James Wright: Thanks, Ruth and Andy – but the era of managerialism is dead

James Wright is a farmer, agri-tech entrepreneur and policy director of the Conservative Rural Forum. He stood as the parliamentary candidate at the 2024 general election.

Ruth Davidson and Andy Street are back, launching their bid to “reclaim the centre” with a new movement called Prosper UK. It is exactly what you would expect from two of the party’s most polished performers.

As seasoned politicians, their intervention is polite and professional; their pitch is aimed for the seven million voters who have rejected populism and demand a return to the “broad church” Conservatism of the 2010s. It is, in every sense, a “grown-up” intervention.

It is also exactly the wrong medicine for a patient that is fighting for its future.

Davidson was a formidable campaigner who, at the peak of her powers, looked like the only person capable of saving the Union from the SNP machine; Street was a brilliant CEO turned Mayor of the West Midlands who fought a valiant re-election campaign against the odds. But as I watch their Sunday morning interviews and listen to their vision for the future of our party, I find myself thinking: thanks, but no.

Before we accept lectures on “competence,” we must look at the scoreboard of the era they represent. The “moderate” consensus of the last 14 years oversaw a stagnation in British life. Under the stewardship of their political generation, we strayed too far from Conservative principles and didn’t deliver on the electorate’s expectations, which led to the historic 2024 election defeat.

The bigger concern should be the people cheering them on. A quick look at Twitter shows who is rushing to endorse this “new” movement: Robert Buckland, David Gauke, and Gavin Barwell, a group who seem to believe the only problem with the last decade was that we weren’t “moderate” enough. Bizarrely, even Matt Hancock is listed as a supporter.

They represent a class of MP who would rather have the applause of the lanyard class than pursue improving the living standards of families in Somerset and the Midlands. Why on earth should we retread the path that led us off the cliff?

The fundamental flaw in the Davidson/Street worldview is the assumption that the current machinery of the state works and that it just needs competent managers to run it. The reality is that whilst the spirit of Britain isn’t broken, the state is. The “neoliberal” consensus they defend relies on outsourcing power to a permanent technocracy that actively blocks Conservative policy.

We saw it with Rwanda, where the will of Parliament was entangled in endless legal knots. We see it with infrastructure, where bureaucracy stifles investment and growth. And we see it in our economy every day, where the myriad of quangos seem more interested in their own job security than the public they seek to protect.

We don’t need to “reclaim the centre”; we need to build an aspirational conservativism – one that aims to break the state to remake it. That means restoring ministerial control so that elected representatives, not civil servants, actually decide policy; it means being willing to drastically remove or curb judicial review, which has morphed into politics by other means; and it means a ruthless cull of the quangos that dilute accountability and stifle innovation.

There are plenty of ideological reasons why we shouldn’t look back, but there is one reason we cannot. It’s the maths.

Davidson and Street are essentially pitching to recreate David Cameron’s 2015 coalition, a mix of traditional Tories and socially liberal professionals. But as the Breaking Blue report from the Onward think tank made painfully clear, that coalition has disintegrated. It does not exist anymore.

The ‘Right-Liberal’ segment they are chasing – socially liberal, economically right-wing – is a shrinking demographic. The data shows that the voters we need to win back, including those ‘Blue Wall’ defectors who went to the Lib Dems, are not actually liberals. In fact, on issues like immigration and culture, they are significantly more conservative than the party they switched to. They left us because they thought we were incompetent, yes – but not because they thought we were too right-wing.

The real battleground lies with the ‘super-demographics’: older voters, Leave supporters, and homeowners. These are the people who form the backbone of any winning Conservative coalition – and are the people who demand the very state reforms that Davidson and Street would reject. They want borders that mean something, an economy that values production over finance, and a culture that is proud of its history rather than ashamed of it.

There is absolutely room for centrists in the Conservative Party; we have always been a broad church, and we need the talent and experience of people like Ruth and Andy. But they must accept that the world has moved on, and we must move with it. To look to the past is to ignore the scale of the problems we face. Worse, if we retreat into the comfort of 2010s nostalgia, we will abandon the future to the radicals who are waiting to fill the void.