Tory Wets are in Cloud Cuckoo Land

A guest essay on where liberal Toryism went wrong

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The following is a guest post by Henry George

The Tory Wets - ‘One Nation’ liberal conservatives who have dominated the Tory party for much of the last thirty years - are in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

That is the only logical conclusion one can reach based on how they are currently responding to the defection of Robert Jenrick, Andrew Rosindell, and many other right-wing Tories to Nigel Farage and Reform.

Writing in The Times this week, Matthew Parris, the standard bearer of the Tory Wets who more than a decade ago famously urged the Tory party to “give up” on white working-class people from the likes of Clacton because they were “going nowhere”, argues this:

“For [Kemi] Badenoch it’s time, now the nutters have gone, for an olive branch towards men like Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, David Gauke, Dominic Grieve”.

Other Tory Wets have been similarly giddy with delight at ejecting their right-wing challengers, joining the growing calls to return the Tory party to its Cameroon past.

In recent days, The Times has also published a series of punchy leader columns, taking aim at right-wingers who are fleeing the sinking Tory ship for Reform.

Last week, the newspaper proclaimed that Robert Jenrick’s firing by Kemi Badenoch is the means to achieving a more “rational, responsible, and tolerant conservatism”.

It also criticised the likes of Robert Jenrick for daring to talk about “incendiary” subjects such as mass immigration, multiculturalism and welfare.

The very next day, the newspaper hammered home the theme, proclaiming that Badenoch now has an opportunity to return the Tories to being the “pragmatic centre right”, and steer them away from what Tory Wets call “noisily divisive culture wars”.

What all this reveals is how utterly out-of-touch the Tory Wets are, how completely disconnected they are from much of the country that surrounds them.

Clearly, they cannot accept that the nationally conservative vision that many former Tories are now endorsing is much closer than the Tory Wets are to the forgotten majority of British people on immigration, cultural cohesion, and economic security.

Tory wets represent the right-wing of what historian J.C.D. Clark calls ‘far-centrism’. This form of politics presents itself as hyper-rational, technocratic and moderate, the centre ground between two opposing extremes of right and left.

But, in fact, far-centrism it is its own form of hyper-partisan extremism. It is openly hostile to true diversity of thought. It is strongly opposed to any meaningful break from the status-quo. And it is inherently contemptuous of the people.

Almost everything that has gone wrong in Britain in the last thirty years or so has either been enabled or outright caused by these supposed liberal centrists.

Open borders and mass immigration. Treating our common life as a global bazaar. Dissolving our national identity and culture. Questioning whether the sex binary exists. And the anarcho-tyranny of treating criminals and Islamist extremists with kid gloves while showing those who notice and object a steel fist.

Everything that Robert Jenrick referenced in his defection speech - from Britain’s declining economy to the demographic revolution that has been unleashed by historically unprecedented mass immigration - was made worse by these Liberal Democrats in Tory clothing.

Of course, the response is complete denial, that “Britain is not broken” and that saying so is even unpatriotic. As Peter Franklin argues, no real reflection and apology from the Tory party leadership has happened since the 2024 electoral bloodbath. That would require a reckoning with the country they left us.

What the Tory Wets view as ‘success’ is steering Kemi Badenoch back toward the failed consensus of 1997-2016, when Left and Right were indistinguishable and liberal centrists like them were at the peak of their political and cultural power.

But those days are long gone.

At its most basic, conservatism seeks to conserve the way of life of a distinct people, in a particular place, down the generations. With proper maintenance and renewal, traditions, norms and mores embody the life of a people, binding us into what Roger Scruton called the first-person-plural. This politics of the “we”, or what James Orr calls the “politics of home”, is the core of any substantively conservative worldview.

But when this foundation shakes and becomes unstable, as it now is because of unprecedented mass immigration, demographic change, state-enabled tribalism, and economic decline, questions of process and policy become entwined with and even overshadowed by the more existential question of collective identity: “who are we?”

The very same Tory Wets who are wishing the likes of Robert Jenrick, Andrew Rosindell and no doubt many other defectors to come good riddance are the same people who hollowed out conservatism of any remaining right-wing substance and now wonder why the British people are once again yearning for the politics of home.

From 2010-2024, the party that supposedly stood for conserving our way of life seemingly did all in its power to either stand aside or actively connive in the further undermining of the basis for its legitimacy and continuity.

Today, the reaction from Tory Wets and media outlets like The Times demonstrates that they see legitimate politics only as choosing between different flavours of the same managerial order that was turbocharged by Blair and further entrenched by fourteen years of Tory rule. They allow no serious alternative to this stifling regime.

Anything or anyone that questions the frame within which politics itself is done, is seen as a “threat to democracy”, defined as “the institutions we control” rather than the result of elections (when they happen at all).

This litany of woe cannot be waved away any longer. Polling focus groups now have normal, non-politically obsessed people in the provinces saying Britain is in terminal decline, immigration is completely out of control, and the economy is a disaster.

No less than 74% of Brits recently told pollsters Ipsos-MORI they think large-scale civil unrest is inevitable, while many clearly believe we need a full-scale political revolution and a new Cromwell-type figure.

Insisting that Britain is not broken in the face of this response to material reality is wilfully complacent. Denial is itself a form of decadence.

Those “noisily divisive culture wars” that the Tory Wets so disdain are not a distraction from politics. They are politics, especially in a country that has been shaped by both Labour and the Tories, two sides of the same managerial order.

And the tragedy for people like me is that much of the institutional weight of the Conservative party, in which liberal Toryism dominated for much of those fourteen years, has been on the wrong side.

I am frankly ambivalent about Robert Jenrick, but the forces he has only recently tapped into represent the dismal, dying legacy of the Tory Wets - people who imposed on their narrow project on the rest of the country and now cannot comprehend why the rest of the country is moving so rapidly away from them.

The Tory Wets had their time in the sun and it proved to be utterly disastrous for the country; we must now ensure they have zero control over whatever comes next.

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