The Tory party has lost the plot – and could be bad news for Labour

Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck/The Guardian

For many people reading this, the analogy will seem ludicrous, but hear me out: if the Conservative party was one of your friends, you’d be very worried about them.

You can maybe imagine it: a privately educated pal from university, perhaps, who seems to have fallen on hard times and bad company. Ten or 15 years ago, they seemed urbane, clever and super-confident. Even if some of it went only skin deep, they professed to be green, socially liberal and culturally switched on. Now, though, they tend to look dishevelled and saggy-eyed. After a few drinks – and sometimes before – they speak an increasingly hysterical language of conspiracy theory and political paranoia. They also seem to be furtively spending some of their time with thugs and bigots: the kind of people whom that great English social commentator Paul Weller once associated with the smell of “pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many rightwing meetings”.

Last week, the latest election projection from YouGov predicted the Tories’ number of Commons seats plunging from 348 to 155. The party now seems to pin its hopes of avoiding complete wipeout on putting a few refugees on a plane bound for Rwanda – ideally, it seems, in the wake of a showdown with judges in Strasbourg. Meanwhile, Suella Braverman, whose time as home secretary included the insistence that this was her personal “dream”, is about to headline a rightwing gathering in Belgium alongside the authoritarian Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. In a similar spirit, Liz Truss decided to try to escape the disgrace of her lost weekend in 10 Downing Street by calmly standing on a platform while a fellow speaker lauded Tommy Robinson as a “hero”. Giving another signal about who her new allies might be, last week she attended Nigel Farage’s 60th birthday party.

These things feed a sense of uncontrolled Tory foment, with Rishi Sunak a hapless observer rather than any kind of effective participant. Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that nearly half of Tory councillors think the government is “too leftwing”. The activist website Conservative Post, linked to the high-rolling Tory donor Peter Cruddas, is now urging party members to stop any remaining “liberal centrists” from standing as Tory candidates, and has published a helpful list of what it calls “the first 10” who should go.

By way of illustrating the kind of politics such a move would assist, the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick – once an insipid Tory journeyman but now seemingly on a mission to become the full-blooded Enoch Powell de nos jours – has proposed an amendment to the government’s criminal justice bill whereby annual crime figures would include “migrant crime league tables”, based on the nationality and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts (according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, the government’s main concern is about the plan’s practicality, “as ministers have no ideological objections to it”). In among this daily carnival of nastiness and attention-seeking – regularly enlivened by noises off about National Trust scones, flags on football kits and the other small change of current Tory politics – sits David Cameron, who once sold himself as the representative of something very different. Sitting at the cabinet table, he must surely wonder what on earth happened while he was away.

Next month, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft will bring out a belated and very lucid sequel to his 2005 masterpiece The Strange Death of Tory England, titled Bloody Panico!, in honour of a phrase used by a long-forgotten postwar Conservative MP named Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles. It highlights what Wheatcroft calls “the undoubted degeneration of the party in terms of personnel” and its embrace of a fanaticism that gained huge ground after Cameron opened the way with the 2016 referendum. English Toryism, he says, has always had “many grave vices”, but also a few redeeming upsides: “pragmatism, scepticism, pessimism and sheer common sense”. He goes on: “Those virtues have occasionally deserted the Tories, as in the years before the Great War when Ireland drove them mad. A hundred years later they were driven mad again, by Europe. It was not the fact of Brexit, not even the economic damage it had obviously caused, so much as the political consequences for the Tories, both the party and the Tory press.” Once, he says, Conservatism avoided the kind of “blind reaction and extreme nationalism” that ran riot on the continent: now, ironically, its loudest voices are in increasing accord with the populists who are forecast to take a quarter of all seats at June’s EU parliament elections.

In the context of the Tories’ apparently inevitable defeat, the state of the UK’s political right might prompt a very understandable burst of schadenfreude. But no one should laugh: the Conservatives’ seemingly unstoppable lurching to the right is actually a grave cause for concern, for a few key reasons. One is to do with the basic functioning of our systems of power, and the fact that governments need to be held to account. Effective opposition, in other words, is a very important job, which an unhinged rabble will not be able to carry out.

But an even bigger cause for alarm centres on a possibility too easily written off. British politics now moves at a breakneck pace: less than five years ago, let us not forget, the party now apparently on its last legs won an 80-seat Commons majority. The state of politics in many of our neighbouring countries speaks for itself. The Tories’ immediate future, therefore, may not be quite the comical sideshow some people assume.

Even in the event of a Labour landslide, the likely survivors will include Braverman, Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, with the latter styling herself as a more level-headed kind of Conservative, but supported Brexit in 2016 and has a long record of culture-war posturing. Regardless of who becomes the next party leader, post-Brexit Toryism is now built around a solid set of factors that will ensure that the most paranoid, belligerent views will remain noisy and untamed: a reactionary activist base, plenty of supportive media outlets and the element personified by Farage – present both inside and outside the party, and set on constantly yanking the Tories even further to the right. If a Labour government hits the skids, therefore, the consequences could be terrifying.

Which brings me to my final source of anxiety. Keir Starmer’s technocratic approach to politics has obviously worked short-term electoral wonders, but it has also left a space that the re-energised post-Brexit right will sooner or later move to occupy: the one reserved for emotion, stories and narratives about what Britain is. Worse still, in the absence of those things, some Labour people are already filling the gap with some very dangerous messages. Last week, the Daily Express published a piece by Josh Simons, the director of the very influential Labour thinktank Labour Together, about immigration policy – peppered with the kind of tropes that any rightwing Tory would happily endorse. The government, he said, “have not made the average working family better off, just increased our population”. Migrants “should contribute to the pot before they take from it”, and “homes should be built for British citizens before those who live here temporarily”.

Here, perhaps, was a lesson so far unlearned: that no matter how dishevelled and discredited some people may seem, if you parrot their lines, you may yet allow them to recover and come roaring back.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist