The chances are that Rishi Sunak won’t end up trading punches in the toilets with hostile MPs, but the atmosphere in the Conservative Party is taking on a familiar hue. Where once Labour was a byword for factionalism — with a dizzying array of Bennites, Tribunites and other “tendencies” — so the Tories today present a kaleidoscope of “New Conservatives”, “National Conservatives”, “Common Sense” Conservatives and self-styled “research groups”, all battling for control of the leadership. And where once a Social Democratic Party fought to “break the mould” of British politics, today the Right-wing Reform party proclaims a “realignment” intended to sweep the Conservatives from the electoral landscape. Over all this hangs the stench of electoral death, as the party contemplates defeat on the scale of 1983 or 1997.

But the Conservatives can still learn from Labour’s agonies in the Eighties. Then, Labour faced three interlocking crises. The first was electoral: from 1979 to 1992, Labour lost four general elections in a row — something that had never happened before in the democratic era. The fear was not simply that Labour was losing, but that its traditional electorate was disappearing. Deindustrialisation was shrinking the manual working class, trade-union membership was in freefall, while non-unionised workers seemed increasingly drawn to Thatcherism. The challenge for Labour was both to reclaim its old electorate and to build a new one, at a time of disruptive sociological change.

The second crisis was political, with the formation of a breakaway party by former Labour grandees. In David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins, the SDP could boast the youngest foreign secretary in history, one of the most popular female politicians in the country, a skilled party organiser, and a former Chancellor, Home Secretary and President of the European Commission. Even under the pressures of First Past the Post, the SDP-Liberal Alliance won more than a quarter of the vote in 1983, coming only 2% behind Labour. In his first term, at least, the challenge for Kinnock was not to defeat the Conservatives. It was to stave off the threat from the Alliance.

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The third problem was intellectual. Parties do not often rethink their core principles, but the questions being asked of Labour during this period were genuinely existential. Was socialism still relevant, in a world where workers were buying their own homes and filling them with consumer goods? Could one talk meaningfully about “working-class solidarity” when the long-term unemployed were so distanced from those in work? Was parliamentary socialism still possible, given the cultural and media power of the Right, or did industrial action pose a surer route to victory? From the hard-Left to the old-Right, there was universal agreement that Labour must change. What was so disruptive was the direction of change, and the principles on which it should be based.

For the Conservative Party today, the challenges are slightly different. Unlike Labour, modern Conservatives are accustomed to winning elections, but that makes the prospect of defeat all the more terrifying. Three-quarters of the parliamentary party, including all but six of the Cabinet, have no experience of opposition, yet the party has now trailed in the polls for more than two years. Those voters who remain loyal are heavily concentrated among the elderly. Labour leads in every cohort below the age of 65; and even the next oldest cohort, from 55-64, has the Conservatives at just 20%.

As for party competition, Reform cannot match the polling figures of the early Alliance, which peaked at more than 40%. Nor has it drawn heavyweight defections of the stature of Jenkins, Owen or Williams. But if Nigel Farage were to return to the leadership, it would boast a consummate campaigner with strong support among Conservative voters: Farage now polls more strongly among 2019 Conservatives than the current prime minister.

Underpinning both these problems is an intellectual dilemma. What is the Conservative Party for? And what, if anything, does it seek to conserve? Under First Past the Post, parties have to construct broad coalitions to be electorally competitive. At its best, that is a source of strength, expanding the range of ideas on which a party can draw and bringing different interests into partnership. At its worst, it generates unstable compounds that can explode at any moment. While Labour struggles to hold together Fabians, Left liberals, ethical socialists, trade unionists and social democrats, those jostling within the Conservative coalition have ranged from free traders to protectionists, libertarians to moral conservatives, Atlanticists to Empire loyalists, and institutionalists to radical populists. The surprise, perhaps, is not that such fissile materials sometimes combust, but that they do not do so more often.

For most of the 20th century, Conservatives could rely on two gravitational forces to keep their centrifugal tendencies in check. The first was a shared hostility to socialism. At a time when the Cold War dominated political alignment, fear of a common enemy was a potent unifying force. The party was also anchored in a set of common institutions: the Church of England, the professions and the institutions of the party itself, which boasted more than two million members at its peak. It was no accident that the party lost coherence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as its own institutions shrivelled, and as it became either detached from or hostile to the institutions of state and civil society. The effect was to leave the party both socially and intellectually unmoored.

More recently, in 2019, the party could deploy two unifying forces: the desire to “Get Brexit Done”; and a determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of office. Neither exerts much power today. Britain has left the EU, and Labour is almost neurotically averse to reopening the question. Those Brexit questions which remain live are as likely to divide Conservatives as to unite them: notably, the status of retained EU law; the future of immigration policy; and the Northern Ireland border. As for Corbyn, he is no longer even a Labour MP. The current Labour leadership defines itself as much against Corbyn as against the Conservatives, and attempts to present Keir Starmer as a secret revolutionary have gained little traction with the public.

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As its unifying elements weaken, other forces are driving the party apart. A tradition that once prided itself on its suspicion of “ideology” increasingly demands “true Conservatism” from its leaders, while disagreeing furiously on what that might be. Loyal newspapers that once catered to millions have become more sectarian as their readerships have shrunk, while new TV stations offer rich rewards for rebels and mavericks. The moderate, pragmatic MP who votes loyally with her party is unlikely to follow Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Esther McVey into the presenter’s chair at GB News or Talk TV.

All this puts a premium on skilled party management, yet there is little in Sunak’s past that has prepared him for this task. Jim Callaghan, who led a government with no majority at all for two years, had spent 30 years in Parliament, including 20 years on Labour’s national executive and a period as party chair. He had held four great offices of state and began his career as a trade-union official. By contrast, Sunak only entered Parliament in 2015, spent his short ministerial career at the Treasury and previously worked at a hedge fund. In a party that has disposed of four prime ministers in six years, even a majority of 60 has strained his powers of party management. Nor have the party’s strategists served him well, for the fashion for seeking “wedge issues” and “dividing lines” has inflamed divisions within the party, rather than establishing clear blue water with the opposition.

Yet as Labour’s experience demonstrates, division need not be terminal; and the Conservatives enjoy a number of structural advantages that were denied to Labour in the Eighties. That includes a largely sympathetic press and a donor base that can outspend their opponents even at the nadir of the party’s fortunes. The Right is in the ascendant across much of the West, and may soon take back the presidency of the United States. And in an age of short political careers, the Tory factions have no equivalent to Benn, Jenkins or Healey — household names with careers stretching back decades. The heavens do not tremble at the thunder of Sir Simon Clarke; nor do the mountains smoke at the voice of Robert Jenrick. That makes the party’s factions more volatile, but also less deeply entrenched.

Moreover, for a party accustomed to government, opposition may also have a galvanising effect. A Labour government would confront a grim inheritance: a public sector on fire, a financial crisis in local government, a stagnant economy and a perilous international situation — perhaps made more difficult by the return of Donald Trump. If there are good elections for the Conservatives to lose, 2024 may be one of them.

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But if the party wishes to restore its intellectual vitality, it will need to face some uncomfortable truths. If the tax bill has risen under five Conservative leaders drawn from across the party spectrum, that is not because they lacked conviction or were secret socialists. A party that wishes to cut taxation must wrestle honestly with the dilemmas of an ageing population, a stagnant economy, a surging bill for social care and pensions, and growing pressure on the defence budget. If younger voters are abandoning the Conservative Party, that is not because they have been brainwashed by their teachers or indoctrinated on TikTok. It is because Conservatism has offered them little but mockery at a time of decaying wages and an impossible housing market.

As the once-great Liberal Party could affirm, parties do not have a divine right to survive. Those that cannot contain their divisions, that look inwards rather than out, and that blame the electorate for their own misfortunes are rarely rewarded at the polls. Like Labour in 1979, the Conservatives may soon be out of office. Unless they learn the lessons of the Eighties, it could be some time before they return.

For a party that is trailing in the polls and uncertain of its direction, hostility to Net Zero has an obvious allure. As a rallying cry, it can speak both to the tax-cutting, libertarian wing of the party and to its culture warriors, eager to renew the fight against experts, elites and international organisations. It offers a bridge between the tech-bro-utopianism of the prime minister and the concerns of motorists and lower-earners, who are facing rising emissions-costs. For many Conservatives, Net Zero smacks of subsidies, price guarantees and market interventions: a centralised re-planning of the economy that owes more to socialism than to science. And while the Uxbridge by-election centred on air-quality, not Net Zero, it offered a glimmer of electoral light to a party raking through the ashes of its recent poll-ratings.

But climate scepticism does not (yet) have a monopoly on Conservative thought. The Conservative Environment Network lists more than 200 MPs and peers on its website, drawn from across the party spectrum. The conflict over Net Zero, then, is not a contest between the “woke” Left and the “radical” Right. It brings into collision different visions of Conservatism, in a struggle for ownership of the Conservative tradition.

Tory environmentalists can point to a strong record on the issue, stretching back to the Fifties. It was Conservative governments that created the Department of the Environment, the National Parks Authorities, the Environment Agency and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research. Tory administrations introduced the Clean Air Acts, the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Environment Act, as well as the Landfill Tax, the Road-Fuel Escalator and, in England, the Plastic Bag Charge. And it was a Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, who made Net Zero a legal obligation.

When global warming first entered public consciousness in the Eighties and Nineties, it was Margaret Thatcher who sounded the most trenchant warnings. Addressing the World Climate Conference in 1990, she accused the world of “playing with the conditions” of life. “We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin”, endangering “the biological balance … on which human life depends”. This was a distinctly Conservative environmentalism — even taking care to warn business that “there will be no profit… for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet”.

For Conservative environmentalists, this is not simply a record to defend. It is a reminder that there are powerful strands within Conservatism that can be mobilised against its climate sceptics. The first is the instinct to “conserve”: the idea on which both “conservatism” and “conservation” are founded. For the Conservative intellectual Roger Scruton, global warming engaged “a fundamental moral idea to which conservatives attach great importance: the idea that those responsible for damage should also repair it”. He drew inspiration from the writings of Edmund Burke and his call to partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. For Burke, the living were but the “temporary possessors and life-renters” of society. As such, they had a moral responsibility not to “commit waste on their inheritance by destroying at their pleasure”, or “to leave to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation”.

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That belief intersected with an emphasis, drawn from Christian conservatism, on “stewardship”: the belief, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, that humans were not the lords of creation but “the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged… with preserving life itself”. As she told the Conservative party conference in 1988: “The core of Tory philosophy and the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy — with a full repairing lease.”

For much of its history, the Conservative Party was pre-eminently the party of the land; rooted, not just in the “landed interest”, but in a patriotic commitment to the natural environment. As Stanley Baldwin put it: “England is the country and the country is England.” Its sights, sounds and smells — “the corncrake on a dewy morning… the wild anemones in the woods of April” — should “be the inheritance of every child born into this country”. Scruton called this “oikophilia”: the love of home, understood not as nostalgia, but as a desire to pass on the heritage into which we were born. It was an impulse, he noted, that had mobilised millions behind the cause of environmental protection, through bodies such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Conservatism also has a tradition of thinking critically about markets, though it has been less visible in recent decades. For Scruton, markets were not a “quasi-religious” institution but a means to an end. In so far as they tended to equilibrium, markets were a useful “social organism” that contributed to “the maintenance of the social ecology”. But if costs could be dumped on “future generations”, or if “waste and spoliation” were treated “as cost-free externalities”, markets would become “anti-social and exploitative machines”.

Scruton offered a passionate, Conservative critique of the view that “growth” was always to be prized: “Growth is good only if it does not fill the sinks. In this sense much of the growth that we have seen since the Second World War has not been a gain but a loss — a vast appropriation from the future of assets that are being used up and not replaced.” Even Thatcher insisted that “free markets” would “defeat their object” if they did “more damage to the quality of life through pollution” than the well-being they promoted by “the production of goods and services”.

In this spirit, not with the laissez-faire insouciance they’re remembered for, the Thatcher governments intervened directly in markets, using taxes to discourage leaded petrol and banning products containing harmful CFCs. This owed something to Thatcher’s respect for scientific opinion: as she warned in 1988, “a nation which does not value trained intelligence is doomed”. It also marked her aversion to debt and her belief in “precautionary action”. If it was wrong to burden future generations with the costs of borrowing, it was equally wrong “to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up”. She compared climate action to household insurance, warning that it would be “more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.

This was climate politics as good housekeeping. It was also ecology as national security. “Spending on the environment”, Thatcher told an American audience, “is like spending on defence — if you do not do it in time, it may be too late”. In the decades that followed, the security implications of climate change would become ever more pressing. The 2021 Integrated Review, published by Boris Johnson, listed climate change alongside terrorism as a threat to security and prosperity. It was in response to such warnings that Johnson named “tackling climate change” as his “number one international priority”.

