The party’s over: the Tory slump is part of a global conservative comedown

The Conservative party has been irrelevant before and recovered. There weren’t many household names in William Hague’s 1997 cabinet either. But back then they were up against a Labour party with a charismatic leader, record levels of approval, a stonking poll lead and a thriving economy. Now they’re facing a government already at Rishi Sunak levels of popularity and suffering their own poll slump. And yet in the recent local elections the Tories secured an equivalent national vote share of only 15%. It is Reform and the Liberal Democrats benefitting from discontent with the government.

It's probably of little solace to Kemi Badenoch that her fate is mirrored all around the world. Everywhere the centre-right is dead or dying.

Just two G20 countries are led by representatives of their traditional centre-right parties: Friedrich Merz of Germany and Shigeru Ishiba of Japan. Neither has a majority, and Merz has already fallen behind the radical right AfD in some polls. Of course, Donald Trump is technically a Republican, but his takeover of the party has changed it completely. He and his entourage of comic-book villains are more extreme than most of Europe’s radical right parties.

In some countries, such as Canada and Australia, the traditional centre-right party at least remains the main opposition, but in many, like France, Italy and Austria, they’ve been blown away by parties to their right. Ireland is now the only European country without a radical right party threatening the centre.

To understand why this is happening, we have to go back to the postwar decades when the centre-right was dominant in wealthy democracies. They achieved this by representing the interests of the burgeoning middle class and aspirational working class against socialist parties on the left. They stood, at least rhetorically, for order, robust institutions and a strong welfare state that nevertheless respected personal freedom. They were the parties of lawyers, accountants and executives. The managerial class; the people listening to the swinging big band sounds of Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. The generation who attended cinema en mass, when not eating the first TV dinners off their knees.

This started to change in the 1980s and ’90s. A combination of economic liberalisation, the rapid expansion of higher education and the end of the cold war broke the old demographic model of politics. It was no longer viable for parties on the left to appeal primarily to a diminishing pool of people working in traditional working-class jobs.

A new generation of centre-left leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder responded by adopting some of the managerialist and conservative rhetoric of the centre-right, while continuing to emphasise social liberalism and carefully managed redistribution to tackle the worst effects of economic liberalisation. The demographics started to shift. The centre-left vote was increasingly well-off, well educated and professional. Albeit, at this stage, still in coalition with those who had been historically loyal to socialist parties.

The electorally successful centre-right leaders of the 2000s and early 2010s – George W Bush, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy – continued to fight for the centre, at least initially. Bush and Cameron talked of “compassionate conservatism” that would, as George Osborne put it, achieve “progressive ends through conservative means”. They used issues like international aid and environmentalism to try to appeal to voters being lost to the centre-left (though Bush’s policy in government took an anti-environmental turn).

But increasingly these leaders found themselves under pressure from their right, as a new wave of activists who saw the managerial class as the enemy rose to prominence. In the UK, Nigel Farage officially became leader of UKIP in 2006 and immediately attacked Cameron as a “socialist” whose priorities were “gay marriage, foreign aid and wind farms”. In the US, Bush shifted rightwards during his presidency and then, after he was gone, the Tea Party movement flared up. In Germany the AfD was founded in 2013 by disaffected ex-members of Merkel’s party unhappy with her willingness to bail out EU partners and her openness to immigration. In France, the National Front (now National Rally), which had been around since the 1970s, started gaining more mainstream support under their new leader Marine Le Pen. They topped the ballot in 2014 elections to the European parliament.

These trends were mirrored across Europe. This revolt on the right was driven in part by the economic volatility unleashed by the global financial crisis and rising immigration, particularly following the devastating civil war in Syria, which began in 2011. But there was another factor, less discussed but equally important: a deep resentment of the increasingly socially liberal managerial class that had once sustained the centre-right.

Much of this resentment was intuitive. But there was an intellectual basis to it as well, stretching all the way back to 1941, when a former Trotskyite called James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution. He used his Marxist training to come up with an alternative class analysis, arguing that the capitalist class would not be defeated by the workers but by a new managerial class of administrators and technical experts who would increasingly hold all the real power in organisations. This class would seek to dominate the state to keep itself in power. He believed the Nazis would win the war because the managerial revolution had progressed furthest there.

Burnham was an influential voice on the American right, helping to set up William F. Buckley’s National Review in 1955, but his greatest impact came after his death in 1987. His work was picked up by a political strategist called Sam Francis, who wrote two books on Burnham and developed a political ideology based around crushing the managerial class. His writings from the 1990s are an almost prophetic description of the coalition that Trump has ridden to two presidential wins.

