The career of a near-forgotten Tory grandee casts a cold light on his successors today. Ian Gilmour was the first and possibly the last centrist Conservative of any intellectual distinction. Inheriting substantial wealth and estates in Scotland, moving effortlessly from Eton, Balliol and the Grenadier Guards to being proprietor and editor of the Spectator, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar (1926-2007) served as lord privy seal during Margaret Thatcher’s first term. Resigning in 1981 after two years in office, he became one of her most indefatigable Conservative critics.
As Thatcher solidified her position in the party, Gilmour became a voice from the past. Seen as disgruntled relics of a defunct regime, the “wets” who railed against her were discredited and shunned. Tories who lament the party’s “lurch to the right” in the current leadership election will go the same way, more quickly.
I met Gilmour only once, and then briefly, sometime in the early-to-mid 1980s. A languid figure, faintly redolent of whisky, he exuded a weary disdain for the passing political show. Beneath the well-mannered scorn, though, it was not hard to detect a sour bafflement. How could a wilful woman of modest origins hijack the patrician party he so elegantly embodied?
A Whig rationalist despite his professed Toryism, Gilmour interpreted Thatcher’s rise as the triumph of mistaken doctrines. In the book Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992), he portrayed his party as having been captured by an alien ideology, purveyed by the Austrian economist-philosopher Friedrich Hayek.
Thatcher did slip into dogmatism in her later years, most obviously over the poll tax, but it was the collapse of the British postwar settlement that inaugurated “Thatcherism”. The historic shift from Keynesian economics occurred in 1976, when Labour’s chancellor Denis Healey imposed public spending cuts after being forced to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund to avert what he feared would be national bankruptcy. When Thatcher entered Downing Street, three years later, she did so not as an exponent of any economic theory, but rather – as one of her close advisers put it to me at the time – as “the reality principle in skirts”.
Today’s Tory “shift to the right” reflects a similar reality. The defining political fact is the ongoing implosion of Starmerite centrism. The precipitous fall in the Prime Minister’s poll ratings is more than an early blip. His government is stranded in unmapped territory, with the “rules-based system” to which it aimed to attach itself nowhere to be seen.
The global financial markets on which Britain’s solvency depends are starting to suspect that Rachel Reeves’ Budget on 30 October will not add up. War in the Middle East could trigger an oil shock that would rekindle inflation and derail all her fiscal formulae. National borders are being reasserted across Europe. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, an avowed liberal, has announced a “temporary” ban on asylum seekers entering the country, citing the undeniable fact that Russia and Belarus are weaponising migrants in their hybrid warfare against the West. If Donald Trump wins the American presidential election and imposes high tariffs on Chinese imports as he has threatened, Britain will find itself in the middle of a devastating trade war. Whatever the outcome, the US will be plunged into bitterness and introversion – a moment of opportunity for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. The international liberal order in which Keir Starmer and David Lammy insist Britain belongs is coming to an end. Labour confronts an enigma of arrival: the world it expected to join when it came to power does not exist.
Tory centrists face their own enigma. The electorate to which they appeal has vanished. Millions are opting not to vote at all. By giving up the centre ground, we are forever being told by the media, the Conservatives are marching into the political wilderness. Shrewder heads in Labour know its worst nightmare is a Tory party that can win back Reform voters without succumbing to internal divisions.
The hosts that are abandoning Labour are not going to turn to “modernising centrists” who treat them and their concerns as atavistic, ignorant and reactionary. Gains for the Liberal Democrats may prove short lived. Whatever their professions of virtue, shire Nimbys will not welcome continued mass immigration. Unsustainably high inflows of migrants and stretched public services are concerns that unite a British majority. They will not be assuaged by a tweaked version of Starmer’s moralising, invasive and incompetent state.
Nor can the issues that concern voters be magically resolved simply by changing the law, as some on the right seem to believe. Setting a statutory cap on immigration, for example, is a mirror-image of left-liberal legalism, which – like Ed Miliband’s net zero targets – will prove unenforceable. Seriously grappling with Britain’s problems involves confronting their roots in a swollen apparatus of government, ideologically captured institutions and civilisational decline.
Tory centrists with a sense of reality will accept that the ground has shifted. Those who are wedded to the past should learn its lessons. Do they want to become, like Ian Gilmour, the unremembered remains of an extinct regime?
[See also: Debunking the fiscal black hole myth]
