The news that the Conservatives intend to undo their own elaborate NHS reforms could be seen as yet another sign of how badly they’ve governed. It could also be taken as a reminder of how bafflingly long they have been in office, given their record. The original legislation setting out their reforms to the NHS was passed nine years and three general elections ago.
During that time the Tories have reversed their policies, or significantly changed their message, in many other crucial areas: among them the role of the state, EU membership, the north-south divide, the relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and the balance between economic growth and public safety during a pandemic. Sometimes since Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 he and his ministers have failed to keep to a consistent line for the duration of a sentence.
Usually, British governments seemingly so lost in U-turns are short-lived, such as Edward Heath’s infamous Tory administration of the early 1970s. Yet despite all the policy chaos since they took office in 2010 – at times much worse than under Heath – the Conservatives seem ever more entrenched in power. At each general election their vote has risen. What if the government’s tendency to contradict itself hasn’t been a weakness, but actually a strength?
At a time when one of Conservatism’s great modern causes, free-market capitalism, has lost its attractiveness for many people, and when the key group of conservative voters, elderly people, is seeing its electoral supremacy threatened by the radicalisation of the young, the Tories’ policy promiscuity has enabled them to maximise their support. On many issues, they have played a double game.
Austerity has been perhaps the most brazen example. From 2010 to 2015, the Conservatives cut state spending more harshly than any government for decades, while relentlessly framing Labour as spendthrift. Enough voters were persuaded to take a stern view of the public finances for the Tories to be re-elected.
Then, when the Brexit campaign and Labour’s 2017 election surge demonstrated that austerity was becoming a political liability, the Conservatives suddenly declared themselves horrified by the state of the country – “too many communities feel let down” warned their 2019 manifesto – and reinvented themselves as champions of public investment.
At that general election, they presented the Johnson government as a fresh start, and many voters chose him to fix the damage his own party had just inflicted on their areas. In effect, the Tories acted as their own opposition. They have continued to do so since, leaving Labour and other critics of the government disoriented and, to much of the electorate, redundant. Why vote for the other parties when the Conservatives seem to offer several parties in one?
The Tories’ double game isn’t a conspiracy, or necessarily even a conscious strategy. Governing is usually too messy an undertaking for neat plans, and since the downfall of Margaret Thatcher’s radical regime 31 years ago the Conservatives have struggled to think long-term, as the frustration of Dominic Cummings demonstrated. What the Tories have done instead since 2010 is improvise: try policies out, and if they don’t work politically, try the opposite. With the rightwing press faithfully following these zigzags, the Conservatives have had room for manoeuvre rarely granted to Labour governments.
They’ve also been able to exploit the double appeal of modern conservatism: its promise both to preserve and disrupt. “Ideology is always contradictory,” wrote the astute analyst of the right Stuart Hall in 2011. “Few strategies are so successful at winning consent as those which root themselves in the contradictory elements of common sense, popular life and consciousness.” As Hall spotted, five years before the Brexit vote, many people want what they see as the British way of life both to be conserved and shaken up.
Today’s erratic conservatism may also fit the times in less political ways. Thanks partly to social media, we increasingly accept people adopting a range of personas according to context, so Johnson’s readiness to say completely different things to different audiences doesn’t discredit him as it once would have done. Many people have also learned to live with impregnable-seeming monopolies, such as the tech companies, and with a feeling that beneath the surface frenzy of much of 21st-century life, the distribution of power no longer changes much, however many mistakes or panicky U-turns the powerful make. Conservatism is often politically effective in a fatalistic age.
Most politicians probably like having as much power as possible for as long as possible. But this Conservative administration, in its fourth term, and still busily increasing its influence over ever more institutions, from the universities to the BBC to Covid-19 contractors, appears even less worried than most British governments about having too much power. The fact that this government changes its mind so often and so drastically – that it appears to offer a broad and changing menu of policies – may be helping to reassure Tory politicians and voters that this one-party dominance is still compatible with democracy.
However, this Tory double game won’t work for ever. It’s more a way of staying in office than of making British life better. And since 2010, by many key measures – wages, poverty levels, life expectancy – British life has stagnated or worsened alarmingly. Eventually, these accumulating failures will weigh too heavily on the government. They almost did at the 2017 election. And at some point, the Tories will also run out of policy options, as they have already almost run out of able politicians. A U-turn is only a clever manoeuvre when you know which way you’re going instead.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
