THE BIG READ: Penny Mordaunt is a red herring only Howard's Way could save the Tories

The prospectus Michael Howard put before the country in 2005 would sweep the board two decades later. But this generation of Tory MPs will never offer us that.

NOT since the resignation of Michael Howard almost 20 years ago have the Conservatives been led by someone authentically “right-wing”.

Arguably, Howard was also responsible for the last genuinely conservative social policy when, as home secretary in the 1990s, he appalled his civil servants by deliberately expanding the jail population via harsh new sentencing laws and guidelines that he advanced under the mantra that “prison works”

Photo by Ethan Wilkinson on Unsplash

In the 15 years that followed a doubling of the prison population, crime fell by almost 45 per cent. There were hundreds fewer murders in England and Wales (something for which to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever thanked Howard. So thank you, Michael). In 2010, even an article in The Guardian conceded: “It is common sense to agree with Howard that serious and persistent offenders who are locked up cannot commit crimes in society while they are behind prison walls.”

Of course, the present pathetic Tory administration is busy letting out serious offenders early because it has neglected to ensure sufficient prison capacity for everyone who deserves to be incarcerated for the protection of the law-abiding public. Indeed, the Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor has just felt compelled to warn that Justice Secretary Alex Chalk is now proposing to release violent offenders who “potentially will continue to be a risk to the public in future”.

Back at the 2005 election, Howard is best remembered for his slogan “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” and his immigration-focused campaign. It turned out that back then not enough people were thinking what he was thinking. The damage caused by excessive immigration was yet to fully be seen to be done. Though he slashed Labour’s majority and came within three percentage points of it in the popular vote, he failed to prevent Tony Blair securing a third successive comfortable win.

Since Howard’s departure, the Conservatives have been led by different varieties of social progressives: David “heir to Blair” Cameron; Theresa “modern slavery” May; that “Brexity Hezza” Boris Johnson. Even Liz Truss was highly comfortable with stratospheric immigration levels and pondered further increasing them during her own very short premiership. And of course Rishi Sunak has turned out to be the most Blairite of all.

In all the main policy areas, from taxation and public spending to law and order and immigration, Sunak’s Downing Street is running according to a Blairite template of talking right and acting left.

What has changed since Blair’s heyday is simply the fact that the template no longer delivers results. Private living standards have been stuck since the 2008 financial crash that Blair ducked out just before. In the entire industrial era there has never been such an extended flatlining. And social living standards have arguably fared even worse, with communities laid low by population transience, the collapse of town centre retail, rises in vagrancy and street crime and the splintering effect of radical left identity politics.

It is in this context that groups of Conservative MPs from across the party have apparently decided that the person best able to reconnect them with their long-lost voter base is Penny Mordaunt, yet another socially progressive, globalist centrist.

Given the rise in support for the right-wing Reform party, from four per cent when Sunak became PM to an average 12 per cent now and the big rise in 2019 Tories saying they won’t vote at all at the next election, it should be obvious that Mordaunt – who has energetically backed the left in the culture war – is not the answer.

The redeemable lost votes for the Tories are almost all to their right, among people who thought that a promise to reduce the overall level of immigration would finally be followed by action to reduce the overall level of immigration, not a near further doubling of it. People who expected the Tories to make good their pledge to stand for “the law-abiding majority, not the criminal minority”. People who read a promise not to increase the income tax rate and innocently failed to work out that their income tax was instead going to be pushed much higher via sleight-of-hand threshold freezes for year after year. People who believed that Northern Ireland’s place in the Union would be bolstered because the Tories had promised to “strengthen the integrity and smooth operation of our internal market”. And of course, people who believed that Boris Johnson’s “we will send you back” warning to those arriving illegally by Channel boat would turn out to amount to rather more than a hill of beans.

To imagine such voters will fall for the same lame trick again of backing a Tory leader who seeks to camouflage a progressive globalist agenda under a patina of patriotic vibes is to treat them with utter contempt.

It was once tempting to think that Conservative MPs were simply incompetent at reading political trends and sincerely remained of the opinion that a Blairite approach was the only way to ensure popularity. Yet the Brexit referendum result in which a much-derided “Europhobic fringe” turned out to represent a majority of voters (yes, we really were thinking what the right-wing was thinking by then) must have alerted them to profound shifts in public opinion.

The bitter reality is that they don’t want to give us what we want: Don’t want to re-assemble an election-winning 40 per cent plus voter coalition if the price for doing so is to offer a nation state-orientated “right-wing” programme envisaging further repatriations of sovereignty from international bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights; Don’t want to jail people who would do us serious harm, believing instead in a reformist agenda which naively thinks the way forward is more “community punishments” (presumably so-called because it is the community that gets punished); Don’t want to “level up” old industrial heartlands but would prefer to focus instead on retaining seats in the prosperous and socially liberal Home Counties commuter belt.

There are scores of Tory MPs, possibly more than a hundred, for whom the perfect election result would be to save their own seats but hand over the baton of centrist “progressive” government to Keir Starmer’s Labour rather than risk the rebirth of