"The Conservative Party is now a waste of time," wrote the despairing British journalist Frank Haviland in the new but already stalwart European Conservative magazine when UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned on Oct. 20, 2022.
She lasted in office only 44 days.
The shortest term of any chief minister in British history.
What went wrong?
Why did Truss become the British equivalent of William Henry Harrison, the U.S. president elected in 1840, who died 30 days into his presidency?
The Tories, as the UK Conservatives are known, have been in office since 2010.
The party’s proud tradition includes: Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, The Duke of Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), Robert Peel, and Benjamin Disraeli.
All were among the greatest leaders in their country, and indeed the world.
In December 2019, led by the eccentric Boris Johnson, the Tories won a massive 80-seat majority in the House of Commons.
The opposition Labour Party, advocating doctrinaire socialism and tainted by an ugly dose of anti-Semitism, suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935.
Today, less than three years later, Labour leads the Conservatives by 10%-20% in a bevy of national polls and is heavily favored to win a majority in the next parliamentary elections, which must be held by January 2025.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is demanding an immediate general election to capitalize on his chances of winning a huge majority.
That's unlikely, but whoever replaces Truss as Prime Minister will have only a brief window to turn things around. Yet even when faced with disaster, there is little indication that her party leadership will adopt a winning course.
How did the Tories sink to this humiliating lowest point?
Since World War II, the Conservative Party has writhed with tension between the principles that made it and Britain great (free enterprise, cultural pride, social stability, shrewd defense and security policies, and an absolute commitment to rationality and common sense) and a preening desire to be accepted by the cosmopolitan London and international elite, media figures, financiers, intellectuals, activists, and administrators who serve Britain’s deep state and act more in the interests of Davos than Devon.
Fitting in with the latter groups requires jettisoning everything sturdy and effective in British conservativism and offering a broad and apologetic embrace of the welfare state, neoliberal economics, multiculturalism, open immigration, European integration, and a host of other agendas that reduced Britain from a mighty empire to its current lamentable situation.
Long called "the wets," these quasi-conservatives have sought to impair the free market, the restoration of British sovereignty, Britain’s traditional faith and culture, and other initiatives toward national renewal — all in the name of containing what they and the elites whose approval they court consider to be the "extremism" of Thatcher and her antecedents among Britain’s true conservatives.
The wets are analogous to what right-wing Americans today call "RINOs" — Republicans in Name Only.
Ideologically, they would fit in well with moderate members of the Democratic Party.
Structurally, they are analogous to the dying breed of liberal Republicans, whose willingness to lose graciously on every important issue has led to their utter defeat at the hands of Trumpian conservativism as well as near extinction in national politics.
The British left despises the wets for being anywhere to the right of Labour, but has relied upon them to guide the Conservative Party to policy and electoral reversals or impotence since at least 1990, when they conspired to oust Margaret Thatcher from her highly successful 11-year premiership.
Since that dastardly deed, their leaders have been colorless caretakers of Britain’s decline.
John Major, who replaced Thatcher, declared his intention to refashion his country into a "classless society" and, among other policies, introduced comprehensive gun control.
By 1997, his dismal leadership had led the Conservatives into a minority government that was tossed aside by Tony Blair’s massive general election win that year for Labour.
A succession of even less effective wets: William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard — all of whom were curiously bald — failed to lead the party back to power.
Its 13 years in the wilderness even led it to consider a name-change to "Modern Conservatives" or some similar watered-down formulation that would show they had rejected the bedrock principles of their party’s tradition.
Some hope came with the arrival of the younger, telegenic, and more aristocratic David Cameron, who became leader in 2005 leading the party back to power in 2010.
But Cameron also proved a poor successor to his illustrious Conservative predecessors.
In opposing Brexit, he failed his party’s most important political litmus test since the appeasement policy its retro wets pursued toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
The Conservative leadership was so weak on the EU question for so long that multiple new political parties — the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Referendum Party, the Brexit Party, Reform UK — have emerged over the past three decades to campaign against the EU advocating true conservatism for Britain.
To the Conservative Party’s humiliation, in the 2014 European parliament elections UKIP won the largest number of votes of any British political party.
Cameron’s solution was to put EU membership to a national referendum, held in June 2016. The anti-Brexit "Remain" camp — which included him and an outsized share of the Tory leadership, including Johnson and Truss until nearly the last moment — lost, as a majority of Britons voted "Leave."
The result cost Cameron his job.
His successor Theresa May, a wet Remainer, dithered over the practicalities of Britain’s EU withdrawal for nearly three years before authentic Conservatives ousted her in favor of the increasingly militant Johnson.
Johnson won his historic 2019 victory a few months later.
He showed some promise for legitimate conservatism as prime minister, and did eventually "get Brexit done" as his frustrated countrymen had demanded.
Yet for all his bluntness and bravado, the wets behind the scenes did almost nothing to prevent Britain’s institutional takeover by woke ideology.
The wets also did almost nothing to stem what is for all practical purposes unlimited immigration, check rampant crime, protect Britain’s rich cultural heritage from the ravages of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and environmental extremists. Additionally, they did virtually nothing to stem a steady undermining of Britain’s values and traditions.
Cultural life remains ceded to the radical left.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson imposed lockdown policies that were among the strictest in the world, so severe that they made U.S. blue states look positively lenient.
Massive debt-financed spending subsidized almost every business and employee in the country.
Possibly under the influence of his younger and reputedly "woke" second wife, Johnson even championed a veritable answer to the radical Democrats’ "Green New Deal," designed to enforce "net zero" carbon emissions in Britain by 2035.
Labour advocates an identical policy, but with an objective to reach that goal by 2030.
Johnson’s leadership came to an end in July 2022.
His party was by then so captured by the wets that the ostensible reason for his ouster was a cocktail party held long before in violation of the government’s strict lockdown restrictions.
Johnson had apologized and paid a civil fine for the violation.
That didn't matter.
Prompted by a couple of garden variety sexual harassment scandals no true conservative should take seriously, dozens of his weak-willed colleagues resigned from government posts, leaving him in an impossible position.
Johnson had the option of calling a snap general election, which might have caused many of his party critics to lose their seats.
Tellingly, that risk was far less important to them than removing Johnson.
Choosing Truss after a vituperative two-month leadership battle again offered a chance of solid conservative government.
Truss campaigned on, and attempted to implement, an ambitious low-tax, pro-growth program sounding positively Thatcherite in its inspiration.
She appointed top cabinet officials drawn from close allies on the Conservatives’ far right and excluded the wets from most positions of power and influence.
The wet establishment punished Truss by tanking the stock market, ratcheting up interest rates, and depressing the already low-valued pound.
Firing her true conservative associates piecemeal did not save her.
Appealing to the crisis atmosphere, the Party fathers — a group of senior figures mockingly known as "the undertakers," told her she would have to go.
The top candidates to replace her are Penny Mordaunt, a wet and ardent Remainer; Truss’s opponent Rishi Sunak, who favored tax increases in the leadership contest and is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire; and Johnson, whose conservatism is demonstrably far from convincing.
Britain’s wets are ascendant again, after a rare six-week interregnum in their 30-year dominance of the Conservative Party.
If the rank-and-file allow them to return to 10 Downing Street, their country will continue to suffer from failed, watered-down policies until the next election, which will almost certainly hand power back to Labour while the wets nod non-confrontationally along and send their kids to hedge fund jobs in what remains of New York.
The only way out is to restore real and unapologetically conservative principles to the party, or build a new conservative party that can consign their broken old one to the oblivion that the moderates who have ruined it deserve.
Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. Read more — Here.
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