Andrew Gilligan: The problems Cameron and Osborne made for Conservatives by being the ‘heirs to Blair’

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

Since I wrote last month that our failure in government has deep roots in the Cameron/Osborne era as well as in the nine years which followed it, a couple of people have asked me to expand on what I meant.

One aspect of the last Conservative government’s failure was, of course, that it failed in most ways to make Britain more conservative. And the main reason for that was that many of its most important members didn’t want to. Yes, the blob was also partly to blame; and yes, latterly our own disorganisation and incompetence, in tackling the blob and in other ways, were partly to blame.

But the fact is that Osborne and Cameron positioned themselves as the “heirs to Blair.” Cameron never said this publicly, but did say words to that effect at private events with journalists, including one with me, before he became PM. As shadow chancellor, Osborne publicly criticised Gordon Brown for “challenging the key elements of the Blair settlement.”

He meant on the reform of public services, but it also extended into full support for the Blairite social settlement and way of doing politics. I remember a senior Tory strategist complaining to me at the time that Osborne was slavishly following the Blair playbook.

There were many areas of policy failure.

Some were explicitly meant to show continuity Blairism, such as spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on aid. (As they ran out of things to spend it on, they found themselves subsidising holidays for British teenagers.) Domestically, much larger amounts of money were moved to the wrong people. The triple lock, one of the things we most need to dismantle, was created by George Osborne.

Austerity is the left’s biggest criticism of Cameron/Osborne.

But aid and the triple lock show the true, rather different, problem with the policy: that the money was spent in many of the wrong places and the cuts were made in many of the wrong places. The cuts to the courts, prisons and police took a few years to work through, but are now manifest in the effective impunity in many places for crimes such as shoplifting; in the victims waiting four years for a trial; and in the decline of the prisons towards American levels of decency and safety.

The state of the armed forces, and the disastrous defence review of 2010, is probably the single most dangerous legacy of the Cameron/Osborne austerity cuts, though to be fair this collapse has been underway for decades. Capital spending followed the same approach: what money there was (arguably too little in an era of low interest rates) often went on the wrong things, such as HS2.

Cameron’s successors also had mixed views about conservatism. May was personally more socially conservative, but ended up trying to impress activists with policies like transgender self-identification. Boris was at base a metropolitan liberal estranged from his tribe by Brexit (it was quite a job to get him off self-ID, for instance.)

All three also fell into a trap, which I might write about more in future, of accepting the centrist answer to a challenge as the challenge. So if you question HS2 – by any objective measure, a very poor way to help the North –  you’re branded an enemy of helping the North.

If you question net zero, you’re deemed to question the very existence of man-made climate change, or the importance of tackling it. Actually, however, many net zero policies have almost no chance of tackling climate change. Because even in the most willing parts of the world, broadly Western Europe, there will never be enough political willingness to implement them. The lightbulb moment for me on this was when the then co-leader of the Green Party, Adrian Ramsay MP, opposed new electricity pylons through his Suffolk constituency, needed to carry the electricity produced by North Sea windfarms to London.

If even the leader of the Green Party won’t support even one of the less politically difficult aspects of net zero, then much of net zero is surely dead. We need to start thinking quite urgently about doing other things to stop climate change, or to dampen its effects, such as mitigation or geoengineering – as well as carrying on with the bits of net zero which are politically tenable.

The reason I say all this is that I slightly feel that Tory centrism might at some point be due a comeback. It is the obvious gap in the market. But unless it learns from these and its other mistakes, it ain’t happening.