Rebelliousness against any rule they don’t like has replaced a political philosophy that was once reckoned with
What has happened to English Conservatism? The party was once believed to have a sophisticated grasp of statecraft and a “natural” capacity to hold on to power. Here it is now, spending the summer trapped in a nightmare of its own making. The cakeist unseriousness of the celebrity Boris Johnson has been spun off into a TV game show: charmless candidates for the next prime minister pander to judges who form not so much a party as a youth subculture that has grown geriatric – its codes and styles opaque to anyone who doesn’t collect Thatcherite “merch” from the 1980s.
All this – like Johnson’s reign of backfire – is symptomatic of a longer, wider and deeper ideological decline. Conservative political philosophy used to make arguments with which opponents had to reckon: sharp and informed scepticism about the grand plans of those who know the world through books alone and the expectation that technocrats in Whitehall could manage benevolently and wisely all of the time. Emphasising the tragic flaws in human nature, warning that efforts to perfect ourselves can give free rein to our imperfections, it was an important counterbalance to political arrogance. Such big ideas challenged the rationalists and progressives of the liberal centre and socialist left.
Alan Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia
