There has been one major theme at Conservative Party conference this week: how terrible the Conservative Party is.
For 14 years, through four general election victories and five prime ministers, the Tories boasted of the ways in which their rule was improving Britain.
Now that has all changed. Again and again in Manchester, you hear that the party’s actions in power were basically a mistake and their policies need to be reversed as a matter of urgency.
David Cameron raised foreign aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GDP – the party’s position now is that the right level is just 0.1 per cent.
It was Theresa May who signed net zero into law – Kemi Badenoch now says the target of eliminating carbon emissions by 2050 needs to be scrapped.
Boris Johnson kept Britain in the European Convention on Human Rights, dismissing calls to quit the decades-old treaty – most Tories now regard that position as a deadly error.
In his party conference speech just two years ago, Rishi Sunak announced a groundbreaking policy of banning all people born after 2009 from ever smoking – the current leader thinks that is nanny state meddling.
The list goes on: Welfare spending, the treatment of mental health by the NHS, relations with China. Time and time again, you hear the Conservatives disavowing the policy positions they took in government.
Some of this is reasonable, even necessary. Faced with the rise of Reform, the Tories cannot defend their legacy on immigration; the number of incomers rocketed in the wake of a Brexit referendum when the winning side had promised a reduction.
And the reckless folly of Liz Truss damned the Conservatives’ reputation for economic confidence. They cannot talk enough about how wrong she was, and must repeatedly promise never to try her tax-slashing experiment again.
But it goes so much further than that. The message that the public is hearing is a perverse one: the Tories were wrong about everything, please vote Tory!
If they wanted to, the Conservatives could point to some genuine successes, or at least areas where they can make a decent argument to right-of-centre voters.
Sunak was arguing back in 2021 that the national debt needed to be controlled, pointing to the risk that a rise in interest rates would send the cost of government borrowing through the roof – how right he was. Johnson was quick to support Ukraine. Cameron married fiscal rectitude with a social conscience in a way that few other leaders have been able to do.
All this disavowal is very deliberate. Badenoch privately describes her message as: “The party has changed, it’s not the same party any more.” But what does that say to the remaining loyal Tory voters who quite liked the old party? And why should voters who do want a change go for the halfway house of the Conservatives, rather than the full-blown revolution of Reform UK?
Part of it is driven, quite straightforwardly, by polls and focus groups. Asked why the Tories were pledging to slash foreign aid again, a total reversal of the Cameron legacy, one senior figure close to Badenoch replies: “We are concentrating on the priorities of the British public, and this is not one of them.”
Another part is a feeling of revulsion at the compromises needed in government, and liberation in opposition where you can say whatever you like without having to deliver on it.
But ultimately it will prove a mistake. The Conservative brand, if there is one left, is built around the idea that they are the only party which will tell the truth about the hard decisions required to run the country, and the bitter medicine voters must sometimes accept for the greater good.
Junking their own record, rather than promising to build on it with a little bit of course correction where necessary, is the same sort of fantasy politics that Reform likes to indulge in.
The question for voters is this: if the Tories hate themselves so much, why should the public feel any differently?
Hugo Gye is The i Paper‘s Political Editor
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