, all whilst smugly reassuring the left that “not all Tories are like this”.

A key part of this centrist shtick is to cast their opponents, as Stewart does, as “fantasists”, whilst presenting themselves as grown-ups in the room; taking his party back, he warns, “will be a painful fight with many party members who will insist that moderation prudence and realism is “wet”!” One wonders, given Stewart has already called for higher taxes and spending — again, on top of the highest tax burden since WW2 and the highest level of public spending since the 1970s — what an immoderate position would look like. 

The problem with Eternal Centrists is that they are not meaningfully conservative

It is notable that Eternal Centrists never offer solid policies or positions to “return” to, but abstract values like moderation or realism. That is because theirs is a politics that offers little but a return to mindless managerialism, the slow grinding of politics as process, rather than principle. What values they do hold are generally economically and socially liberal, and largely indistinguishable from those offered by the parties of the left. That is why so many have so warmly welcomed Starmer into government; he will implement few policies they won’t agree with, with his governing strategy of co-opting “experts” offering a thin cloak against allegations of ideology appealing to their desire for “grown-up” politics. Which is to say, their desire to see meaningful political disagreement, founded on ideological differences, eliminated.

The problem with Eternal Centrists is that they are not meaningfully conservative. As we shall see under the reign of Starmer there will be few social or economic policies that they don’t agree with Labour on, as they have no real ideological grounding in conservatism. Bella Wallersteiner, by accident, made this split clear when she argued that “the party should return to its centrist roots.” The Conservative Party has no centrist roots; its roots lie in maintaining “a hegemony over the right-wing vote whilst also being able to poach votes from the centre”, not the other way around.

 To be generous, it’s possible they retain a few conservative instincts, but these are quickly overawed by their desire for the left’s applause, or overridden by their willingness to hand over democratic accountability to “experts”.

Our problem was not that we “caved to populism”; it was that the electorate finally understood the difference between our stated and revealed preferences. No. 10 is only ever rented; in 2019 people lent us their votes, but found us unwilling — or unable — to pay back our debt to them. When the rent came due, they naturally turfed us out. The truth is that to get back into power, there is only one voice we have to listen to; the electorate’s. Where they are is where the centre ground is; and it’s nowhere near the Eternal Centrists.