David Gauke: ‘Trump Would Be Very Problematic for the Conservative Party if It Tried to Turn Into the British Equivalent of MAGA’

The cabinet minister under Cameron and May, who had the whip removed by Johnson during the Brexit wars, speaks to Simon Nixon about the future he sees for the liberal conservatism he still believes in

David Gauke. Photo: Jay Allen/Crown Copyright

SN: How did the Conservative Party of David Cameron become that of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick in less than 10 years?

The Brexit Referendum was a crucial moment.

Once there was a result, politics became an exercise in implementing that result – and those who had campaigned to leave the EU could claim a moral authority to be speaking ‘for the people’. Suddenly, we were left with a position where the political mainstream of the Conservative Party – remember, most Tory MPs and the vast majority of ministers voted to remain – were left at a disadvantage. That cleared out a lot of the leadership. It was the end of the careers of David Cameron and George Osborne. For others, we were put in a defensive position, and the difficulties of implementing Brexit exacerbated that. That fundamentally weakened the old mainstream.

Then there are the wider issues common to pretty much every developed country: greater concerns about immigration, greater concerns about social issues, and the rise of populist voters who could be described as being on the right of the Conservatives but, economically, are very often to the left.

There was a constituency there that the Conservatives wanted to go for and which delivered success for Boris Johnson in 2019. The argument was ‘we can’t allow anything to emerge to our right; these are socially conservative, authoritarian voters that we have to appeal to’. By that point, there were very few people left saying ‘what about the more metropolitan, internationalist, socially moderate voters in prosperous parts of the country?’ That was no longer seen as the Tory base.

The Conservative Party used to pride itself on being a broad church. Is it still?

Again, I think the events of 2019 are key.

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