What does this mean for the future? Climate change asks new questions of all political traditions, but Conservative environmentalism has rich resources on which to draw from across its intellectual firmament. For those who are not Conservatives, the results may sometimes be frustrating. Conservative environmentalism may be more drawn to market solutions, or more sceptical of international agreements. The localism prized by Scruton may seem hopelessly inadequate to a global crisis, while the commitment of the Conservative Environment Network to “grow our economy faster” will alarm for whom “growth” itself is the problem.

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Liz Truss still haunts the Tories

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Conservative environmentalism will not look the same as its Labour or liberal equivalents — but that is precisely why we need it. Faced with such an awesome challenge, conservatism can bring a set of tools, ideas and insights that would otherwise be missing, in a mutually enriching exchange. As John Stuart Mill reminded the liberals of his own day, “from points of view different from his, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees”.

If Conservatism turns its back on the climate question, it will be a dereliction of the Conservative tradition and those who claim to represent it. In 1936, in a debate over German rearmament, Winston Churchill, issued a warning that is as resonant today as when it was first delivered:

“Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger… The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

“We cannot avoid this period,” Churchill concluded; “we are in it now”. Conservatives, and everyone else, should rise to the challenge.

The Truss premiership crowned perhaps the most chaotic year in Conservative history: a year of three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors of the Exchequer, three Home Secretaries, four Health Secretaries and five Education Secretaries. Ministers cascaded through government like some dystopian vision of the Twelve Days of Christmas. That some of them were the same people, winking in and out of office like a faulty dash light, added to the sense of drawing-room farce. It was the year of Partygate, Pinchergate and Tractorporn, in which one prime minister was “ambushed by a cake” and another mugged by the financial markets; a year in which, as a Victorian Home Secretary lamented, “the crisis of one day is obliterated by the catastrophe of the next”.

Like a former government advisor, furtively editing his Wikipedia page, it would be understandable if Conservatives preferred simply to erase 2022 from the historical record. Yet if the Conservative Party is to dig itself out of the hole in which it is currently floundering, it needs a better understanding of the mistakes that landed it there. In particular, it needs to recognise that the Truss debacle was not some aberration from the party’s recent history, but the culmination of its most destructive tendencies.

Truss did not fall into No. 10 from a spaceship, like some twin-set Mr Bean. She won the leadership because she best expressed what Conservatism has become. The attributes that broke her premiership were also those that carried her into power, making her the favoured candidate of the party membership, the Right-wing think-tanks that supplied so much of her programme, and what the political scientist Tim Bale calls “the party in the press”: the network of sympathetic newspapers that works to maintain the party in office. Sold as the heir to Margaret Thatcher, Truss was to prove more Tin Lizzie than Iron Lady; but her ill-fated premiership was more a symptom of her party’s problems than their cause.

Truss was cheered into office by the party’s most loyal newspapers, which trashed her critics, lauded her tax cuts and only turned on her when it became obvious she could not survive. Headlines proclaimed “In Liz We Trust”. “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman”; and “Liz Puts Her Foot on the Gas”. The reaction to the mini-budget was equally effusive. “At Last”, gushed the Daily Mail, “a True Tory Budget”. A Daily Telegraph front page called it “the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver”. For the Express, part of Truss’s allure was “her long involvement with centre-right think tanks”. Responding to the mini-budget, a representative of the Centre for Policy Studies told the IEA podcast that it as “exactly what we would have hoped for”. The Taxpayers’ Alliance called it “the most taxpayer-friendly budget in recent memory”.

Newspapers and think-tanks could provide the mood music, but only MPs and party members could put Truss in No. 10. Her comments on the campaign trail may have alarmed the commentariat — whether dismissing the First Minister of Scotland as an “attention-seeker” to be “ignored”, or refusing to say whether the President of France was “a friend or foe” — but they drew cheers from the party audiences to whom they were delivered. As an aide to the Truss campaign told her biographers, “we went straight for the membership and gave them what they wanted to hear”.

Add in the endorsement of figures such as Daniel Hannan, David Frost, Sajid Javid and Ben Wallace, or the money that cascaded in from party donors, and the Truss premiership begins to look less like the personal failure of a flawed individual, and more like a systemic disaster for which the party bears collective responsibility. The Conservative Party turned to Liz Truss, not in some temporary spasm of irrationality, but because she embraced the ideas and courted the institutions that had become dominant in its make-up. The forces that destroyed her premiership were those that secured it for her in the first place.

