Brian Jenner: In the battle of ideas, here’s one – a strong dose of social conservatism

Brian Jenner is a professional speechwriter and founder of the European Speechwriter Network.

On Sunday 19 October, I went to the Battle of Ideas Festival, the annual gathering of non-aligned free speech fans.

I go there because I’m nostalgic for non-digitally intermediated politics. You can get a sense of what people are really thinking. The event is like an ideological mixed sauna. You can reveal whatever you like and nobody bats an eyelid.

Having attended for the past two years, I was surprised to see stall for Women2Win.
The fate of the Conservative Party is one of my special interests and I was keen to engage with a young Tory, called Tori, about the state of the party.

I told her my anecdote about how at the turn of the century I met a young woman called Liz, who wanted to become a Tory MP. Liz asked me how she should improve her public speaking. I told her she should go to the equivalent of AA for those who have a fear of standing up in public: the American organisation, Toastmasters. And she did.

Twenty years later I switched on my TV and to my surprise Liz was about to become Prime Minister. I told Tori how I never saw that coming. Though it was to her credit that Liz joined a group outside of politics, put herself to the test, and saw it through.

Then Baroness Jenkin arrived, a woman I always remembered as the tinkling bell of enthusiasm for the Tory cause, advocating for better organisation, new personnel and fresh ideas.

I gave the Baroness my potted history of why things had gone wrong. I’d been thinking about how to reinvigorate local associations in around 2006. I built a monthly meeting for creatives that attracted about 30 people and I tried to share my ideas with Central Office. To no avail. A few years later, I started Conurbation 2050 with Tobias Ellwood. It began as a ‘blue-sky-thinking’ project for the BCP area and ended up as a popular quarterly breakfast hosted by Tobias for about 10 years.

I told the Baroness that too much effort was spent on raising money and winning elections, not enough effort was made to build local associations and networks in the local community. She raised a knowing smile, but then told me rather gruffly that she wanted to go and listen to one of the sessions. I felt a bit crestfallen.

The Battle of Ideas was intense this year. I happened to wander into one session where a man with a working class voice was announcing that it was too late now, the revolution was coming. Then I went to another more peaceable session on the collapse of the world order.

Some of my Finnish friends wanted to go to the session, ‘Why is civil war a talking point?’ so I tagged along.

A young woman was talking about a Muslim uprising in a rather raw and dissonant way. Another academic was suggesting three different civil war scenarios. The most pertinent observation came from a panellist who said that the elites have absolutely no conception of how rising prices are hurting people on low incomes.

I agreed with that, while lamenting that there wasn’t more of a British sense of humour prevailing in the discussion.

The great divide in Britain is now between the graduate and non-graduate class.

The former has been obsessed with self-fulfilment for most of the 21st century, the latter has found it ever harder to flourish. It’s really hard to imagine what adversity is like if you’ve never experienced it for yourself, and ever since Brexit we’ve seen the mutual incomprehension of the two classes.

For the rest of the evening, I was processing the gloomy prospect of civil breakdown with my observation that the Baroness is no longer a tinkling bell, but a sombre knell for the Conservative Party that died on 5 July 2024.

I was overcome with the thought that what’s needed now is a strong dose of social conservatism.

If I were the party chairman I would make it a priority to ensure that at least a third of the people standing for the Tory Party at the next election were non-graduates.

It’s time to dissolve Women2Win. I would also begin to murmur that the aspiration to have equal numbers of men and women in Parliament was a Blairite preoccupation not a truly Conservative one.

Dare we say it? Bringing up children in stable homes is more important than fulfilling the fantasy that women can have it all.

There is a good way of seeing what is at stake by comparing two films. Godfather I is the patriarchal society, with traditions, strong social bonds and pressure to conform to social roles. Godfather II is about the collapse of traditions, the atomisation of society and the disintegration of the family.

What I picked up in Church House that Sunday are the early signs of what happens when government fails to govern effectively.

We’ve had too much of Godfather II and there is now a deep longing to return to a stronger social order. If the Conservative Party doesn’t pick up on that, other better organised minorities will fill the vacuum.