Book review: Plus ça change?

Bale, Tim (2023) The Conservative Party After Brexit. Turmoil and Transformation. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-1-5095-4061-5 (Hardback). 368pp. £25

(This is the latest in the occasional series of reviews of books about Brexit. They can all be accessed via the tag ‘book reviews’.)

By any reckoning, the last seven years of British politics have been tumultuous, and at least one measure of that is the extraordinary churn of Prime Ministers – five, counting Cameron, since 2016 – and with that four Tory Party leadership contests and two General Elections. The Brexit referendum was the trigger which began this period, and the Brexit process that followed provided much of the content and context that ran through it.

Charting what happened during those years is a daunting and serious task, and in Tim Bale it has a serious and impressive analyst. Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, he has longstanding research expertise in, amongst other things, the Conservative Party. It is this party, and especially its leadership, which is the focus of this superb book. In it, Bale presents an assured, detailed account of the exceptionally complex story of the premierships of May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, with the emphasis on the first two, reflecting the brevity of Truss’s tenure and, at the time of the book’s writing, the newness of Sunak’s.

Yet, whilst being a serious and detailed book, written with the academic rigour that would be expected of the author, it is highly readable. Some Amazon reviews disagree about its readability, so perhaps it depends on what you are used to, but in my view Bale writes crisply and with brio, and for all the command of detail displayed it is never stodgy. There is also a certain amount of wry humour. To give just one example, recording that Truss did not offer David Frost a role in her administration, Bale adds the laconic observation “or at least not one he felt was commensurate with what he regarded anyway as his considerable talents” (p. 271). The ‘anyway’ adds a particular sting.

It is, very much, the story of the premierships both in the sense that these provide the structuring frame of the book and that the focus is largely on individuals. Most obviously that means the leaders themselves, but also what might be called the ‘high politics’ of their tenures. Thus the analysis includes the composition of different cabinets, the coalitions of support in leadership elections and parliamentary votes, the role of advisors, the tactical calculations of party political advantage, the opinion polls and their interpretation, the electoral manoeuvres, and the role of the media.

This is a deliberate choice, flagged up in the introduction, to capture the way that “individuals, and therefore parties as a whole, are as much tactical and reactive as they are strategic and proactive” (p.3). The consequence is, perhaps, to downplay the role of ideology, but it is an approach which is helpful in revealing how much of the Brexit process was haphazard and, certainly, ‘unstrategic’. Anyone who still thinks there was any kind of ‘a plan’ for Brexit will be firmly disabused of that idea by reading this book.

Distance and engagement

That last comment reflects the way that, given the focus of this blog, which in turn reflects my own preoccupations, I approached the book primarily through the lens of Brexit. But, as I read it, I began to see that this is not, actually, a very sensible approach. Of course, as the title suggests, Brexit is a more than major presence, but this is first and foremost a book about the Conservative Party, and that observation, which may seem trite, is an important one. It is not just about delineating the empirical scope of the book but about the way that Bale brings an impressive, and to me usefully disconcerting, perspective, that is at once distant and engaged.

It is distant, in the sense that he manages to stand back a bit from the tumult of the events he describes so that, whilst they are in some sense extraordinary, they can also be seen as ‘business as usual’. So Brexit, rather than being some huge disjuncture in political life, can be read in the context of, and having some of the characteristics of, “the really big splits in the Conservative Party’s long history” (p.3). That point isn’t heavily emphasized in the text, but it is an implicit ‘viewing point’ throughout, and re-reappears right at the end when the possibility of an impending heavy electoral defeat is discussed alongside reminders of defeats in the mid-1940s, mid-1960s, and mid-1990s (p. 294).

So whereas all of us who have lived through the last few years may feel – as perhaps people at any period do – that there is something special and unprecedented about these ‘Brexit years’, Bale gives us a glimpse, at least, of how political historians may well come to write about it. It is the slight jolt that this gives (at least to me) which explains why I referred to it being a ‘usefully disconcerting’ perspective. If journalism is the first draft of history, then Bale provides, perhaps earlier than any other academic, the second draft of the history of Brexit (or, at least, those aspects of it with which the book is concerned).

Yet it is also an engaged approach, in that by delving into the weeds of political tactics and the ad hoc responses to the pressure of immediate events and headlines, Brexit is also re-positioned, but this time as being continuous with the mundane realities of politics and so, in that different sense, again understandable as ‘business as usual’. For example, although this may reflect my own naivety, I was struck by the way that, throughout this account, Tory politicians are shown to have approached Brexit not – or not simply, or even primarily – as a massive upheaval of national geo-political strategy but as an opportunity to gain party political advantage.

So, to give an example within that, whereas I had probably assumed that May would have spent her early days immersing herself in the technical complexities of Brexit, Bale suggests that “the new Prime Minister and her advisers seemed to be seizing opportunistically … on the way Brexit had ripped apart Labour’s already fraying electoral coalition.” (p. 23). Of course, it might have been better all round had my assumption had been right, but Bale’s account is all too plausible.

Similarly, I tend to see events like the resignations of leading Brexiters (e.g., David Davis, Dominic Raab, p.63 and p.72 respectively) as being about their perennial preference for fantasy over reality; or the crucial parliamentary votes over Brexit as being, centrally, about the implacability of the Ultras’ ideology. But, here, although the “near religious” (p.73) fervour of some of the Brexiters features, such events are configured as being at least as much about the perennial issues of party management, careerism, whipping operations, and ‘counting heads’.

