Ahead of tomorrow's Tamworth by-election, Jay Jackson looks back to Robert Peel's infamous 'Tamworth Manifesto' in December 1834 and asks where the Conservative Party's defining 'prudent adjustment' will take it next.
Depending on who you are, Robert Peel is best known, speaking relatively of course, given he died the fat end of 200 years ago - when asked to name Prime Ministers on Pointless, only four people said his name - for being the 'Father of Modern Policing' (establishing the Met Police in 1829) or for repealing the Corn Laws. Peel's most enduring legacy, however, must be the modern Conservative Party.
Building on earlier incarnations dating back to the Civil War, the publication of Peel's 'Tamworth Manifesto' in December 1834 marked, as Douglas Hurd argued in 1988, 'the birth of a new Conservative Party'. Appearing in the national press for the first time on 18 December 1834, in anticipation of the forthcoming general election in January 1835, the Manifesto has been described as the beginning of the Tories' perhaps defining quality of 'prudent adjustment'.
In other words, this is when the shape-shifting, all-consuming, election-winning machine that we know today was born. Since then, prudent adjustments - to expansions of the franchise, the end of Empire, and the rise of the Welfare State - has been the hallmark of a party that has been in power for 69 of the last 100 years. Fast forward to 2023 and we've got a by-election in a (theoretically) super-safe Conservative seat - Tamworth in Staffordshire.
Tamworth has been Tory since 2010 with ever-increasing majorities. In 2019, the Conservatives won twice as many votes as all the other parties combined, and Tamworth voted 2 to 1 to leave the European Union in 2016. The most recent incumbent, Chris Pincher, was suspended from Parliament and resigned, triggering the by-election. Sensibly, given the nature of the allegations against Pincher, the Conservatives had already selected a candidate to replace him: the current MP for neighbouring Walsall North, Eddie Hughes, who will be out of a job when his seat is abolished at the next election.
However, last month, Hughes announced that he would not be standing in the by-election and the Party was forced to choose Andrew Cooper (a councillor since 2021) to contest the vote instead. A strange decision on the face of it? Given the Tories' remarkable ability to lose by-elections - Chesham and Amersham, and North Shropshire, as well as Tiverton and Honiton - Hughes clearly decided that he didn't fancy this particular fight. And can you blame him?
Today's incarnation of the Conservative Party (a 'Leave coalition') which has dominated British politics for the last decade is splintering before our very eyes. Voters who helped Boris Johnson secure a sensational majority just four years ago - those who had been alienated by 'New Labour', wooed by David Cameron, retained by Theresa May, and allied with Johnson to defeat Jeremy Corbyn's Labour and 'deliver' Brexit - have new priorities and new concerns. The salience of Brexit (and 'Leave' or 'Remain' identities) has declined steeply, as the cost of living crisis, crumbling public services and the chronic housing shortage bite. Despite Rishi Sunak's 'Windsor Framework' earlier this year, recent polling has found that increasing number of people think Brexit was a mistake and would vote to 'Return' if a referendum was held today.
After a third consecutive defeat in 2005, Tory 'grandee' Michael Ashcroft published 'A wake up call for the Conservative Party' - in which he argued that the Party's problem 'is its brand ... [which] means that the most robust, coherent, principled and attractive Conservative policies will have no impact on the voters'. While I don't think the problem is fatal yet, Sunak's approval ratings are rapidly falling to levels matching those of his party and Number 10 have pivoted towards the well-worn trope of 'making long-term decisions' and urging the electorate not to let Labour 'mess it up' in the hope that the Prime Minister will appear to have assembled a robust, coherent, and principled programme by the election.
Sunak's 'mini reshuffle' earlier in the year and the more comprehensive 'Autumn Reset' - including his conference announcements on HS2 and Net Zero, as well as the introduction of a phased smoking ban - are indications of his determination to break with 'thirty year consensus' in order to make 'long-term decisions for a brighter future'. But the inevitable question is already being posed: what comes next? And, if the polls stay the way they are and Labour sweep into power, who follows Sunak?
Recent history suggests that there's almost no chance that Sunak would survive a defeat and retain the leadership - something no Tory leader has done since Edward Heath in February 1974. At the Conservative Party's conference in Manchester earlier this month, future leadership contenders such as Suella Braverman, James Cleverley, and Kemi Badenoch used set-piece speeches and fringe events to roll the pitch, so the infighting and right turn looks set to continue. The Party's recent 'populist-authoritarian' turn is largely the result of indulgent complacency, as prudent adjustment has given way to impudent maladaption. The Conservatives are, in fact, the ones wallowing in what Suella Braverman called 'luxury beliefs'. Drunk on 13 years in office, it may well take the cold shower of opposition to shake the Tories out of their blinkered doctrinairism and return them to their pragmatic and ruthless mass-appeal.
Robert Peel's Tamworth Manifesto is the Conservative Party doing what it does best - adapting to seismic shifts that theoretically threaten its entrenched interests, creating a new voter coalition, and acceding to a level of change with the hope of heading off, in Peel's words, 'a perpetual vortex of agitation'. This begrudging acquiescence to a minimal level of change - pithily summarised by Lord Salisbury when he said that 'whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible' - is the quintessential essence and mission statement of modern British conservatism. At their conference in Manchester, Rishi Sunak proclaimed that Conservatives 'have always been at the front of society, leading it'. He was right - not only in the sense that the Tories are more often than not in power but also that, by necessity, the Conservative project must appear to be at the front of society, offering calm pragmatism and moderating change with what Herbert Asquith called the 'tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority'.
The Conservatives aren't expected to win the Tamworth by-election so if they do, I would argue that it will likely be a relatively insignificant bonus for him. Likewise for Labour - who are fresh off the back of a symbolic victory in Rutherglen and a successfully uneventful conference - defeat would be an insignificant bump on their prospective road to power. If the Conservatives do suffer another by-election drubbing though, in a seat that is a barometer for post-Brexit Britain, attention will shift further away from the current incumbent of Number 10 and towards what comes next for the Conservative Party - the ultimate political shapeshifters.
Jay Jackson is a political commentator who has written for outlets including Labour List, Compass, and Politics.co.uk