Chris Patten: My six-point plan to drag the Tories back from the abyss

Britain’s new Labour government has got off to a flying start. After 14 years of increasingly incompetent and fractious Conservative government, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer seems to have got a remarkably firm grip on the beginning of the effort to deal with the mountain of problems facing the country today.

Starmer himself has travelled around the United Kingdom, from Westminster to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, seeking to rebuild at least a modicum of trust between the central government and the devolved administrations around the United Kingdom.

He has brought elected mayors from around England – Labour and Conservative – into his tent and enlisted their support for the efforts pioneered by the new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to recharge economic growth.

His government has set out to deal rapidly with the appalling crisis of overcrowding in our prisons, left behind by the Conservatives. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, is attempting to improve industrial relations in the health service so that it can get on with the job of reducing the waiting lists for even serious treatment.

Abroad, the new foreign and defence secretaries are busy restoring relations with our partners in Europe. Starmer himself has been in Washington for a Nato summit, pledging more support for Ukraine, and preparing for a meeting in Britain on security and foreign policy with the other European democracies.

And what of the Conservative Party? The earthquake of the recent election handed out what is probably its worst-ever defeat. It lost votes across the board to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Reform party. There was a spectacular cull of ministers left, right and centre, good and bad. Long-serving MPs watched majorities which had seemed impregnable reduced to handfuls of votes, or even wiped out altogether.

It is not surprising that a shrill debate has already broken out about how the Conservative Party, one of the two oldest democratic parties in the world, should try to rebuild. Would-be leaders of this rump party rubbish one another and attack the defeated prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for allegedly having been the main cause of the electoral disaster.

It is not new for the Conservative Party to lose its way in fratricidal rows. That is the malevolent business that started back in the 1990s, focused on Europe and John Major’s moderate conservativism.

Each row has been more bitter than its predecessor and today’s arguments are not only fuelled by rival ambitions – for example, those of extreme right-wingers like Suella Braverman and Priti Patel – but also by absurd attempts to paper over the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss and the years of lies and incompetence which were the main legacy of the moral vacuum represented by Boris Johnson’s years in 10 Downing Street.

So, as Lenin once asked, what’s to be done?

First, the Conservative Party needs to avoid rushing into doing anything except trying to pull itself together and learn how to play as a team. It would be best if Sunak would agree to stay on as leader for a short while, or alternatively make way for an interim leader who could command support right across the party.

Secondly, the Conservative Party should recognise that its main task, for the moment, is to act as the loyal opposition. It should be prepared to support the government when it is clearly trying to do the right things on the economy or social policy. The only way, for example, in which we will achieve reform in the planning system, and advance in social care for the elderly or the reorganisation of our higher education system and its funding is if the political parties can find constructive ways of working together.

Third, the Conservative Party membership – which has plummeted over the last few years, not least in the 34 years since I was party chair (it is now about 1/8 the size of the membership of The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) – must be told very clearly that the way ahead does not lie in playing footsie with Nigel Farage’s populist Reform party, let alone merging with it.

Farage, who led the campaign to get Britain out of the European Union at a huge and toxic cost of which we are increasingly aware, offers nothing for a healthy Conservative future. His saloon bar bluster, if translated into policy, would give us Liz Truss economics, Jeremy Corbyn foreign policy (which would be much loved by Putin) and an approach to our nation’s identity akin to that of Tommy Robinson (albeit Tommy Robinson with a cravat).

Fourth, attacks on so-called One Nation Conservatives – which means those Conservatives who believe that their party should seek to dominate the moderate centre-right in politics – would certainly consign us long-term to the political cemetery.

These One Nation Conservatives include most of those who have successfully led the party over the last century. They are patriots and internationalists who believe in the central importance of properly regulated market forces, which can produce the resources for generous social and welfare provision.

And where does Margaret Thatcher fit into this party’s history? She was far more cautious and pragmatic than is suggested by most of those who claimed today to be her acolytes. She believed that the Conservative Party should be a broad church.

She wanted those whom she would have called “strivers” to own their own homes and get a share in the firms that employed them. She would have defended the idea of healthcare for all, free at the point of use. She would never have left the European Union but would have continued to assert Britain’s interests in Europe, for example, through the internal market which she did so much to create.

Drawing on these traditions, which led to great political and national success, the Conservative Party should now set itself the task of working out policies which will enable us all to embrace change – whether demographic or technological — while protecting people’s sense of identity and community. Change is not our enemy. As was argued in the greatest European political novel, The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, things have to change in order to remain the same.

Fifth, Conservatives must not allow discussions about the meaning of our national identity to be dominated by simplistic ideological arguments about immigration. The control of legal migration and the prevention of illegal entry into our country can only be prevented by two things.

First, we need to recognise that the pressures on the borders of better-off countries in Europe and elsewhere will grow, with (for example) population growth in Africa – and will need to be managed through cooperation with our friends and the use of development, foreign and security policy to create stronger borders.

Second, we need an active labour market policy which brings together training, education and public sector pay in order to ensure that we are not so dependent on other countries to provide services in crucial areas of our society.

Finally, above all, the Conservative Party must understand that its long-term revival will be impossible if burdened by half-baked ideological prejudices – if, in other words, it lurches to the right.

Like the British people as a whole, the Conservative Party has traditionally been moderate and civil. It has succeeded when it has tried to reach agreements, rather than provoke fights. Why on earth, after a couple of hundred years of successfully following this approach, should we throw it overboard now?

Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of the University of Oxford and the author of The Hong Kong Diaries (Allen Lane, 2022)