Four years have now passed, and I still struggle to get my head around the fact that David Gauke is no longer in the Conservative Party. The man is sceptical of utopian schemes, uncomfortable with current spending levels, distrustful of radical change and quietly patriotic. Yet Gauke was one of 21 Conservative MPs who lost the whip in September 2019 after voting to take the legislative agenda away from the Government – a move which meant that Britain would not leave the EU except on terms that Brussels liked, and so wrecked any chance of a successful exit.
Many of the 21 worked their way back into favour; indeed, Boris Johnson, who is incapable of bearing a grudge, put four of them in the Lords. But not Gauke, who sits outside the party like some geological anomaly, a boulder hurled miles by an ancient eruption, a reminder of how violently our political landscape was reshaped between 2016 and 2019. In Gauke’s view, that tectonic upheaval has left the Conservatives reliant on more authoritarian, more statist and more elderly voters, and pushed away economic liberals such as him.
He has thus gathered 10 former Tory Remainers, including Dominic Grieve, Amber Rudd and Anne Milton, to write a book making the case for what they all call “the liberal centre-Right”. And you know what? They do it pretty persuasively. The problem they identify – a simplistic populism that refuses to recognise trade-offs, an insistence that imperfect policies are caused by bad or incompetent leaders rather than being intrinsic in public affairs – is a real one. And it is true, as the Gaukster argues in his introduction, that the Conservative Party has traditionally acted as a brake on magical thinking.
Rory Stewart develops the case in a characteristically elegant essay, replete with classical references, which identifies the danger of polarisation. He has the honesty to allow that it is a global phenomenon, rather than a product of Boris and Brexit, and to admit that hardcore Remainers were “an exact shadow” of hard-line Leavers, both sides convinced that they were up against dupes who had been gulled by unscrupulous politicians and financiers. Stewart is stronger on the diagnosis than on the prescription – as critics have recently said of his own book – but that is hardly his fault. There is no obvious cure to the populist spasm through which we are passing, which has seen liberal democracy retreat globally since 2011.
Not every contributor, however, is as fair-minded as Stewart. There are anti-Brexit rants by Michael Heseltine and Gavin Barwell, which sit oddly in a collection that lauds the virtues of temperance, cool-headedness and compromise. “Hezza” may have earned the right to rant after such a long and distinguished career. Less so Barwell, who, as Theresa May’s chief of staff, helped to take the Tories to their worst defeat since the party coalesced in the 1670s: 8.8 per cent of the vote in the 2019 European elections, a percentage that Johnson raised to 43.6 per cent just seven months later.
