Tory talismans?
| Date | 22 June 2022 |
| Author | Bale, Tim |
He is absolutely right, for instance, to point out that Johnson is far from the first Tory leader to be accused of presiding over the death of 'authentic' Conservatism, nor the only holder of that office to draw selectively on his party's past in order to produce a platform designed to cope with contemporary political pressures. The parallel Saunders draws with Disraeli is an apt one - not least because, as he notes, Johnson appeals in particularly populist fashion to the idea of One Nation, in 'cakes and ale' contradistinction to the supposed puritanism of his 'progressive' opponents. Saunders is spot-on, too, when he notes, first, that Johnson's talents lie not in leading his party in any particular direction but in holding it (and its heterogeneous electoral coalition) together and, second, that one of his signal achievements is to have convinced so many voters that his administration has little or nothing to do with the administrations that have been running the UK since 2010. Finally, Saunders is surely correct when he notes the trend towards the hollowing out of many of the institutions that in the past have bound the Conservative Party into this country's liberal democratic system - a trend that has come about partly as a result of the Tories' increasing taste for creative destruction, of which its enthusiasm for Brexit is the most recent example, the first being the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.
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