Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus? Has the Tory Party Finally Chosen between Europe and America?

Abstract

When Andrew Gamble's Between Europe and America was published in 2003, the Conservative Party was in deep trouble—a victim, he claimed, of its own success under Margaret Thatcher in destroying ‘the post-war compromise’ that had kept the United Kingdom together, allowed it to participate, albeit reluctantly, in European integration, and helped it cope with imperial and economic decline. Yet, getting on for two decades later, the party appears to have regained the hegemony that then looked lost. Moreover, by leading the country out of the EU, the Tories seem finally to have made the choice between the two relationships and the two models of political economy that, according to Gamble, they had long attempted, however uneasily, to reconcile. When we look more closely, however, at trade, at foreign and defence policy, and at the Johnson government's economic policies, it looks as if the Conservatives—for all that the majority of their MPs can be classified as Brexiteers, as Atlanticists, as neoliberals, and therefore as Thatcherites—continue to hope (not necessarily irrationally) that they can have their cake and eat it too.