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The Economist

10 Sep 2024

Blighty newsletter: how Canada’s Conservatives are shaping the Tories

https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/09/10/blighty-newsletter-how-canadas-conservatives-are-shaping-the-tories

Britain | Newsletter

Blighty newsletter: how Canada’s Conservatives are shaping the Tories

Sep 10th 2024

Matthew Holehouse, our British political correspondent, explains the Canadian influence on Britain’s right wing

As we go to pixel, the final four candidates in the Conservative leadership contest have been picked by their fellow MPs. They are: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat. They will make pitches to the party’s members in speeches at their conference later this month. This week’s newsletter focuses on Robert Jenrick, who has emerged as a front-runner in the contest and whose campaign tells us a lot about the potential future of the British right.

Mr Jenrick has undergone a transformation in the past year—from a rather boyish figure who hewed to the centre of his party to a leaner, harder and much more right-leaning figure. His campaign in part reflects a study of Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who, as my colleagues in Ottawa report, is on track to crush Justin Trudeau, the Liberal prime minister, in the general election there due next year. Mr Jenrick met Mr Poilievre and some of his staff on a visit to Canada earlier in the year.

Mr Poilievre has been described as the Canadian Trump, which seems a category error. He has indeed fused elements of a populist anti-elitism (he has bugbears about the World Economic Forum, Canada’s public broadcaster and its central bank) with a more traditional vision of small-state, low-tax conservatism. But most unlike Mr Trump, he has a style that combines rhetorical punchiness with a high degree of fluency and discipline. He attempts to sound modern rather than reactionary.

I think you can distil four influences on Mr Jenrick’s campaign.

1) Tory contests have tended to present the selectorate with a dilemma: do they pick the candidate who seems competent and “sensible” from the centre of the party (think Jeremy Hunt or Rishi Sunak) or the one who may be more in tune with their radical instincts but who has a reputation for erraticism (think Suella Braverman or Liz Truss). Mr Jenrick seems to be aping Mr Poilievre by attempting to break this head-versus-heart, sane-versus-sound choice. He styles himself as both the most-right wing candidate but also a safe pair of hands. He favours, for example, exit from the European Convention on Human Rights without delay and radical cuts to immigration; he also talks repeatedly about the Tories’ need to “get serious” and be perceived as sensible, sober and competent if they are to win back power.

2) A Poilievre campaign maxim is to spend 90% of the time on the things 90% of people care about—namely, crime, jobs and the cost of living. There is a view in Mr Jenrick’s camp that Mr Sunak’s government came to behave like a Twitter account, wading into debates over the Elgin marbles or the signage on toilets. It is not that Mr Jenrick disagrees with the positions of the cultural right but he would spend less time on them.

3) Mr Poilievre has heavily courted blue-collar union members, with campaign ads set in factories and mills. For Mr Jenrick the Conservative Party’s future lies with provincial, working-class voters—more Mansfield in Nottinghamshire than Guildford in Surrey. Winning back Reform UK voters, by tacking to the right, would come before courting those who defected to the Liberal Democrats in the party’s wealthier heartlands.

4) Mr Poilievre has put housebuilding at the centre of his campaign—by, for example, tying funding for municipalities to building targets—in order to win over younger voters. Mr Jenrick proposed zoning-like planning reforms under Boris Johnson but met resistance from his colleagues. One possible way forward may be for the party to take a more regional approach, pushing for planning deregulation in cities (where it has the least support) with a more restrictive approach in rural areas.

Replicating a campaign method from across the Atlantic is never easy. Given that Mr Trudeau has been in office for nearly nine years and is hobbled by high inflation, Mr Poilievre’s anti-incumbency challenge may be doing well for the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer’s succeeded in July. Still, if he triumphs later this year, Mr Jenrick is unlikely to be the last Tory to drink the Canada Dry.