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Take, for example, Truss’s enthusiasm for “moving fast and breaking things”. Not so long ago, a politician who boasted of being the “disruptor in chief” — who told a journalist that “I embrace the chaos. I’m a thrill-seeker” — might have been thought an unlikely candidate for a “Conservative” party. Her contempt for “orthodoxy” might have puzzled a party that prized tradition, while her conviction that sheer willpower could bulldoze all difficulties would have sat uneasily with a Burkean sense of human fallibility, girding its suspicion of grand visions for change.

Yet these were exactly the attributes that had enthused Truss’s supporters. For her cheerleaders in the media, the case for Truss was precisely that “she gets the need for radical change“; that she was an enthusiast for “elbowing to one side the Treasury’s fiscal conservatism“; that she persistently “knocked aside her critics” and was “ready to take on all opponents”. For the Daily Mail, it was Truss’s “boosterism” that “puts her in the driving seat”. Ignoring civil servants, economists and forecasters came naturally to a party that, in Michael Gove’s famous words, had decided years earlier that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. Why consult the Office for Budget Responsibility, when it had been dismissed by Conservative columnists as “a waste of money” and a “vehicle for establishment groupthink”?

A party that had spent years urging its supporters to “believe in Brexit”; that decried warning voices as “doomsters” and “gloomsters”, guilty of “talking down Britain”; and that blamed setbacks on “saboteurs” and “enemies of the people”, could not have been surprised at a leader who embraced boosterish economics, ignored warning voices and blamed setbacks on a mythical “anti-growth coalition”. Having burned out Remainers and moderates under Johnson, the party could hardly complain when Sunak supporters were informed that “their careers are over. If you’re on the stage you’re in a grave”.

The danger for the Conservative Party is that it turns to one of two comforting myths to explain the Truss debacle. One loads the blame entirely onto Truss, insisting that “the notes were right. It’s just that they were in the wrong order”. The same think-tanks who had hailed Truss’s rise to power now likened her to a “hubristic, or crazy, or incompetent” chef, who had bungled their “perfect and delicious” “recipe“. A second myth blames a “Remainer coup”, driven by the “anti-growth coalition” and “the Remainer elite”; a “very British coup” propelled by a “pushback against democracy”.

The reality is more prosaic. Truss was the product, not the source, of her party’s problems. She embodied a Conservatism that embraced creative destruction, that was dismissive of caution and contemptuous of institutions, that prized ideology over experience and regarded opposing voices as heresies to be burned out; a Conservatism that had ceded power to irresponsible think-tanks, contrarian newspaper columnists and a dwindling party membership that nobody has elected. Truss’s crime was to carry that Molotov Cocktail into government, holding it aloft like a torch; but it was others who mixed the ingredients and lit the fuse. The paradox is that this combustible mix was so often described as “real” or “true” Conservatism; yet that aspiration may offer the beginnings of a road to recovery.

If the Conservative Party is to rebuild itself, it might find inspiration in its own best traditions. It might recognise that institutions are fragile and easily damaged: that the problem with “moving fast and breaking things” is that things of value get broken. It might revive its sense of human fallibility, requiring grand ideological visions to be tested carefully against evidence and experience. It might recognise, as Margaret Thatcher did, that caution is not the enemy of change, but a crucial component of its success.

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That will require it to reconsider its taste for disruption, and to wean itself off the influence of what Truss herself famously called “vested interests dressed up as think-tanks”. Like the Labour Party, it may also need to rethink the case for treating the choice of prime minister as a subscriber benefit for its dwindling pool of members. Temperamentally, Sunak seems less inclined to play the “disruptor”; whether he can defy the forces in his party that crave such a role remains to be seen.

In her final speech as Prime Minister, Truss offered a mangled quotation from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult”. It was a bizarre choice for a politician who had just crashed the public finances and destroyed her own premiership, as a result — in her own words — of going “too far and too fast“. If the Conservative Party is to take Seneca as its inspiration, it might be wiser to look to his reflections on Epicurus, who remarked that “A consciousness of wrongdoing is the first step to salvation”. This, Seneca concluded, was a “very good” maxim. “For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right. You have to catch yourself doing it before you can reform”.

