The return of Johnson, Farage and Truss or the self-destruction of the British Conservative Party

The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, many of its critics point out, has entered a state of permanent hallucination that allows the resurrection of the most toxic politicians of recent years. Liz Truss, whose brief 49-day mandate sank the country’s economic credibility, is presenting her book these days Ten Years to Save the West (Ten years to save the West), and does not rule out a new attempt to become leader of the tories: “I still have issues to resolve, and I think the Conservative Party has issues to resolve,” Truss told LBC this week. The former prime minister accuses the deep state (the deep state, a conspiracy theory that considers that countries and the world are controlled by hidden forces) to frustrate his attempt to boost growth in the British economy, with a tax cut of more than 50 billion euros that sank the pound and the public debt of the United Kingdom in October 2022. In reality, it was the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office for Budgetary Responsibility that put the brakes on a madness that destabilized the markets in a few hours and almost sank the system private pension.

Truss has now joined a cohort of characters who hover around a Rishi Sunak in low hours. The prime minister, a technocrat who has tried to impose rigor on the country’s accounts while flirting with populism – with a tough speech against immigration or his determination to deport recent arrivals to Rwanda, for example – cannot convince the conservative bases with neither of the two strategies. Only four in ten voters who supported the British right in the 2019 elections would do so again if the candidate is Sunak, according to a recent survey carried out by Opinion for the newspaper The Observer.

The next general elections do not yet have a fixed date, but the Prime Minister himself has suggested that they will be “in the second half of the year”, and the majority of political actors in the United Kingdom are betting on November. However, there are still many obstacles and challenges in the coming months that could alter those calculations. On May 2, municipal macro-elections will be held that will cover a large part of England — and which will include, among others, the fight for the mayor of London. If the result ends up being catastrophic for the Conservatives, the pressure on Sunak to call the polls would increase. The average of published polls gives the Labor Party a 20-point lead. All predict a victory as overwhelming, or even more so, than that of Tony Blair’s New Labor in 1997.

Rebels against “the nanny state”

There is a general feeling in the Conservative Party that defeat is inevitable, and the internal battle is already focused on who will lead the ruins. As has happened before with many other political formations, the response to the agony is to increase the dose of poison, and voices proliferate accusing Sunak of having abandoned true conservatism, having been soft when it came to implementing Brexit or deploy a pusillanimous policy. There were many conservative deputies – 157, between abstentions and rejections – who this Tuesday voted against the Government’s proposal to prohibit the sale of tobacco to all those born after 2008. It is a health strategy already deployed in other countries, and which has the support of the Labor opposition. However, the hardline of the tories considers the measure a clear demonstration of the “nanny state” promoted by the current prime minister, which places restrictions on individual freedom.

All these resurrected rebels have one thing in common: their continuous flirtation and their undisguised support for the American presidential candidate, Donald Trump. “The world is on the threshold of an era of serious conflict, and needs a strong United States more than ever,” Truss said. “(With Trump in the presidency) the world was a safer place,” he said.

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Nigel Farage, the populist who promoted the victory of Brexit more than any other politician, interviewed his friend Trump again on the program he presents on GB News, a kind of speaker for the most extreme British right, similar to the American Fox News. Farage has ruled out running as a candidate for the last party that he once helped create, the Reform Party (heir to UKIP or the Brexit Party), but remains on the front line of the political debate and has not ruled out fighting for the leadership of the Conservative Party when, as all the polls predict, it goes into opposition.

Finally, there is Boris Johnson. The politician who has contributed most in recent years to sinking the international prestige of the United Kingdom and who has caused the most division among the British, continues to be an object of nostalgia among many Conservative members and voters. Johnson has deep grudges against Sunak, whom he considers the main cause of his fall as prime minister, and does not miss the opportunity to launch criticism and attacks against the current tenant of Downing Street.

During a recent visit to Canada, Johnson – who cannot be denied his capacity for witty phrases – described Sunak’s anti-smoking law as “absolute madness”. “It’s crazy that Winston Churchill’s party bans cigars,” he ironized.

More delicate was his criticism against the Government in the face of the idea demanded by other conservatives of suspending the sale of weapons to Israel, after the attack that ended the lives of the seven collaborators of World Central Kitchen, the organization of the Spanish chef José Andrés. Johnson described the proposal as “insane” and “shameful” in his regular column in the Daily Mail: “Do we want to hand victory to a bunch of murderers and rapists (in reference to Hamas)? “They ask us to carry out a complete repudiation of Israel after the country has suffered the largest and most terrible massacre of the Jewish people since World War II,” denounced the former prime minister, with an exaggeration in the tone that seemed to accuse weak to Sunak, already quite firm in his support for the Netanyahu Government. A revealing example of the current state of the conservatives, for whom nothing is radical enough to avoid the collapse that the polls predict.