Since the demise of Boris Johnson’s premiership, the promise of working-class conservatism has been dormant. During the Conservative leadership campaign there was Robert Jenrick’s call to turn the party into the “trade union for working people”. But otherwise the most successful Conservative positioning of modern times – the electoral coalition that won the 2019 election – has been abandoned, with Reform gleefully collecting the lost voters.
Indeed, Reform’s membership now outnumbers the Conservatives’, the fruit of its relentless focus on connecting with the silent majority of the country. Kemi Badenoch must correct course. And while much has been made of the influence of Roger Scruton over her thinking, it is to a Victorian thinker she should look to refresh her project: John Ruskin.
In his own bid to realign the politics of Victorian England, Ruskin evaded simple categories. Instead, he was a Blue Labourite or Red Tory avant la lettre : as well as a self-professed “ violent Tory of the old school ”, he also claimed to be “ a communist of the old school – reddest also of the red ”. And though now best known for his writing on art, Ruskin’s social and political criticism took in a smorgasbord of welfarism, elitism, communitarianism, and (despite his own alleged sexual impotenc y) pronatalism.
But Ruskin also made the right enemies, just the kind that Badenoch should take aim at if she is to appeal to everyday working people: the economic establish.