Thatcher has a hold on the Conservative imagination that no other leader can match. It is hard to imagine a candidate turning up to a leadership debate dressed as Stanley Baldwin, or modulating their voice to sound like Alec Douglas-Home. Ambitious young Conservatives do not promise “common-sense Majorism”, or curate images of themselves posing as Harold Macmillan. Nor do they launch their campaigns at the birthplace of Sir Edward Heath, like pilgrims seeking blessing at the Church of the Nativity. Only Churchill matches Thatcher’s charismatic authority; yet his standing as a war leader makes him less useful in domestic political debates. There is little mileage in promising to run the economy like Winston Churchill, or to impose Churchillian discipline on public services.

For two candidates who grew up in the Thatcher era, and who lack strong public profiles of their own, the allure of the Iron Lady is obvious. Like Thor’s hammer, Thatcher’s handbag can bestow godlike powers on those deemed worthy to lift it. Yet her centrality to the current campaign also tells us something about the modern Conservative Party, at a time when its political direction has rarely felt less certain.

Thatcher has come to represent three things that are sorely lacking in her party today: intellectual clarity, political longevity, and electability. Like many late-term governments, the Conservative Party often feels like it is reacting to events, rather than shaping them. It is struggling to hold together a diverse electoral coalition, with very different understandings of what it means to be “a Conservative”. It is about to elect its fourth leader in six years, and can smell defeat in the polls. In such a context, there is a particular allure to a Prime Minister who radiated ideological certainty, who set the agenda of British politics for a generation, and who won three general elections in a row. For a party that feels like it is lost in space, the gravitational pull of “Thatcherism” is hard to withstand. The challenge for Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak is to harness it to their purpose.

To do that, they are drawing on very different points in Thatcherite history. Perhaps curiously, as the younger of the two, Sunak seems more attracted to the early Thatcher. His Thatcher believed in “sound money”, “balancing the books” and “tackling inflation”. She treated the national finances like a household budget, where you don’t spend more than you earn and you lie awake at night worrying about a rise in prices. This is the Thatcher who raised taxes during a recession, in the belief that short-term growth was less important than putting the economy back on a secure foundation.

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For Liz Truss, it is not the prudent housewife that glitters in the imagination but the “Iron Lady”: the swashbuckling, pugnacious Thatcher who cut taxes, sent the fleet to the Falklands, defied the Soviet Union and, as one of her MPs famously put it, could not “see an institution without hitting it with her handbag”. She seems drawn, in particular, to the later Thatcher: the Gloriana figure who strode the world-stage and boasted of unleashing entrepreneurialism. While Sunak sings what Spitting Image called the “Grantham Anthem” – a hymn to “hard work”, “family values” and attention to detail — Truss’s outfits, speech patterns and Instagram posts evoke more heroic Thatcherite characteristics, such as resolution, determination and a willingness to stand up for Britain in the world.

Neither of these visions is entirely false. They do, however, draw selectively on Thatcher’s time in power. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister for 11 and a half years: a period that encompassed an enormous range of challenges and drew out different aspects of her personality. Periods of boom alternated with periods of bust, when revenues gushed in from North Sea oil or inflation neared 12%. A modest majority in the first term ballooned into the landslide majorities of the second and third, while the electoral base of the party shifted significantly across the decade. Subjects such as inflation, unemployment, the Cold War and European integration moved up and down the political agenda, while Thatcher’s own views evolved over time: most famously on Europe and the Single Market, but also on issues such as climate change and the law on homosexuality. As a consequence, her heirs have little choice but to pick selectively, as they seek to annex her legend to their own priorities.

This requires some careful forgetting. Neither Truss nor Sunak would wish to be associated with Thatcher’s views on homosexuality, single parents or the role of women in the home. In the age of Brexit, Thatcher’s enthusiasm for the Single Market has to be gently faded out, and there seems little interest in her short but significant period as an environmentalist. Rhetorically, at least, both Truss and Sunak remain committed to an interventionist, “levelling-up” conservatism that actively intervenes in the economy — a doctrine that Thatcher would have found very alien.

Yet the construction of memory is as much a political exercise as a strictly historical undertaking. The question that exercises the two leadership candidates is not “which version of Thatcher is correct?”, but “which is most potent in the present situation?” Which speaks most directly to contemporary problems? And which, crucially, is most alluring to Conservative party members?

