So, how likely are you to vote for something called a Start-up Party? Thought not. A Start-up Party founded by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former Svengali? Don’t be rude. But how about a party focused on reducing immigration, closing tax loopholes for the one per cent, investing in public services and reforming the civil service? Well, now you may be onto something.
Cummings has given an interview to the i newspaper, his first since his spectacular departure from Downing Street, in which he repeats his plan to establish a new political party from the cadaver of the Tories after the next election. “The only point of doing it is to do something which is completely different from the other parties,” he says.
He is, unlike founders of other challenger parties, fine with the present electoral system and thinks it might work. “History shows it’s doable but it happens in response to huge system changes… wars and pandemics.”
He may be onto something, and it’s because of what he has identified; our inability to tell the modern Conservative Party and the modern Labour Party apart. The Tories, he says, now represent high immigration, high debt, high taxes and failing public services. Labour’s offer isn’t actually different. The two parties are cohering in the centre ground, in a de-facto consensus that The Spectator has dubbed Starmakism.
It is in fact difficult to know why Tory MPs like the unremarkable Natalie Elphicke bother to defect except to get attention, though probably not the sort she actually got.
Matthew d’Ancona’s characteristically insightful analysis of the Tory party’s plight in this paper this week suggested that a move to the Right would be taking it in the wrong direction. And yet it is quite difficult to discern in what respect his preferred Tory party would differ from that of Sir Keir Starmer.
Immigration? It’s unprecedentedly high under Rishi Sunak; from past form it would be higher under Labour. Public debt as a percentage of GDP? Spending on unreformed public services? Closing the class gap, the North-South divide? If you had one of those children’s spot the difference picture games, you’d be reduced to poring over teeny details. Essentially, the Conservatives are the party that gave an incredulous nation Liz Truss. Labour didn’t. Anything else?
There are dangers when the main parties cohere. So it’s not an inherently bad idea to bring on a new party which has something different to say
There are dangers when the main parties cohere. For one thing, people ask themselves why bother voting if the upshot of an election is that you get a change of face but not much else.
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For another, it leaves space for problematic outsiders. Ireland was for decades run by the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, so indistinguishable that their two leaders can now take turns in government without any visible difference in policy. But the price for that is that Sinn Féin, an altogether more problematic entity, is now within reach of power — or would be if it were in touch with popular opinion on the migrant crisis.
So it’s not an inherently bad idea to bring on a new party which has something different to say. Emanuel Macron single-handedly disrupted French politics by presenting a new party based entirely on himself. But there is no obvious equivalent here; the last was Sir Tony Blair who had the same attributes: centrism plus charisma.
But there have been successful disrupters in British politics too. I’m not thinking of Ukip, which was arguably the most successful movement of modern times in achieving its ends. There is a better precedent in the Eighties phenomenon of the SDP, the Social Democratic Party, made up of serious politicians known as the Gang of Four: David Owen, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers.
They were profoundly disaffected with the Labour Party to the point where they broke away to found their own movement. It got nowhere electorally but it galvanised the creation of modern, centrist Labour.
And funnily enough, the SDP remains in being, though it has yet to impinge on public consciousness — Amy Gallagher got just 34,449 votes for mayor. It lacks a leader anyone has heard of — William Clouston, anyone? Yet it is not, like Reform, simply a drier version of the Tory party. It combines social conservatism with economic liberalism, so it would favour nationalisation of water and rail.
If Cummings were to abandon the odd-sounding Start-up Party and join forces with the SDP, which doesn’t have a silly name but has plausible policies, he may get somewhere. Everything militates against the idea — first past the post, the absence of grassroots — but right now there’s a gap in the market. Just because it’s Dom, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
Melanie McDonagh is an Evening Standard columnist