How the Conservative Party's Dream Turned into an Inescapable Nightmare

Russell Jones, author of 'The Decade in Tory' and 'Four Chancellors and a Funeral', traces the origins of the full scale collapse that is about to hit the Tories

From the front cover of ‘The Decade in Tory’ by Russell Jones

We each conjure our own nightmares, and the Conservatives are no exception. Yet despite recent electoral disasters, most of the Tory party still twitches and drools in an ideological fever dream. Few have woken up to the cause of their woes, staring back at them in the mirror.

The fate of the Tories in 2024 can be traced back to the 2007 financial crisis, a failure of private banking that most of the world responded to with a series of stimulus packages. In Britain however, the Conservatives realised the crash provided a perfect cover for their long-term ideological infatuation: they could shrink the state and blame it all on Labour.

Austerity was nothing to do with economics. It was pure politics.

But if you starve an economy of money and hope, you end up with a hopeless economy and no money, as any fool can tell you except the one called George Osborne. Austerity terrified the public out of spending money. Potential investors got the willies. The economy ground to a halt, and investment as a share of GDP fell to two-thirds of the OECD average. We starved ourselves.

The cuts badly hit services we’d become accustomed to, but the Tories had a plan to deflect public anger. Cameron may have been a Remainer, but he was only too happy when his party’s bigoted flapdoodle wing blamed the effects of austerity on Brussels. For short-term political gain, he allowed populist lies to become normalised.

Cameron’s decision to unleash his Little-Englanders merely superpowered UKIP, who until 2013 had been little more than a cranky fringe movement, with batshit proposals including mandatory uniforms for taxi drivers, criminal sanctions for people who didn’t dress smartly at the theatre, and a grand plan to turn the Circle Line into an actual circle. It’s a rivetingly mad document.

Yet, turbocharged by Tory efforts to deflect blame for austerity onto Europe, UKIP gained popularity, and Cameron’s backbenchers agitated for a similarly bonkers rightward swing. Cameron, chillaxer extraordinaire, was desperate to avoid the splits that had cursed John Major and was itching to go back to watching Midsomer Murders and playing Angry Birds. So he decided to barely fight the new populist tendency.

And that’s how the Tories adopted the topsy-turvy argument that the EU had ruined this country so much that everybody wanted to come and live here.

Meanwhile the damage caused by all the cuts ended up costing more than austerity had saved. The economy stalled, services atrophied, and the national debt soared. We lazily blamed it all on Europe, making Brexit inevitable, despite practically every economist on the planet predicting it would be a calamity. Britain had floundered for years before joining the EU. We would flounder again outside. But Cameron merely shrugged, whistled a happy tune, and left Theresa May to clean up his mess.

May tried to encourage moderation and unity, but failed because she had all the collegial warmth of a Meccano scorpion and made the fundamental mistake of trying to define Brexit, rather than merely wallowing idiotically in the lysergic dream. The only way to end the ensuing political crisis would be a new leader who was selfless and ethical enough to be honest with the public.

So the Tories picked Boris Johnson.

Fat Malfoy won power because by now the Tory membership had shrunk to a tiny sect of political fantasists. Remember: he might have been an outrage, but Johnson was signed off by officials at every level for absolutely years. He was not an aberration; he was a culmination.

Johnson sold the country a false prospectus and offered his MPs an ultimatum: repeat my lies or quit. The ethical ones quit, and the remaining MPs nodded along in supine stupidity. With the moderates gone, nothing would prevent the drift into madness.

Despite the supposed panacea of Brexit, somehow the problems of underinvestment remained, and we needed a new nemesis. So now asylum seekers were Villains of the Week, and the Tories made no attempts to solve problems, just indulged in an endless hunt for ways to exploit them. More bigotry, more paranoia, more populism. It was all Gary Lineker’s fault. Blame unisex toilets. The Blob did it. Look at the dinghies, look at the dinghies! The dinghies made me do austerity, and then they ran away!

And naturally, if the government isn’t responsible for anything that’s happening, its MPs will start acting irresponsibly. Scandal erupted on all sides, the public were nauseated, and Tory polling plummeted.

The lesson: if you let go of sound economics, abandon the truth, and eschew accountability, this is the outcome. Austerity led to Brexit. Brexit led to Johnson. Johnson led to Partygate. And Partygate led to Truss, Sunak, and what promises to be a generational collapse for the Tories.

The Conservatives thought shrinking the state and blaming it all on Labour was a dream come true. It has turned into an inescapable nightmare. 

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Russell Jones is the author of two books, The Decade in Tory, and most recently, Four Chancellors and a Funeral. His forthcoming book Tories: The End of an Error, the final volume in the ‘Torygeddon’ Trilogy, is currently crowdfunding on Unbound. His legendary #The Week in Tory threads can be found @RussInCheshire on X/Twitter