Matthew d'Ancona: The Tory project isn’t ‘bust’ but it is plainly creaking under stress

One of my favourite moments in the church sitcom, Rev, showed the impeccably modern Archdeacon Robert rushing off, as ever, to a chic cultural gathering: “I need to get going now. I’ve got tickets to watch David Hare read some of his emails at the National.”

It is a perfectly-pitched gag, funny because it lurks on the fringes of plausibility. If any contemporary man of letters might just read out the contents of his inbox to an audience, it would be Hare. As a playwright of distinction, he has settled in recent decades into the role of dissident-laureate; deploying his drama both to report on the state of the nation (media, financial sector, Labour Party, Iraq War) and to deplore those who — in his opinion — have vandalised the country he loves.

Yesterday’s Guardian published an edited version of his Richard Hillary Lecture, delivered last week in Oxford. In this densely argued polemic, Sir David’s central thesis was typically forthright: “In its essential thinking, the Tory project is bust.”

Really? Less than a year after David Cameron’s unexpected general election victory, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party shrink-wraps itself into ever-greater irrelevance, this assertion seems (at best) counter-intuitive.

Some of Hare’s claims are overblown or downright sophomoric. Conservative governments, he says, “have launched waves of attacks” upon public sector workers, “all of whom they openly scorn for the mortal sin of not being financiers or entrepreneurs”. This is an absurdly partial way of describing public service reform, as though it were intrinsically immoral to ensure that taxpayers’ money is well-spent and that the interests of patients, pupils and passengers come first.

On occasion, the rhetoric is little more than a tantrum: Hare sneers at David Cameron’s “big society” as “self-evidently, a palliative, nothing more, the lazy shrug of a faltering conscience”. That “self-evidently” is trying to do far too much work.

So it is tempting to dismiss Hare’s cri de coeur as the foot-stamping outburst of the archetypal knight-luvvie. Tempting, but wrong. Sir David is onto something in his intuition that the Tory project is under stress: not bust, as he claims, but certainly creaking at the joints. Naturally, the general election result masked these tensions: success tends to postpone inquiry. But the EU referendum campaign is already ushering some of the divisions in question into plain sight.

If there is such a thing as Cameronism, it is not a project to dismantle the state but to decide upon its priorities. Hare is right that the banks were the principal culprits in the 2008-9 crash. But that financial crisis also forced a global assessment of fiscal realities. In a democratic society, how much of its GDP can the state afford to spend without dire consequences for economic stability and the burden upon future generations?

Cameron and George Osborne have pursued austerity for almost six years: a week today, the Chancellor’s eighth Budget will pursue this trajectory further (alongside much else, of course). No less interesting, however, has been the areas of spending that they have ring-fenced — the NHS, international development, pensioner benefits, schools, and defence.

But Cameron will be gone before the next election and the battle to succeed him will trigger a fresh round of argument over the proper limits of the state. More or less unopposed by the hibernating Labour Party, Conservatives will be free to pursue their deepest ideological yearnings.