On Wednesday evening, peers finally nodded the EU withdrawal bill towards the statute book. At the same time, a few hundred metres away, the prime minister took to a makeshift stage in College Gardens to revive her vision of post-Brexit Britain.

Theresa May framed her remarks in terms of the crisis shaking the established order of liberal democracy across Europe and the US. If May has one core belief, it is that to fail to deliver on the EU referendum would fan the flames of populism.

“Nothing would hurt our democracy more than to give the people the choice, and then not to trust their judgement when they give it,” she told guests at the Policy Exchange thinktank’s summer reception.

Plenty of Conservatives would dismiss her sentiment as simplistic. However this appeal to the will of the people has become a monstrous cudgel against more nuanced response. The paradoxical consequence is that, having weaponised this “will”, it is now threatening the political cohesion upon which liberal parliamentary democracy, and the Tory party itself, depends.

Leaving the EU is disproportionately a crisis for the Tories. With the second anniversary of the referendum falling on Saturday, the dilemmas remain over how to leave and what the consequences will be. But one other question has arisen: is a post-Brexit Conservative party an oxymoron?

This month’s Prospect magazine asks if the Tories can survive Brexit (spoiler alert: no).

Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, writes in this week’s New Statesman (£): “We will not know the final nature of Brexit for many months, or even years, but what we do know is what it is doing to our politics.”

Nick Timothy in July 2016. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

He warns that his former boss is doomed, like a character in a tragedy, to see the need for change yet be unable to deliver it. “Destiny dictated that she would be the prime minister who delivers Brexit … and few domestic reforms.”

As Timothy acknowledges, however, it is not just Brexit. It is what is left of the Conservatives afterwards.

The party in the country – a shrinking band of fewer than 100,000, disproportionately old, white males in favour of Brexit – retains its oppressive control over the Conservatives’ future as the electors of any future leader. It is easy to see it as the embodiment of the party’s rediscovered appeal to older, poorer, whiter parts of the UK.



Sitting amid the wreckage of Cameron’s failed experiments in modernisation – the NHS reforms that May has pledged to reverse, the arbitrary cruelties of universal credit, the unaccountable education reforms, and the referendum itself – the party is searching for a more appealing reason to exist.

One response is a perceptible leaning towards a prelapsarian Toryism, the era before Margaret Thatcher.

Neil Carmichael, a former chair of the cross-party education committee, regards Mayism almost as a reversion to the era of Ted Heath and the 1970s. “You listen to the talk of an industrial strategy and the power of the state to intervene, and it is almost as if the Thatcher years never existed.”

It has become commonplace – as an example of how new thinking is possible even in the darkest hours – to reference the 1942 Beveridge report.

Unlike Beveridge, however, the increase in intellectual headscratching on the fringes of Westminster is not so much at the frontier of new thinking: it is an attempt to find pragmatic solutions to the overwhelming sense that capitalism has failed.

In September, the second Big Tent ideas festival is to be held in Cambridge. Partly an attempt to capture the attention of the next generation, it is morphing into something bigger. Its prime mover, the former minister George Freeman, fears the government has failed to comprehend the scale of the challenge ahead.

“It needs to be a really bold renewal moment, [a] much bolder commitment to enterprise, [a] different model of global Britain, aid, trade, security – much more woven together – radical localisation of Treasury incentives,” he says.

“The scale of the underlying domestic policy challenges which drove the Brexit vote – debt, deficit, housing, low growth and low disposable incomes – means that Brexit has to be recast as a catalyst for much bolder domestic policy renewal. Without that reform, the underlying grievances [Jeremy] Corbyn has tapped into will worsen.

“As the last election showed, simply implementing Brexit without a bold programme of one nation reforms will fail.”



Lined up against Freeman and his small band of radicals is Michael Gove, the environment secretary and self-appointed analyst of disaster. Along with Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Conservatives in Scotland, he is the chief hope of reformers seeking more incremental change.

Michael Gove, the secretary of state for environment. Photograph: Robert Perry/Getty Images

This month, Gove made a speech about the economy that the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, might have applauded.

“Economic power has been concentrated in the hands of a few … crony capitalists have rigged the system in their favour … debt has fuelled growth in an unsustainable fashion… Our politics, culture and regulatory models have worked against innovation ... Many of our fellow citizens have seen less and less value placed on their work and themselves … communities and individuals have seen so much of what they value which is beyond economics … overlooked or ignored.”

As May noted wryly on Wednesday, Gove has become ubiquitous on the thinktank circuit.

With Davidson, he is backing the newest one, called Onward. Its name is not a deliberate echo of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party, just as Gove would deny being a Macronesque-style disrupter. Yet Onward boasts that it is about more than ideas.

The spokesman, Nick Faith, says: “Onward is all about outcomes, about what works.”

On Monday it publishes its first report, on housing. It is an attempt to combine a “big bang” idea – on the buy-to-let market – with pragmatic interventions.

“If you come in with the viewpoint that either the market or the state is best at delivering something, you’re starting from the wrong position. The position should be, what is the best approach to get the best outcome for the individual. Your ideology can’t cloud what works best in practice.”

But there are many Tories for whom the libertarian Ayn Rand is still queen and the market still sacred. These are the people who fear a soft Brexit would really mean Brexit in name only.

On Wednesday, one cabinet Brexiter celebrated the passage of the withdrawal bill with a toast to a change in the political weather. But no political meteorologist can forecast what that change might mean, nor if the Tory party has the capacity to respond.