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If context is the test, it is the challenges of Thatcher’s early years — the period invoked by Rishi Sunak — that resonate most powerfully. Rising inflation, pressure on public-sector pay, an expansionist Russia and a squeeze on the cost of living would have been painfully familiar to the Thatcher of the first term. By contrast, neither candidate is likely to enjoy the revenues that poured in later in the decade from North Sea oil, privatisation and the “Big Bang”. Yet the destination to which modern Conservatives aspire — a world of tax cuts, higher defence spending, and resistance to the EU — may favour the Gloriana Thatcher conjured up by Truss.

Whether this is helpful to the party remains to be seen. Dressing up as Margaret Thatcher is a risk-free activity when it is Conservative Party members who are lining the cat-walk. It draws a more mixed reaction among the general population. Promising to “run the economy like Thatcher” is unlikely to inspire support among communities that did not share in the economic boom of the Eighties — some of whom voted Conservative for the first time in 2019. For younger voters, in particular, the obsession with a figure who left office a third of a century ago risks looking like political cosplay: a narcotic reversion to the past by a party with no vision for the future. There are dangers in treating a party like a historical re-enactment society, or a political equivalent of the Sealed Knot.

Like so many political icons, however, Margaret Thatcher is no longer a purely historical figure. She has become a creature of myth; and the nature of myths and legends is that each generation tells its own version of the story. Even in her own lifetime, there were many Margaret Thatchers to choose from: the “Iron Lady”, the “Milk-Snatcher”, the prudent housewife, and “the Grocer’s Daughter”. In death, as in life, the struggle for her memory will shape the destinies of Conservative politics. Thirty-five years after she promised to “go on and on”, she would have wanted it no other way.

British parties are always fractious coalitions. First Past the Post requires parties to hold together an unstable alliance of forces, with divergent interests, priorities and visions. Labour has struggled throughout its history to bind together Fabians, Left-liberals, trade unionists, socialists and social democrats. The Conservative Party has been an explosive cocktail of Thatcherites, protectionists, free-marketeers, Powellites, paternalists and Christian conservatives. For a party to succeed, it needs some shared gravitational field that can contain its centrifugal impulses: a role played in Conservative history by hostility to socialism, the defence of established institutions, the rights of property and a “conservative temperament”.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been increasingly difficult to say what Conservatives have in common. They are no longer anchored in historic institutions, such as the Crown or the Church of England. They have lost their suspicion of change. They are no longer rooted in British business, and they can no longer mobilise against Communism at home and abroad. That leaves only the party’s notorious instinct for power. As a unifying force, that instinct should not be underrated: it makes the Conservatives much more likely than Labour to mobilise behind a perceived “winner”. But it also leaves any leader dangerously vulnerable if they begin to slide in the polls.

The party’s loss of cohesion was not resolved by the purge of 2019, or even the massive majority won at the general election. Johnson’s majority, like the Leave vote on which it was founded, was built on highly discordant materials: elements of which wanted to shrink the state, end austerity, cut taxes and boost spending. Those elements were held together by two magnetic impulses that were peculiar to that election: hostility to Jeremy Corbyn; and the desire to “Get Brexit Done”. With Corbyn gone and Britain outside the EU, holding that coalition together would prove a task of particular delicacy.

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Covid temporarily suspended that difficulty, because it suspended the usual rules of politics. Spending could rise, taxes fall and divisive questions be held over to another day — all in the name of a national emergency that discouraged political dissent. But as the Covid crisis recedes, the choices confronting the government are becoming more pressing; and for divided parties, choice is dangerous.

Johnson was in some respects well-placed to lead a party that was pulling in opposing directions. Throughout his career he has poured himself into a variety of ideological moulds, projecting different political personas to different sections of his party. As Mayor of London, he championed immigration, celebrated multiculturalism and called Donald Trump “unfit to hold the office of President”. As a Brexit campaigner, he mocked the “part-Kenyan” Obama and promised to “take back control” of Britain’s borders. As prime minister, he suspended Parliament and threatened to ignore legislation. That has allowed him to straddle his party’s divisions, to a degree unmatched by almost any other politician.

Johnson is not an Enoch Powell or a Tony Benn. He is not the sort of politician who sets an intellectual pole-star and drags his party along behind it. But nor is he simply a “weathervane”, who follows the prevailing political wind. Instead, his great skill is an ability to defy definition, by sending conflicting signals about his beliefs and intentions.

As Johnson approaches his 60th birthday, people still argue about what kind of politician he is “really”, or what he might become in the future. Is he a liberal? A populist? A “one-nation” Tory? A culture warrior? “Britain Trump”? Or a “Brexity Hezza”? Ambiguity is an underrated political skill, and Johnson has it in spades.

