Tories at war: what happened to the world’s most successful party?

Liz Truss attempted to rally her party today with a message of unity following what pundits described as “a ropey few days for the government”.

In her maiden Conservative Party Conference speech as leader, the prime minister “focused on selling her economic vision and persuading people it would work”, said the BBC’s chief political correspondent Nick Eardley.

“Whenever things change, there is disruption, but everyone will benefit from the result – a growing economy and a better future. I have three priorities for our economy: growth, growth and growth,” Truss told delegates in Birmingham.

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But only a month into the Truss premiership, the mood at the conference was “grim to funereal”, said The Spectator’s Tim Stanley. “There’s a sense that something has changed in British politics and we ain’t going back.”

Divisions within the party have been compounded by Labour’s soaring lead in the polls, which has fuelled questions about the future direction of what The Economist described three years ago as “the world’s most successful political party”.

What did the papers say?

“I’ve never seen a conference dissolve quite like this one”, said Andrew Marr on LBC radio. “The real question is, is this the beginning of the great unravelling of much more?”

The former BBC presenter said the mood of the conference felt “fatal” for the government, even though the “real opponents” of Truss had “stayed away”.

The conference has been a “festival of internal discord and division”, wrote Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. The unrest was highlighted by the government’s U-turn on the cutting of the 45p top tax rate, which was intended to “pacify the government’s rebellious MPs”, he continued. A subsequent speech “riven with contradictions” by Kwasi Kwarteng failed to quell anger against the chancellor and the PM.

The government’s refusal to commit to raising benefits in line with inflation has created “a fresh battle with MPs”, said The Guardian, and has triggered “concern from among her cabinet”. Penny Mordaunt and Robert Buckland are among the ministers who have questioned reported plans to increase benefits in line with wages instead.

There is also “growing anger” from some MPs over the comments made by Home Secretary Suella Braverman that they had “staged a coup” in order to force Truss into reversing the decision on the top rate of income tax, said Politics Home. MPs including former cabinet minister Michael Gove said “they were simply doing what we believe to be right”.

What next?

The turbulent conference has led to talk of the possible end of a Conservative era. “The Conservative Party seems to be stuck,” wrote Harry Lambert in The New Statesman. For the past 15 years “it has been the Conservatives who have set the pace of British politics” however, a “general election held today would see the parties switch places”.

The Tory party isn’t “​​certain to lose the next election but we have reached the point where everyone in politics expects them to”, wrote Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. The party “seems to want to be at war with as many people as it can find” and there has been a “narrowing” of support within the government after Liz Truss excluded “almost anybody who didn’t support her” in the leadership contest. “How can it possibly win from such a narrow position?” he added. “It becomes a sect not a party.”

The Conservatives’ downfall could be brought about because of how Western conservatism has changed, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Liz Truss is “out of touch” with the “electoral sweet spot for right-of-centre governments”, he wrote. Recent elections in Italy and Sweden have seen “anti-libertarian right-wing politics, favourable to the welfare state and sceptical of immigration” succeed because of constituents “buffeted by globalisation and anxious about national identity”.

Liz Truss is going in the “opposite direction” he argues, on a “Reagan-Thatcher nostalgia trip, that’s carried the Tories away from their own constituents” and away too from the populism of the previous Boris Johnson government.

Across Europe there has been “collapsing support for moderate right-wing parties” alongside the centre-left, said Benjamin Fox at Euractiv. Though it maintained power, the Conservative Party has “morphed into an increasingly nationalist and populist party since Brexit”. Populist and nationalist parties have replaced established conservatism by offering “quick-fix policies” and “easy answers”.

In contrast, Philip Johnston in The Telegraph suggests the Tories have simply “run out of steam” in a seemingly natural “finite term for governments of around 13 or 14 years”. At the time of the next scheduled general election it will have been 14 years of a form of a Conservative government, and “there is nothing to suggest that they can get past this invisible barrier”.