Andrew Gilligan: It’s time Prosper UK and the Conservative party accurately addressed the past

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

What we might call the central delusion of centrism is that until about 2016, or perhaps 2019, Britain’s political system and state were functional, and that they went wrong only after they were hijacked by politicians with cynical motives and populist slogans.

That, in essence, is the diagnosis of David Gauke, vice-chair of the new Conservative grouping, Prosper UK, who wrote on ConservativeHome yesterday that Tory centrists bear no blame for the electoral disaster of 2024. As he put it, “there was a debate about the future of the Conservative Party in 2019… we lost and Boris Johnson and Brexit won… Whoever was responsible for what followed… it certainly was not us.”

It was plainly also the diagnosis of Keir Starmer, who drew up no plan for government because he thought that the main change needed was simply for the bad people, the cynical populists and ideologues, to be replaced by the good people, the respecters of institutions and processes, the grown-ups in the room. Then the system would start working again.

I had thought that the obvious failure of this approach under Labour – even Starmer now appears to realise that the problems are far more fundamental – would discredit it to everyone. That may, indeed, be the most valuable service the new government has performed. But no: Gauke continues to argue for “focusing on pragmatism,” despite the mounting evidence from Starmer that managerialism isn’t remotely enough to meet the challenges we face. (Gauke is right to say that competence is necessary, but wrongly equates managerialism with competence.)

I respect many of the people in Prosper UK. Gauke, Andy Street, Ruth Davidson and others were successful at their jobs (though they were different jobs, more confined than the job that needs doing now.) The Tories are and must remain a capacious party: inclusive in the real, non-woke sense of that term. We look for points of agreement with people. The left and populists are exclusionary: they look for points of disagreement, heresies, deviations.

And as a member of Boris Johnson’s and Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street teams, I certainly don’t deny our part in the disaster that befell the Conservative Party. But it’s quite wrong to see 2019 (or 2016) as some sort of turning point. The truth is that our failure in government has deep roots in the Cameron/Osborne era and before it, too: in vast areas of bad policy, often done for performative reasons, and in the broader failure, since the financial crash, to ensure that the system was delivering for enough voters.

This isn’t “re-fighting old battles,” of which Gauke is rightly wary. It’s highly relevant to now.

Because to recover, the Conservative Party needs to do at least three things. First, start campaigning. Second (as Gauke rightly says), start talking about the economy. In the last few months, we have finally done those two things – which probably accounts for our improved confidence and poll standing.

But the third thing is that we have to find some way of honestly addressing with the public the failures of our time in government: the whole 14 years, not just the final five. We have to find some way of getting past or at least mitigating the deep antipathy towards us which those failures have caused in the electorate. That is much harder, which is no doubt why we have done and said nothing about it.

The current approach appears to be to wait until memories have faded. The risk, of course, is that by then there is not much of the party left. Another approach would be to draw up a proper plan which directly and candidly explains what we (and Labour) got wrong and what we will do differently to fix it. This will sometimes mean, as Gauke says, making difficult and unpopular changes.

But the answer is definitely not to go back to a style and content of government which bears some of the responsibility for the mess we are in.