Never has there been a politician to have fallen so foul of the Eric Morecambe mistake of playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, as William Hague.
The former Conservative leader spent the first years of this century as a hardline EU-sceptic and telling voters that lax immigration policies were turning swathes of the country into ‘a foreign land’. The electorate at the time proved largely impervious to these arguments, perhaps because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to be delivering better living standards and most of the country had not yet experienced the community-shredding delights of hyper-migration.
But following a terrible beating by Blair at the 2001 election and then a spell as shadow foreign secretary, warning that the Lisbon Treaty would steal essential British sovereignty permanently, Hague lost faith in his ‘kitchen table conservatism’ and instead bought heavily into the ‘heir to Blair’ agenda of David Cameron, George Osborne and their coalition partner Nick Clegg. A spell as foreign secretary ensued and he was a major player in the Remain campaign in the 2016 referendum, despite the Lisbon Treaty having been ratified by Britain and the sovereignty he had once identified as essential having gone down the plug hole. More recently he started releasing joint papers with Blair and writing articles declaring this to be the ‘age of immigration’.
This week in his column in the Times, he questioned the right of Donald Trump to be regarded as a conservative on the grounds that Trump was not pro-immigration and had also backed the idea of trade protectionism. Presumably the existence of Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell within the conservative political family had slipped his mind.
Hague then went on the radio on US polling day itself to declare Trump a ‘nasty individual’ who ‘must lose’. And with that his claim to have the most perfect reverse Midas touch in modern British politics was complete. Trump’s campaign for national sovereignty, border control and traditional cultural values (all central to Hague’s on 2001 manifesto) trounced a Harris White House bid pinned to the boilerplate progressivism of the Clinton-Blair era.
Hague is far from being alone among a generation of One Nation Tories who became accustomed to regarding themselves as get-with-the-programme modernisers just as the tide was going out on the progressive paradigm. One could say that George Osborne, Rory Stewart, David Gauke and Dominic Grieve are also among those wandering around an ideological wilderness while claiming it to be the promised land. It’s not where the voters live. Not these days.
In Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives have a new leader who could turn either way in the philosophical tussle her party is engaged in, so brilliantly did she protect her room for manoeuvre during the recent leadership contest. Economically she is at heart a small state, tax-cutting free trader. That’s fine. Only a fool could look at the size of the UK state, the overall tax burden, the dampened incentives to wealth creation or the burgeoning numbers of those hitching a free ride on the backs of others and conclude that a free enterprise booster jab is not part of the answer.
Can Badenoch preserve her immunity from the pull of the Hagueites?
On cultural matters, Mrs Badenoch instincts are sound. She fought a good and often lonely fight against the wokery of the new establishment during her years as a minister. On the key issue of migration policy she has made a lot of the right noises too, declaring that numbers matter, culture matters more and that Britain is our home and not just an economic zone to be exploited by those who lack loyalty to it or affinity with its values.
But can she preserve her immunity from the pull of the Hagueites, and of the Treasury bean counters who import people into Britain to boost GDP without regard to GDP per capita? Rishi Sunak, a Hague protégé par excellence, even embossed the laughable claim that ‘diversity built Britain’ on a new 50 pence piece.
Donald Trump has just demonstrated the potency of a national conservative agenda in Hague’s era of immigration. That has recently been shown in Italy and the Netherlands too. It is soon coming to a country near you, aka France.
This is not, as Yvette Cooper would have you believe, a matter of ‘shouting at the sea’. Countries can have borders which are properly enforced, cultural norms which are protected and communities sufficiently stable to develop their own comprehensive ties of kinship. Whether to do so is a political choice.
The siren voices of the One Nation tribe, even expressed in the flat Yorkshire vowels of Hague, are singing a song that will lure Badenoch conservatism onto the rocks. She must resist them at all costs. Only the right notes in the right order will do from now on.
