The hilarious delusions of the Tory wets

God love the ‘centrists’. It doesn’t matter how many times the world shows it has moved on, how stubbornly insoluble today’s problems prove to be to their insipid, deluded technocracy – nothing can dent their conviction that the future belongs to them, or dampen their thirst for a Sunday broadcast round.

Enter stage (centre-)right, Prosper UK – a new Tory-wet initiative with all the energy of a third-rate management consultancy, and the corporate branding to match. At a launch event in London this week, the new group laid down the gauntlet to Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party, calling for it to stake out a ‘practical, pragmatic’ alternative to Keir Starmer’s profligate Labour and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform. The old boys down the Dog and Duck have been talking about little else since.

It was a roll-call of yesterday’s men and women – former Tory ministers and politicians who we had all too briefly been allowed to forget. Andy Street, Ruth Davidson, David Gauke, Amber Rudd. One by one, they took to the lectern to decry populism and extol the virtues of blue-rinsed Blairism. They might not have used that phrase, but it is about the measure of their technocratic, Third Way outlook – one that is gripped by the conviction it is still the early 2000s.

This wasn’t another launch of another new centrist party. At the very least, Prosper UK has learned the lesson of Change UK – that unholy alliance of anti-Brexit Tories and Labourites that sent lobby journalists into raptures before being humiliated at the 2019 European elections. Instead, the assorted Tory sensibles called Prosper ‘a movement’, aimed at ‘reaching out to the whole country’, and building a ‘broad church’ within the Conservative Party, deploying every tired cliché at their disposal.

Inspiring it wasn’t. As with all of history’s most galvanising public meetings, it began with the chair – in this case, former mayor of Birmingham Andy Street – directing the journalists assembled to look at a handout, laying out some polling. They say you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This lot want to campaign in PowerPoint and never govern again.

You’ll have heard it all before. That you can only win elections from the centre ground. That much of the nation has been left ‘politically homeless’ by the nasty ‘polarisation’ of left and right. Yada yada. And so Prosper UK charged pollsters More in Common with furnishing these platitudes with some numbers. They asked voters to position themselves on a scale of one to 10, from left to right, concluding that 22million Brits are ‘centre right’ (between a five and a 6.5), of whom seven million ‘feel no parties represent them’.

There are some obvious problems with this. As the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley has pointed out, most people think of themselves as moderate or centrist. The problem is, what passes for moderate or centrist among the political class is wildly different to what is widely held and considered commonsensical among the electorate. The median view on, say, immigration or Net Zero – though eminently reasonable – would scandalise the geniuses of SW1. When this forgotten seven million say they feel unrepresented, that doesn’t mean they are hankering for the lukewarm Cameroon slop this mob appears to be selling.

Cameron’s ghost haunted this launch. You would have thought Dave was a Disraeli-esque titan of One Nation conservatism, rather than one of the last gasps of a bloodless, managerialist era in which vision and ideas gave way to mere ‘electability’. He rode the tide of the global financial crisis into a coalition government in 2010, before sneaking a majority in 2015 off the back of a deeply cynical, not to mention expensive, campaign – plunging activists and resources into key marginals, rather than articulating an inspiring case to the nation.

This is a trick that would also be all but impossible to pull off for Badenoch’s diminished, cash-strapped Conservatives, who can no longer count on the affections of their core vote – much of it lost to the Faragistas – let alone hope to woo the waverers. As top pollster James Johnson argues, you can only ‘reach out’ to the supposed centre of the electorate if you have a strong base of support to begin with. Otherwise, it’s ‘like trying to grow a tree without a trunk’. Plus, thanks to Brexit and Boris, the Tory name is now dirt among precisely the ‘social liberals’ who swooned so hard for Cameron in the first place. The delusional take across the comment pages – that the defection of right-wing MPs Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman to Reform clears the decks for Badenoch to go the Full Rory Stewart – is, in Johnson’s unminced words, ‘electoral madness’.

You cannot expect to win if you refuse to understand why you lost. Voters haven’t been fooled by the ‘easy answers’ peddled by beguiling populists, they are rebelling against a phoney old consensus that locked them out of politics and produced some of the barmiest ideas ever to be inked in statute. Indeed, it is the supposed sensibles who thought you could make energy scarce and expensive and still have a thriving economy, or impose unprecedented levels of immigration, against voters’ express wishes, without any social consequences whatsoever. (When pressed on migration and greenism at their launch, the Prosperers could only warble a little about trade-offs while staring blankly into the distance.)

These people want to lead a country that no longer exists. They long for a time when the public were demoralised, deprived of political choice; when relative economic and geopolitical stability allowed them to pursue their mad schemes without the nation feeling the full effects of them. Those days are over. Democracy is back. Politics is back. Voters want leaders who will actually listen to them – and clean up the mess left by the David Gaukes of this world. Now it’s the turn of the ‘centrists’ to be left behind.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.