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In 2006, for obscure reasons, I had a short and private conversation with Margaret Thatcher. Briefed in advance that she wasn’t at the peak of her faculties, I thought better of asking the question that still intrigues me now. What did she make of the nation she had moulded? On the one hand, it was an economic success: rich, creative, no longer Europe’s shambling neighbour. On the other, once-stable communities had changed. National assets were under foreign ownership. The capital city belonged more to the world than to Britain. Markets, it turned out, were un-conservative.
Look upon your work, ma’am. Was it worth it? I think it was, but then I’m a liberal. The question is rather for conservatives to wrestle with.
Rishi Sunak, who doesn’t have the excuse of old age, seems never to have done this. He is the most thoroughgoing capitalist to have held the office of UK prime minister. At the same time, he is enough of a stickler for tradition and nationhood to have supported Brexit before Boris Johnson did. That the first belief conflicts with the second, that markets scramble established patterns of life, seems not to trouble his high-grade mind. But this is the eternal conservative dilemma. In the end, he has been gored and impaled on the horns of it. I wouldn’t mind so much if the nation wasn’t bleeding with him.
A conservative believes in home ownership, but not in building houses on greenfield sites; in trade, but not in the supranational regulations that smooth it. In each of these intellectual conflicts, this government has tended to prioritise tradition: the field over the house, the legal sovereignty over the exports. It is a legitimate choice. But it was made with no awareness of the cost to growth. If Thatcher never anticipated the cultural upheaval that her economic reforms would bring about, her heirs couldn’t see the economic torpor that their cultural caution would bring about. Mistrusting abstract thought, conservatives can’t spot the tension at the core of their worldview.
This tension applies to rightwingers everywhere, sort of. If William Buckley was serious about his definition of a conservative (“someone who stands athwart history, yelling, ‘Stop’”), he should have supported more curbs on American business, which was an agent of social change even before it put a smartphone in every teenager’s hand. Today’s alt-right, with its jaundiced view of capitalism, sees the point. Still, the dilemma is much more acute in the UK than in the US. The domestic market is smaller, resources less abundant, and trade a colossal share of national output. We are an open nation or a hard-up one. We are porous or poor. Traditionalism isn’t affordable.
This, in the end, is the case for the political centre. Britain needs the right’s enthusiasm for the market but the left’s openness to immigration, housebuilding and other fruits of the market. This centrism doesn’t split the difference on each issue. It emphatically takes one side or the other, according to the issue. You might better call it “double extremism”.
One story will stick with me from this outgoing government. An Abu Dhabi-backed consortium launched a bid for some conservative newspaper titles in the UK. It gave up last month. What happened? Tenacious resistance from scandalised rightwingers, who cited the sanctity of national institutions in a world of loose and ethics-free capital. Some of these conservatives had once told me that buccaneering Brexit Britain was going to embrace the outside world as squeamish continentals never could. They say if you live long enough, you get to see everything. Not true. You need only live to 42.
Sunak can afford to live anywhere in London and chooses Kensington. It is hard to present him as an interesting man, then, much less a tragic historical figure. But I believe he did, unlike one or two of his predecessors, and hordes of his frivolous colleagues, get into politics to make Britain better-off. He just never resolved, or even recognised, the fact that one half of his worldview would always get in the way. He should have given the other half, his inner liberal, more rein. What a disappointment he has been to those of us who run beside history, yelling, “Speed up”.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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