Francis ended up advising the firebrand right-winger Pat Buchanan, whose two failed attempts to win the Republican nomination in the 1990s also prefigured Trumpism, before becoming affiliated with a variety of white nationalist organisations. These ultimately morphed into the alt-right movement of the late 2000s, providing Trump with activist ballast. Francis died in 2005 but he helped the attack on the managerial class go mainstream, and his ideas were taken on by key MAGA personnel including Trump’s first campaign chief Steve Bannon and White House policy chief Stephen Miller.

What made this pivot so dangerous for the centre-right is that it created an alliance between the capitalist class, frustrated by do-gooder regulatory impediments to making more profit, and a larger pool of resentful outsiders, many of whom were older or retired and avid viewers of right-wing media.

This is evident in Trump’s apparently confused agenda, as he attempts to appeal to both groups within his coalition without being overly worried about the contradictions – simultaneously deregulating while insisting Walmart fix their prices.

Elon Musk’s DOGE represents the capitalist interest in the coalition and is explicitly influenced by Burnham. One of Musk’s techbro associates – Marc Andreessen – called Burnham’s work “the best explanation for the current structure of our society and politics”. The purpose of DOGE is not to improve government, but to destroy it by firing as many of the managerial class as possible, regardless of the human consequences.

The administration’s war on elite universities is part of the same determination to crush this enemy. It’s spearheaded by vice-president JD Vance, who embodies the coalition Sam Francis imagined, being both a protégé of the libertarian billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, and a self-proclaimed tribune for the “hillbilly” world in which he was raised.

It seems unlikely that Farage has read Burnham, but these influences have spread out from the US, through the increasingly globalised world of the radical right, and are clearly apparent in Reform’s agenda. Like MAGA-world, Reform is an alliance of billionaire capitalists like the party treasurer, property developer Nick Candy, and resentful voters stuck outside the world of liberal institutions. It can only be explained by the common enemy of the managerial class. The same is true of radical right movements across the world. It’s why “wokeness” is such a unifying source of anger – not because of the direct consequences, but because it’s seen as an exercise of linguistic power by one class over others.

Meanwhile the centre-right are caught between their traditional base and joining in these attacks in the hope of winning back the support they’ve lost to their right.

In the UK, Badenoch has chosen to try and join in. During her leadership campaign she published a paper called Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. It is, in essence, a restatement of Burnham’s argument, with “bureaucratic” taking the place of “managerial” (he is cited in the introduction). It argues that we’ve moved away from the traditional left/right divides of politics towards a battle between this bureaucratic class, who derive not just their income but their “justification” from “an ever growing regulatory state”, and everyone else.

According to Badenoch this class includes, inter alia: academics, civil servants, psychiatrists, compliance officers and risk managers, most lawyers, and everyone working in HR. That’s a lot of people to declare as your enemies. Especially when they are exactly the type of people that used to vote for you (well, maybe not the academics).

As a political strategy it’s hopeless for the Conservatives, many of whom were either in or adjacent to this bureaucratic class before becoming MPs themselves. For those who wish to rebel against the establishment, Reform is a much more attractive choice. Meanwhile the Tories are gifting professional graduate voters to parties of the left and centre, as demonstrated by the ongoing destruction of the Tory party by the Liberal Democrats in long-held heartlands like Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire.

Centre-right politicians are caught in the same trap the world over. In the last French Presidential election the centre-right candidate Valérie Pécresse got stuck between Emmanuel Macron and Le Pen, trying to take votes from both and doing so from neither. She finished a dismal fifth. The same is happening to Merz’s party in Germany – with some of his colleagues calling for the AfD to be banned while others want to emulate it. But all these parties are of the establishment – that is why they used to win – and in their attempts to copy the radical right they just end up attacking themselves.

Even in countries like Australia, where the centre-right coalition does not currently face a threat from their right, they’ve still chosen to engage in the politics of resentment. Peter Dutton lost the recent election there because he alienated wealthier, graduate professionals in big city suburbs, which used to be rock-solid seats for his party. His announcement that he would insist everyone working for the state returned to the office full time was an emblematic attack on the managerial class, and ended up being messily withdrawn because it was so unpopular.

The future of the centre-right depends on how the radical right evolve as they become parties of government. As we’re seeing in the US, the problem with destroying the managerial class is the lack of a replacement. As Burnham understood, that class is dominant in complex modern economies because it is impossible for the capitalists to make anything work without a bureaucracy below them. It’s one reason why radical right billionaires like Musk, Andreessen and Thiel are so obsessed with AI as a potential alternative to human administrators that would increase their power and profitability.

In the meantime, though, radical right governments in power will need to find ways to work with the managerial class in order to sustain functioning government. On the evidence we have so far, Giorgia Meloni in Italy is the best example of a leader who has managed to do this while still using culture wars and aggressive anti-immigration policies to sustain her base. Her manoeuvring within the EU is testament to her own bureaucratic skills.

The future of the Conservative party here may depend on whether Nigel Farage, or his successor, is similarly adaptable.

Photograph by Carl Court/Getty Images