Look away, Rishi: It could be 1997 all over again

If moderate Tories like Max Hastings and Anna Soubry (not to mention Mark Carney) say they’re abandoning Rishi Sunak and switching to Labour, the election tide really is turning in Keir Starmer’s favour, writes John Rentoul

I didn’t expect to see Blairism revived in all its essentials, not just as a guiding philosophy for the Labour Party but as a tendency of wider society (PA)

Max Hastings, who in his time has been the editor of The Daily Telegraph, an employer of Boris Johnson, a Daily Mail columnist and a distinguished war historian, is a monument of moderate Conservatism. So much so that he voted for New Labour in 1997 and 2001 – but who could have imagined that another Labour leader could persuade him to support the party again? And so soon after the party was led by someone so opposed to the moderate Tory view of national security?

Yet it has happened. Sir Max told The New European this week that he will vote Labour at the next election, not because of anything Keir Starmer has said or done, but because the government is “dreadful”, the Tory party is dominated by “Flat Earthers” and Brexit has been a “disaster”.

Earlier this week, Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England who was recruited by George Osborne, endorsed Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, saying it was “beyond time we put her energy and ideas into action”. John Caudwell, the Phones4U founder and former Tory donor, told The Independent that, after Rishi Sunak’s new “pragmatism” on net zero, he was thinking of giving to Labour instead. Yesterday Anna Soubry, a former health minister who left the Tories to form Change UK, said she would be voting Labour.

This is a shift in the spirit of the times comparable to what happened before 1997. Those were the days when the sun shone and the great and the good gathered in Tony Blair’s big tent. After years in which Blair’s name was mud and New Labour’s record trashed from both sides, I hoped for some rebalancing of historical perspective, but I didn’t expect to see Blairism revived in all its essentials, not just as a guiding philosophy for the Labour Party but as a tendency of wider society.

Yet here we are.

Hastings is an unusual trendsetter, perhaps. He is animated more than most by a contempt for Boris Johnson, bred by familiarity. “It never crossed anyone’s mind that Boris Johnson might enter public life because he was so obviously unsuited to it,” he said, speaking from the experience of having hired Johnson as the Telegraph’s Europe correspondent. “He’s the most selfish and irresponsible human being I think I’ve ever met …

“At one time or another in his life, he’s betrayed every individual or cause to which he has ever been attached. Whether it’s the women in his life or all the various causes.”

Hastings blames Johnson for aligning the Conservative Party with Nigel Farage, whose effect on public life “has been entirely malign”.

Yet he doesn’t think that the party and the government are now in safe hands under Sunak, who is less vocal about it but who appears to share Hastings’s view of the former prime minister. “I think he’s a decent person,” said Hastings. “But is he a leader? I’m afraid not.” He thinks Sunak’s fate is to be remembered as “the tail ender – the loser”.

Hastings thinks the Tory party is in thrall to its members, given power by William Hague in a disastrous decision. “These people thought Liz Truss was the answer to the nation’s problems,” he said. The members are “almost without exception fantasists about the sort of Britain that we live in”, he said, imagining themselves “standing on the White Cliffs of Dover behind Boris Johnson while he gives two fingers to Johnny Foreigner”.

He contrasts them with the “centrists” who used to dominate the party, which draws attention to the pool of One Nation Tories who could easily be recruited to the Labour cause over the next year until the election.

At the party conferences, I met a former No 10 staffer who was still fuming about Liz Truss’s leadership, who told me he would leave the party if she had any influence over a post-election Tory party.

There will be defections to come – although admittedly no one foresaw that one of them would be Lisa Cameron, a Scottish National Party MP defecting to the Tories.

Before the party conferences I went to the launch of a book, The Case for the Centre Right, edited by David Gauke, the former Treasury minister kicked out of the party by Johnson. Its authors are a roll call of Tories and former Tories who might endorse Labour at the election. Gauke told me he wouldn’t, but in the same breath said he could imagine having worked for Blair. But look out for Rory Stewart, Michael Heseltine, Dominic Grieve, Gavin Barwell, Amber Rudd, Anne Milton and Sam Gyimah. Andrew Cooper, another author who was David Cameron’s director of strategy, has already done some opinion polling for Keir Starmer.

The after-effects of Brexit still have some way to work through British politics. Hastings, Carney and Soubry are only an early wave of a One Nation Tory tide that is running strongly towards the Labour Party.