In 1975, in the wake of a fourth Tory election defeat in five contests, an event about the future of the Right would have concentrated on the Conservative Party. In 1997, in the aftermath of what was then the worst Tory defeat in the twentieth century, the same would have happened.
2024 is different not only because of the scale of the Conservative defeat in July, greater even than in the age of Tony Blair, but because of the continued unwinding of the two party monopoly – which began before the era of Margaret Thatcher, but (100) now appears to be rapidly gathering speed.
Small parties of the Right sat in Parliament alongside the Tories, in the form of Ulster Unionist and National Liberal parties, for most of the last century. However, the Conservatives never faced a potential major rival. They now do so in Reform.
Furthermore, elements of the Liberal Democrats, in the form of a new generation of supporters of the ideals of the Orange Book, can legitimately be viewed as part of the Right. And after all, the Liberal Democrats were governing in coalition with the Tories as recently as 2015.
The inaugural event of Policy Exchange’s Future of the Right programme recognised this challenge to two-party dominance, evident now in trends on the Left as well as one the Right, by including in its five person panel a Reform MP, Rupert Lowe, as well as a Conservative one, Katie Lam.
The other three members of the panel were: James Kanagasooriam, the Chief Research Officer of Focaldata; Charles Moore, Thatcher’s biographer and former editor of the Daily Telegraph; and Rachel Wolf, co-author of the 2019 Conservative general election manifesto.
Inevitably, the event featured some Conservative-Reform crossfire, though certainly not enough to turn the event into a narrow one concentrated on party rivalries rather than a broader one about regenerating the right culturally as well as electorally.
Indeed, Lowe presented Reform as a new force that will replace both the Conservatives and Labour. That raised a more profound question than whether he’s right – namely whether, if the new party will indeed prove so all-encompassing, it can truly be considered a party of the Right at all.
Kanagasooriam said that it isn’t one – at least in terms of its economic programme, but suggested that both parties sit on the Right in a broader sense: the Conservatives in terms of what the Right has become, and Reform in the sense of the Right as much of it used to be.
Wolf, speaking first, set out the parameters within which much of the discussion took place. And Moore, who spoke last (with reference to Thatcher leadership’s), essentially completed them. There was agreement among most of the panel that the Tories deserved to lose the last election.
Wolf argued that the Right needs a programme that will address the fundamental problems facing the country. Moore held that the Right hasn’t collectively done so since the days of Thatcher, tending instead to preoccupy itself with image rather than message. And content.
To sum it up, the Right, if it is to change the country for the better rather than simply clock up future election victories, must get serious – and face up to challenges that politicians tend, for reasons of electoral self-preservation, to duck, such as that of demographic decline.
Lam said early in the event that the Conservatives have no automatic right to govern. In doing so, she recognised that the future of the Right is, to an extent that many other Tories perhaps don’t appreciate, is up for grabs, as next year’s local elections in England may remind us.
A question left hanging in the air is whether Reform, in economic terms, moves leftwards as it seeks to challenge Labour in the north-west and north-east – which would imply support for high levels of spending on health, parts of the welfare state and pensions.
If so, the Conservatives and at least some Liberal Democrats would be left to more convincingly champion the smaller state, lower taxes, less regulation and the broad economic agenda that the Right has championed since at least the end of World War Two.
And to address inconvenient fundamentals such as the need to maintain our international security alliances, reform our public services, build the houses we need and ensure that the demographic challenge is recognised rather than ignored – or simply wished away.