A fortnight ago, my wife and I were driving some 750 kilometres one day from the north-western tip of Newfoundland island back to Gander, home of the most important civilian airport in the 1960s, because it’s where planes from the west coast of North America had to refuel to get to Europe (and vice versa). It’s also where dozens and dozens of planes landed on 9/11, unplanned, of course, and the tiny town put up all the passengers for four days. They made that into a very successful Broadway and West End musical, Come From Away.

Anyway, there we are driving through the wilds of Newfoundland, a fantastically beautiful place where you’ll see moose and caribou as you drive and hope like heck you don’t ever hit one. To wile away the time, my wife put on a podcast by the Daily Telegraph of London, one in which they interviewed the editor of this magazine’s British mother ship, Michael Gove. It was an excellent interview, but one thing stuck in my craw. You see, when pressed about Nigel Farage and his Reform political party, my boss’s opposite number, Mr Gove, kept coming back to the same point. He told the interviewers that Reform was not a conservative party. And many of you in Australia will recognise that it is exactly the point that our Morning Double Shot editor, Terry Barnes, has repeatedly made in the Australian context, namely that One Nation is not a conservative party.

This being the most pro-free speech weekly in Christendom (and you don’t really get much free speech outside of those historical lands, do you?), I’d like to indulge in a bit of colonial pushback against this claim by our venerable London editor. Because one thing Mr Gove made clear in (and by agreeing to do) that interview was that he is a free speech guy.

So what are we to make of this criticism of ‘not being conservative’? Of course, Mr Gove and Barnes mean their censure or disparagement to be more than a purely semantic one, a fight over how to use a word. They mean it to have a political sting in the tail. So that leaves us with two ways to take the term ‘conservative’. One is purely procedural. A conservative party in this sense just happens to be the most right-leaning of the ones currently on offer. It’s a shorthand for where a party stands on the current spectrum. Lots of people use the term that way. Yet that can hardly be the sense in which Messrs Gove and Barnes are using it. They mean to make a substantive point, one with real oomph and force.

And that takes us to the other possibility. What they’re saying is that a ‘conservative’ party is one that tries to conserve the good things that have been passed down to us. But clearly, that is a context-dependent value or virtue. No sane person would want to conserve anything regarding North Korea’s political set-up. In other words, you need a pre-existing idea of what things are good and what aren’t before you can play the ‘let’s conserve’ game. Right?

And that takes us to the reason why I think that so many former Tory and Coalition voters have deserted those ships. In fourteen years of Tory governments, what they most conserved were the woeful Tony Blair innovations to what had been one of the world’s greatest constitutional arrangements. The Tories conserved the awful Human Rights Act. They conserved the country’s being in (and with foreign judges overseeing) the European Convention on Human Rights as it was continually remade to make deportations impossible. They conserved an idiotic set-up where top judges effectively pick their own successors. They conserved all of the democracy-enervating quangos and the inability to control the borders. They conserved the Keynesian big spending and big taxing. They conserved (and initiated) the net zero insanity. And during Covid, they certainly did not conserve ‘the flood of British freedoms, which to the open sea of the world’s praise, hath flowed with pomp of waters, unwithstood’.

And the Libs in Australia, in their nine years, were hardly any better. They conserved or initiated the lefty, progressive policies on net zero, massive spending and taxing, Labor hit jobs on super, and the entire lefty culture war victories. Try to think of anything they undid. Meanwhile they oversaw Covid’s biggest attacks on our civil liberties in centuries.

So what the Reform party and One Nation might reply to Messrs Gove and Barnes is that from the vantage of the 1990s, they – not the Tories or the Libs – are the real conservative parties. They want to conserve what we had then. Not what we have now. And to do that they will first have to unwind the progressive left’s triumphs of the last couple of decades.

Put differently, do you, as a right-leaning voter, prefer to be part of a team conserving what we had back then or have now? It is patently obvious that the former is the answer most right-leaning voters are giving. That’s why Badenoch in Britain and Taylor in Australia are desperately pushing their establishment parties in that direction, big time. ‘Good,’ I say. I look at Poland and see a country with big-time growth and nearly no mass immigration (putting the lie to the Keynesian, lefty economic settlement and to mass immigration that was ‘conserved’). I also want an end to democracy-gutting managerialism that our established parties of the right ‘conserved’.

So, I think it turns out that the critique of ‘not being conservative’ is sort of time-dependent when it comes to Britain and Australia. Tell us, precisely, what you want to conserve. If it’s what we had before Blair and back under Howard, then that means a lot of unwinding and repealing is now needed – to get us back to conserving the good things we had a couple of decades ago.

Moreover, that is precisely what the Tories and Libs are trying to promise voters today that they can and will deliver. As I said, ‘good’. But that means the issue between them and the insurgent new right parties is not about who is conservative. Nope, it’s about ‘who can you trust?’. On immigration. On lower taxation. On getting immigration way, way down and enforcing the borders. On getting unelected judges and transnational bureaucrats out of social policy decision-making. On free speech (which to me has, till lately, been sold out by the established parties of the right). On our civil liberties, come the next emergency.

But if I am right, and trusting parties to keep their word is the key issue for most voters on the right, then Farage and Hanson have a big advantage. They do not have to overcome a decade-plus record of untrustworthiness, like that of a serial philanderer. Yes, there are routes home for Kemi and Angus. But it ain’t going to be easy for them, is it? (For Angus in Australia, for the Lord’s sake, you have to give an explicit number for total net immigration for your first and second year in office, plus promise to resign if it’s not met, or no one will believe you on this issue, not with all the wets in your party room.) Over to you, Michael and Terry.