A corrective to Brexit-obsessives?

The wider issue these examples point to is that Bale’s analysis is a useful corrective for those who, like me, tend to write, at least implicitly, as if Brexit was pretty much the only political issue of the last seven years. That is just about defensible for the period up to January 2020, when the UK left the EU, but it is simply not true after that. That’s not exactly a news item, even for Brexit obsessives, but I suppose I still had a residual sense that Brexit ‘ought’ to have been central, because it is so important, with other events being seen as a distraction. But Bale’s account suggests to me that, for the political actors themselves, in the press of events, Brexit was not experienced in that way. This may well also be true of voters, and perhaps explains why, to my puzzlement at the time, the details of Brexit were actually rather little discussed during the general elections (or indeed the leadership elections) of this period.

None of this is to imply that Bale downplays Brexit. It is, rather, that he contextualises it, showing how it became imbricated with multiple other strands of politics. To take just a couple of numerous possible examples, Johnson’s initial, and as it turned out short-lived and ill-fated attempt, to protect Owen Paterson from the effects of the lobbying scandal that ended his career was bound up with the latter’s longstanding place amongst ‘Eurosceptics’ (p.215). Likewise, the overlap between ‘lockdown sceptics’ and the Brexit Ultras illustrates how ostensibly different issues were intertwined with Brexit (p. 173). Conversely, no one reading Bale’s account of Johnson’s downfall as Prime Minister (pp. 258-260) could possibly be taken in by Johnson’s own subsequent claims that he had been the victim of vengeful remainers.

So, in all of these ways, Bale’s book is a valuable challenge to Brexit-obsessives - including me and, very likely, many readers of this blog - by providing an account which has an implicit historical distance alongside an explicit focus on the everyday practicalities of politics. It certainly made me think differently. Equally, it could be seen as a challenge to the most ideologically-committed of Brexiters in that, for all they may have believed themselves to be engaged in a revolution, the outcome has been far less dramatic than they thought. Indeed, there’s already a discernible disappointment amongst such Brexiters not just with Brexit but with its failure to usher in a ‘new way of doing politics’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

It is worth saying that in this respect my reading of the book differs from most, if not all, of the other reviews of it I have seen (e.g. Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian), which makes me wonder if mine is fallacious – though evidently not to the extent of revising it. Most reviews put great weight on Bale’s undoubtedly well-founded suggestion that the Conservatives have “slipped their moorings as mainstream centre-right party” (p.291). Nevertheless, what I found more striking was how, despite everything that has happened, the political process itself, and the terms of political debate, have not dramatically changed. Yes, the norms and conventions of political conduct have been strained and frayed and, yes, political discourse has substantially coarsened and polarised, but the basic contours of both remain recognizable. In terms of the book’s subtitle, then, the ‘turmoil’ is undoubted, but the ‘transformation’ is less clear-cut.

Whether that was Bale’s intention I am not sure but, at all events, he leaves open the question of what is going to happen to the Conservative Party now. That’s wise, because it isn’t yet possible to have a genuine historical distance and so it remains unknowable whether the ‘final draft of history’ (if there could ever be such a thing) will conclude that Brexit marks a fundamental shift for British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, or whether it is only an episode, possibly important or conceivably only ephemeral. My own expectation, for what very little it is worth, is that, assuming defeat at the next election, the Tories will spin off into the weird world of the emergent ‘National Conservatism’ before electoral defeats, and the realities of electoral demographics, pull them back to something more recognizably normal. The only rider to that is that things would change dramatically if the ‘first past the post’ system were reformed in the meanwhile, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Encore!

Overall, this is an excellent book and a hugely important addition to the emergent literature on the politics of Brexit. It is also an exemplar of how academics can and should write for general audiences, something still rarer than it should be.

If I have a criticism, then it is that I would like to have seen more fine-grained analysis of the party membership, and also of party funding. Of course, the huge significance of the membership as a ‘selectorate’ of the leadership is made abundantly clear, as is the way it has all but driven out the relative liberalism of the Cameron period (e.g., pp. 126-127). Even so, there’s still something puzzling to me about just how radicalized the membership seems to have become in recent years, and in the extent to which both its members and its funders seem to have become so out of tune with the mainstream of, especially, business interests.

Moreover, it is curious that they seem to have done so in different ways, with the membership so obsessed with social traditionalism and the funders (I suspect) increasingly reflecting highly untraditional ‘disruptor’ or even ‘disaster’ capitalism. Might this be the long-term unwinding for the always fragile coalition of social traditionalism and economic liberalism that Thatcher’s Conservative Party managed to sustain? Might it reflect the changing nature of British capitalism?

These are questions of political sociology and political economy which perhaps can’t be answered within what I’ve called the ‘high politics’ focus of this book, for all the virtues of that focus. For that matter, perhaps they are questions that would need another book and, if so, then undoubtedly Bale would be its ideal author. Equally, it would be fascinating to read, as a companion volume to this one, his analysis of the Labour Party after Brexit. But, just as the finest performances are greeted with multiple cries of ‘encore’, it is hardly a criticism to conclude, after having read a book, that I’d like to read two more books by the same author.