National Conservatism Conference's cruel populism will play its part in Tories' defeat at next general election – Euan McColm

Right-wing libertarians are undermining Rishi Sunak’s attempts to restore the Conservatives' credibility

It's an unsettling combination of the sinister and the blandly provincial. If members of a hard-right cell decided to infiltrate a garden centre, they could do worse than to recruit volunteers from those in the audience at the National Conservatism Conference.

The three-day event in London – which kicked off on Monday – is a celebration of the crank right, a carnival of ideas so long as those ideas had run their course by 1958. Headline news from day one was the concession, from Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, that his party’s decision to introduce the compulsory production of ID for voters in the recent English council elections had been an attempt to gerrymander the result.

There was a time when admitting such a thing might have been career-destroying but we have grown so used to the debasement of our democracy by the Tory right that the natural reaction was to shrug and say “well, of course it bloody was”. Although not in attendance at the event, its figurehead is Boris Johnson. He remains, in the hearts and minds of those attending, our nation’s great saviour. There was much chatter among attendees about how he might be brought back from the wilderness, once more to make Britain (or, more accurately, middle England) great again.

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg speaks at the National Conservatism Conference in London (Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Denied the opportunity to touch the Johnsonian hem, delegates instead could enjoy speeches by such greats of the “oh, Christ, not him again” sector of public life as the loutish deputy chairman of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, the certified wing-nut former MEP and Brexit obsessive, Daniel Hannan, and the downright weird Tory peer Lord Frost, whose hatred of Scottish nationalism compels him to suggest foolish plans – such as rolling back devolution – which would only boost support for the SNP.

This is an unserious conference for unserious people, for libertarians whose time is passing by the day, for a right so discredited by the disaster of Brexit that their willingness to continue to appear in public speaks to a profound lack of self-awareness. Confused by the rebirth of the Labour party under Keir Starmer, these are the delusional and the stupid who think the counter-argument to the centre-left is more of the nonsense which has hollowed out the Conservative party as an intellectual force.

They will not help the Tories, of course, rather they will further damage the party. While Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tries to rebuild Tory credibility, the attendees at the National Conservatism Conference will undermine him. Their very existence in public life is an embarrassment to him.

These people have no big ideas, no vision beyond their nimbyish outlook. They live in a world where “you can’t say anything anymore” and Ayn Rand’s most famous novel is “Atlas Would Like A Word With Your Supervisor”.

Without the cover of Boris Johnson’s enthusiastic boosterism, the Tory right is exposed as out of date and out of touch. Its populism isn’t pally and jolly, it’s ugly and cruel. When the Conservatives lose the next election, every man and woman in attendance at the National Conservatism Conference may be sure they played their part.