Party of One...

Why is everyone on the right starting their own political party?

Matthew Goodwin is starting a new political party.

I’ll give you a moment to stop laughing….

So is Dominic Cummings…

I’ll give you a moment to stop screaming…

Now I will freely accept that both these men are better known than me, with Substack readership that dwarfs mine (share this with your friends, neighbours, followers, the postie!).

But then I hope that were I to reach their dizzying levels of readership, I would still have the self-knowledge never to think I could or should start my own political party.

We do live in an age of cult of personality politics, it’s true. The reason that practically everything written and discussed about what effect Reform could have on the Tory vote includes speculation about the return of Nigel Farage is that he is one of very few politicians who has managed political cut through with a degree of success, despite failing to be elected as an MP in the seven times he has stood.

But along the way, Farage’s fronting of UKIP and The Brexit Party has had a greater political impact on our country than the vast majority of hard working backbenchers. I wouldn’t say it’s been a positive one, but there’s no denying he’s had an impact and that Reform are. having an outsized impact on Tory politics.

George Galloway is another serial party-former. His impact on the country has been significantly less. But he is a celebrity politician (he was before he was the cat but that is still what you will hear about as soon as his name is mentioned) but he has always been more of an opportunist. He runs and sometimes gets elected when particular tensions are heightened. That the pattern generally runs that he lets his electorate down, loses his seat, and runs again with a different label elsewhere the next time the political moment looks opportune is the second (and more relevant here) part of the tale.

But the more successful personality politicians of our age have been those who took their cult of personality and welded them to an existing political party. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump both took this route to become the leaders of their country. Trump may do so again, and there is barely a day that passes without discussion of a possible BoJo comeback from some quarters.

These traits are not the sole preserve of right wing or communitarian politicians either. Both Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn could be said, in their own ways, to have become politicians to whom loyalty to them, for a not insignificant group of people, came before loyalty to the parties they led.

(One of my favourite anecdotes is from the 2017 Labour Party conference where a - somewhat worse for wear - young man at the Fabian Reception spent about 20 minutes telling me how much he thought Corbynism was a “cult”. Not 10 minutes later I saw the same person chanting “Tony! Tony! Tony!” as the DJ played Things Can Only Get Better. I honestly don’t think he saw the parallel.)

So yes, in this moment of populism, singular leaders can break through either individually or by getting themselves to the top of an established party.

But it’s rare. And in the UK at least, those who do it outside of the party system find themselves suffering at the hands of the electorate however much they may have an outsized place in the media and political discourse. The major established parties are hard to shift, even as - and perhaps because - they themselves shift and change over time and leaders.

I don’t think either Matthew Godwin nor Dominic Cummings will succeed in becoming the kind of semi-messianic figures who pull off being the face of electoral realignments - though of course the latter had significant success being the backroom svengali. Both have publicly fallen out with colleagues along the way (one of my favourite TwitterX sub-dramas is watching the excellent Rob Ford distance himself ever further from Goodwin - an academic he once did joint research with. The language used about Cummings in Tim Shipman’s recent book No Way Out is extremely Anglo Saxon - from his own side). Neither has a particular reputation for clubability or collegiality.

The first question that really ought to be asked is why aren’t these two joining any of the plethoras of fledgling right wing parties that already exist in their attempt to steal the Tories’ lunch? Why not Reform, Reclaim, the SDP or UKIP? They could probably rise quite quickly to take at least some of these over and they have an existing infrastructure which could be put to use rather than needed to build a whole new one.

(One of the under reported by very real reasons that Labour didn’t split beyond the failed move of the Change UK group was that as much as the internal fights were over policy, political behaviour and antisemitism one of the reasons both sides dug in rather than quit was because the Labour infrastructure was deemed as essential to rebuilding the party from the non-Corbynites and retaining power for Corbyn’s supporters.)

There are probably two reasons. The first being how many people these two may have already fallen out with within these parties would impede them playing the kind of leadership role they envisage for themselves.

The second is that each of these parties will have policies or stances they disagree with.

But, if you are looking for a political party so pure it will never disagree with you, you have two key problems.

Firstly, that’s essentially a party of one. Everyone, even your toadiest lacky, will disagree with you on something. Off they go, and there you are, looking around and wondering where all those people who used to cheer you on went.

Parties are essentially coalitions of people who agree on just enough to band together. Long term readers of this newsletter will know that I have had my disagreements (and will continue to) with Labour over everything from their policy to their communications to the vastly dysfunctional machinery of the organisation. But I have never left. I’ve never even really come close - though I did draw the line at campaigning in 2019. Because, I understand the fundamental truth behind the words on my membership card: that by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we do alone.

And yes, I get that collectivism is a socialist concept. So it is reasonable for those on the right not to subscribe to it. But then again, nowhere has this truth been more ruthlessly adopted than in the Tory party which has mostly understood their broad church and lightly worn politics as essential to what has made them the most electorally successful party in the world. That may change. But there are probably enough people in the party to fight for this notion. Whether they will win or not is another matter.

I don’t think Goodwin really gets this. And I get the strong sense from all that I have read of Cummings that he actively loathes other people. Pretty much all of them eventually and 99 per cent of them immediately. I don’t see a personality type in either that can make the compromises on the small to medium sized things that lead to achieving your bigger goals.

The second problem, is that unless either of them are planning to launch a military coup, they are going to have to ask people to vote for them at some point. They will need to be persuasive.

But, as many on the left have found out, painfully, if you restrict yourself to a bubble of people who only agree with your views, you will never understand what arguments you might come up against, never mind be able to realistically counter them and bring people to your side. Your debating instincts atrophy when you only listen to people who agree with you. This would not bode well for any party trying to grow its support rather than be a vehicle of tiny purity.

It is worth saying that there’s a reason that both Goodwin and Cummings see a gap in the market on the right. It is not unusual for discussions around the future of the Tory party to be existential. The party could collapse. It does not have a right to exist or to be the principal vehicle for voters and politicians of the right. There may be a gap in the market coming.

But that gap can only be successfully filled by a party that has the capacity to build the kind of coalition that exists between One Nation Wets like Greg Clark and hardline heabangers like Suella Braverman. Both of whom might well dislike each other’s politics but understand their need to be in the same party.

Purity politics will never be the route to achieve power. And without power you achieve little. With Reform already eating into the Tories vote, setting up further right wing parties over tiny differences make Goodwin and Cummings look more likely to lead a TUSC than a revolt on the right.

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Other writing

I wrote a piece for the Express this week as advice to the Tory Party not to go down the same route as Labour in power - leaning to their extremes. Don’t worry - they won’t listen!