Steve Forrest / PANOS
At some point, this may start to sound familiar: a well-established party cruises to office in three straight elections, riding the popularity of a dominant, if sometimes ruthless, leader. Then, entitlement sets in. The party’s policies turn stale. Its senior statesmen grow irksome to the public. Power-drunk members succumb to petty corruption, and a few party operatives even set out to game the political system to personal advantage. Finally—repelled by the steady drip of scandal—voters send the rascals packing.
The post-Margaret Thatcher experience of Britain’s Conservatives can read at times like a roman à clef for Canada’s Liberals after Jean Chrétien—another sometime dynasty that, like the U.K. Tories, once saw itself as its country’s “natural governing party.” In both cases, the succession battle to replace the warlord PM left the party crippled and divided. In both cases, a brief interregnum in office under a new leader merely staved off the inevitable. In Canada, as in Britain, a formerly hapless opponent restyled itself into a credible political alternative, occupying wide tracts of the deposed party’s electoral base and pushing the perennial incumbent further into the wilderness.
If Canada’s Grits are casting their eyes across the ideological divide toward David Cameron’s Tories, it’s because they embody both their fondest hopes and darkest fears. Yes, the British Conservatives are back in minority government—thanks in large part to the efforts of a savvy young leader. But they took 13 years to get there, which is an awfully long time to wait for a restoration. Senior Liberals in this country point to the Conservatives’ inability under Prime Minister Stephen Harper to crack the low 40s in popular support; there is reason, they say, for optimism. But even the most partisan among them admit the hardest part might yet lie ahead. “It’s difficult to make yourself look new again quickly,” says Terry Mercer, who served as the party’s national director from 1995 to 2003 and now sits in the Senate. “It’s even more difficult to do without consuming yourself in internal battles. Regeneration and rejuvenation is one of the toughest things any party will go through.”
To be sure, the fault lines in the British Conservative Party took a while to reveal themselves. The party’s 1992 election win under John Major masked internal divisions that would come to the fore following Labour’s landslide victory five years later under Tony Blair. By then, say observers, the Tories’ unbroken 18-year reign had left members out of touch with voters and suffused with a sense of invincibility. “They figured that they had the recipe for success,” says Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, “and they assumed the Labour Party had won only by stealing that recipe. They thought they could get back simply by waiting for the Labour Party to implode, or by being even more Thatcherite.”
What they didn’t do, says Bale, was listen to their own pollsters. Bored by the Conservatives’ Euro-skepticism, gripped by the sense that Britain had become a less compassionate society under Thatcher, voters were falling hard for Blair’s fusion of free-market economics and social justice, allowing the articulate young PM to build a formidable centre-left coalition at the Tories’ expense. In response, the Conservatives only hit the anti-Europe button harder, while mining public-opinion surveys to justify their rhetoric. In April 2004, their house pollster, Nick Sparrow, resigned in protest, saying party brass was pressuring him to frame questions in ways that would suggest stronger public support for the Conservatives’ Europe policy than actually existed.
The sense of disconnect was most obvious in the men the Tories chose to lead them. Faced with an opponent who enthused about Britain’s bright future, the Tories reached into their past, electing the estimable but ideologically rigid William Hague. Hague’s attempts to woo younger voters fell flat (he once wore an ill-fitting baseball cap during a public appearance in London’s Notting Hill), and he had a tin ear when it came to Britain’s growing blocs of ethnic voters. In 2001, he infamously warned that a re-elected Labour Party would turn England into a “foreign land,” which allowed the Blairites to paint the Conservatives as the party of xenophobia.
The election that spring didn’t improve matters. Blair’s second straight majority win left the Conservatives with just one more seat than in the previous Parliament, and a meagre list of candidates with which to replace Hague. Many of the Tories’ 165 MPs were rookies, while others weren’t sufficiently anti-Europe to suit the party brain trust. “Given that one-third of any political party is basically mad, you find yourself fishing in a very small pond,” says Bale, chuckling. “That’s one of the reasons they kept choosing the wrong leaders.”
Exhibit A: Iain Duncan Smith, a committed Euro-skeptic whose mild manner raised fears within his party about his ability to win an election. He was ousted by MPs in a motion of non-confidence in late 2003, and succeeded by Michael Howard, a political veteran who had held several cabinet portfolios under Thatcher.
Howard, another true-blue conservative, is credited with instilling party discipline while boiling the Tory platform into 15 clear, digestible principles, moves that helped the Tories to a 33-seat gain in the 2005 election. But he too failed to dislodge Blair, and at 65, Howard admitted he felt too old to wage the battles that lay ahead. His parting gift to the party was to reshuffle his front bench, promoting a promising young member named David Cameron to the position of shadow education secretary.
To credit Cameron alone with the recovery that followed would be simplistic, of course. Weighed down by the unpopularity of the Iraq war, beset by the sort of internal divisions that pushed Thatcher out of leadership, Blair stepped down in June 2007, having served longer than any Labour prime minister in history.
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