Morgan Jones
Liz Truss is setting up a new group. It’s called “Popular Conservatism” (or “PopCon”), and it launches next week. Truss will be speaking, as will Jacob Rees Mogg and Ranil Jayawardena, who, if you will recall, was DEFRA secretary for a few weeks in autumn 2022. Simon Clarke was originally on the billing, but it’s been reported that, following his one man coup attempt on Rishi Sunak, he can no longer make it. Their aim is to “restore democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular Conservative policies”.
PopCon is not the only such group to spring up of late with the aim of shaping the direction of the beleaguered Tory Party; it sits alongside organisations like the New Conservatives (Danny Kruger’s birthrate-concerned caucus of MPs in imperilled seats, set up in 2023) and the Conservative Democratic Organisation (founded 2022). There’s also something called the Conservative Britain Alliance, about which no one seems to know very much at all. Some would argue that a diffusion of such groups is a sign of political and intellectual health; that the Tories are letting a hundred flowers bloom. I would not. It may be springtime for Conservative Home journalists, but for the prospects of the party itself, this is all, I feel, a very bad sign.
I was a Labour activist and staffer through the Corbyn years and up into the first almost still-born 18 months of Starmerism, when people tend to forget that Labour lost in Hartlepool, barely held seats we should have kept easily and struggled in the polls. It’s safe to say I remember internal groupings you wouldn’t believe. I remember the aspirationally cross-factional group Consensus, launched in 2016, and the anything but cross-factional Saving Labour, another 2016 vintage. I remember the re-launch of the Tribune group in 2017 (a centre left grouping of MPs) not to be confused with the re-launch of Tribune magazine in 2018 (an unambiguously left publication that had nothing to do with the MPs). I remember Renaissance (launched in 2021 aiming to reconnect with voters lost to Labour and chaired by Stephen Kinnock) and No Holding Back (also 2021, in many ways quite similar in its aims, but avowedly Corbynite and run by Ian Lavery and Laura Smith). I remember the sub-groups that sprang up around the party’s Brexit position – Labour for a European Future, Love Socialism Hate Brexit, Labour for a Public Vote, the Labour Campaign for a Single Market – when that position felt truly existential in the post referendum years. I even remember Black Rose Labour, the party’s short lived libertarian socialist group (2021).
Success for such groups is not zero-sum. Most of the above went directly into the footnotes of books about the Labour Party, but Momentum, formed out of Corbyn’s leadership campaign in 2015, had serious impact on the Party and still commands not insignificant resource; Open Labour, also formed in 2015, also still exists. Labour Together (founded in 2015 as Labour for the Common Good) would certainly present itself as the one that worked, the thing that un-sunk Labour’s electoral ship and set us hard on the course towards government. Very few people in the party were immune from participation in such efforts. They say success has many fathers, but in this stretch of Labour history, so does failure – and only most of them are Jon Cruddas.
It’s not that any of these groups were bad; most had admirable aims, and some have had lasting impacts. They were, however, symptomatic of a broader problem. If you’re in opposition and things are going well, you’re not trying to solve the problems of your own party; you’re trying to solve the problem of being in opposition.
There are always factions and groups pulling and pushing with greater or lesser success on the coat sleeves of the party leadership. But organisations like PopCon or the Labour efforts discussed above, and particularly a proliferation of them, suggest a widespread belief that whatever’s happening now either needs to seriously change, or that it simply will not last, so the smart thing to do is to prepare for the next thing (or try to be it).
Mostly this kind of agonising is left for opposition, but the Tories have jump started the process while still, somehow, in power. I would hazard that it’s an even worse sign of the health of the Tory Party than it was of Labour, for the simple reason that Labour has more of an internal culture, more members, more organisations connected to it, more internal democracy. There’s room for these groups in a way there isn’t for the Conservatives, who are basically just a leadership structure with some pensioners and Curtis Yarvin reading 23 year olds attached. It’s a pretty thin soil to grow your hundred flowers in.
Who knows, maybe Truss’s new organisation will transform the party’s fortunes. Probably not though. I wish them all a very happy wilderness years.
Morgan Jones is a writer and Contributing Editor for Renewal.