Johnson’s ability to hold those roles in creative tension — or in his favoured expression, to “have his cake and eat it” — has been a feature of his career. It rests on a series of rhetorical techniques, honed during his years as a journalist and public speaker. But the efficacy of those techniques has been declining in recent months: not because of “Partygate” – though that may have calcified a certain image in the eyes of the public — but because of changes in the economic climate.

Johnson’s favoured technique is rhetorical extravagance. Promises to “ping off the guy-ropes of self-doubt”, or to unleash “the ketchup of catch-up”, or to inflate “the mattress of dough” commit him to nothing, but they give an impression of energy and authenticity.  The effect is enhanced by a macho political style: one that scoffs at “girly swots” and “big girls blouses”, and parades a love of fast cars, hi-vis jackets, grandiose building projects and shagging. The result is an unusual combination of artful ambiguity and performative purpose.

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That runs alongside a self-parodying political style. It is not unknown for politicians to feign sincerity; Johnson, by contrast, actively performs insincerity. He deliberately strips his words of meaning, by rhetorical exaggeration, ludicrous turns of phrase and the knowing look down the camera. No other politician so consistently breaks “the fourth wall” in interviews, inviting the public to be in on the joke of his own performance. It becomes impossible to hold him to what he has said, because anything can be dismissed as a joke.

This has enabled Johnson to cultivate a reputation for dynamism, while sending conflicting signals on his politics. Johnson has been a prolific writer and public speaker for nearly 30 years. But if we set aside the insults and the gaffs (“tank-topped bum-boys”, “picaninnies”, “clearing the dead bodies from the beach”), few people could quote a word he has ever said. When challenged about his past comments, Johnson invariably seems astonished that anyone should have taken them seriously. For Johnson, ideas and arguments are like rhetorical flares: sent up into the sky to awe and amaze, while distracting from the emptiness around them.

So long as politics centred on issues of culture and identity, Johnson’s political style could be highly effective. But economic questions are less susceptible to this kind of rhetorical mystification: and those questions are moving remorselessly up the political agenda.

2022 may come to be seen, in retrospect, as the end of a 30-year period of consistently low inflation. Such periods are peculiarly hospitable to “cakeism”, because they soften the competition for resources. By contrast, inflation sharpens political choices: do you raise taxes or cut spending? Subsidise energy bills, or let the market decide? Inflation is already reopening debates about monetary policy, public ownership and the independence of the Bank of England, while wages, industrial action and the cost of living are all surging up the political agenda. The effect is to bring economic and distributional questions back into the political mainstream, opening up questions on which the party is deeply divided.

Such questions play to all of Johnson’s weaknesses and none of his strengths. Tax rates, wage bills, fuel costs and supermarket bills are not susceptible to his peculiar brand of rhetorical mystification; and voters struggling with rising bills and falling living standards may be less forgiving of a politics of distraction. It is no coincidence that his speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2021, in which he repeatedly lost his place and joked about Peppa Pig, landed so badly, when equally chaotic speeches on other subjects have drawn laughter and acclaim.

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Johnson himself has no economic policy to speak of. His approach to economics — like his view of history — centres almost entirely on heroic individuals: those “entrepreneurs” and “wealth creators”, for whose “concupiscent energy and sheer wealth-creating dynamism” we should give “humble and hearty thanks”. Discussing post-Brexit trade barriers earlier this year, he told MPs: “There is no natural impediment to our exports, it is just will and energy and ambition”. There is not much here for policy-makers to work with, at a moment when policy is badly needed.

On economic questions, at least, “to govern is to choose”. Yet every choice Johnson makes on tax rates, energy bills or public spending infuriates some wing of his party, eager for higher spending, lower taxes, more intervention or more deregulation. And as Brexit moves from rhetoric to reality, the choices already made grow harder to ignore. Johnson can give his party no star to steer by, for he has none. His political compass points only at himself.

Johnson’s leadership is a symptom, not a cause, of his party’s loss of cohesion and direction. For that reason, it cannot also be a cure — though it may, like a fever, bring the illusion of vigour and short-lived colour to the cheeks. Whether or not Johnson survives the consequences of yesterday’s vote, Conservatism is in a parlous state. It will take a very different skill-set than his to restore it to health and vitality.