We win if the Right unites: that is the lesson from Canada and Australia for the Tories and Reform

Telegraph

29-03-2025

The two nations whose politics most closely resemble our own announced general elections last week. Canada will go to the polls on April 28, Australia on May 3.
In both countries, the sitting prime minister is Centre-Left. In both, the conservative challenger is concentrating on the economy (sure, also strong defence, secure borders and whatnot, but mainly the economy). In both, the incumbent is trying to make the election about the imagined Trumpery of his opponent.
As international secretary of the Conservatives, I oversee relations with our sister parties. Having held that post under four leaders and 12 party chairmen, I can say without hesitation that our closest links are to the Canadian Conservatives and the Australian Liberals. We exchange staffers and strategists unfussily and unhesitatingly. We glory in each other's triumphs and smart at each other's defeats. Labour, I'm sure, would say the same about its allies, the Liberals in Canada and Labor in Australia.
(I mean no disrespect to the fourth CANZUK state, New Zealand. It is simply that, when the Kiwis adopted mixed member proportional voting in 1996, they began to move away from a two-party system, which makes parallels with Westminster weaker.)
What, then, can the British Tories learn? Both countries are richer than we are – Australia especially so. The two big Commonwealth realms came through the global financial crisis without a downturn.
Both, for reasons of geography, have very little illegal migration, meaning they can sustain public support for a measure of controlled immigration. Both have a healthier demographic outlook than ours, fewer problems with welfarism and lower debts.
Not that being better off than Britain is exactly a high bar these days. Australians and Canadians, like everyone else since the pandemic, believe they are poorer than they ought to be. And they're right.
Let's start with Australia, whose laid-back PM, Anthony Albanese, unexpectedly won the 2022 election, largely because the Liberals lost seven seats to the so-called 'teal independents', a group of women who leaned towards wet Toryism on the economy, but loved carbon taxes. Their colour was supposed to reflect that blend – blue on economics, green on climate – though any advertising guru will tell you that, for reasons of psychology, teal is also the perfect colour for a political party.
Albanese, a career politician, took over when the economy was recovering from lockdown. It is important to stress 'lockdown': the damage came less from the virus than from the response.
Australia, like other countries, was struggling with high inflation (again, a consequence of closed shops and loose monetary policy, not of Covid). It was also hit by Chinese trade sanctions when its then prime minister, the Liberal Scott Morrison, called for an enquiry into the origins of the virus.
Many Australians felt that, given their straitened circumstances, it was the wrong time to beef up employment rights and pursue more greenery. Few understood why Labor was wasting time on a referendum that would have given Aboriginal Australians additional parliamentary representation.
The Liberals, led by a no-nonsense ex-copper called Peter Dutton, won that referendum, and have since campaigned for tougher immigration, a smaller public sector and fewer state subsidies. A month ago, Dutton was ahead. Then came Donald Trump and his tariffs, and everything changed.
Australia produces steel and a lot of aluminium. When it signed its trade deal with the US in 2004, it exempted steel and aluminium from the possibility of tariffs, even in the name of national security. Trump has flagrantly broken that deal and, in consequence, has damaged pro-American politicians in Australia as elsewhere.
Dutton is attacked as 'Temu Trump' (Temu, in this context, meaning something like 'poundshop'). Labor politicians, who would rather not talk about their own record, fall delightedly on every asinine statement by the US president, contriving to suggest that all Rightists are on his side. Dutton calls it a 'sledgeathon'.
The same is happening even more aggressively in Canada, where the handsome but insubstantial Mark Carney faces one of the world's most impressive politicians, Pierre Poilievre.
In January, Poilievre had it in the bag. Canadians, especially younger voters, liked what he had to say about taxes, inflation and the cost of housing. The Conservatives led by 25 points.
But Trump's daily threats of annexation, coupled with his economic aggression, have turned that lead into a six-point deficit. Brits might think of Carney as the nincompoop who inflicted needless inflation on us, but Canadians, or at least Canadian journalists, have an exaggerated respect for any of their countrymen who get big jobs abroad.
It is amazing how far politicians – male politicians, at any rate – can go simply by looking the part. Carney stands accused of being a plagiarist and is a dullard, but he looks a bit like George Clooney, has a deep voice, and nods sagely.
Trump's insults mean that, instead of being interrogated on policy detail, he can get away with staring into the middle distance and portentously repeating banalities along the lines of 'Canada will never be the 51st state.'
Poilievre is, by any normal measure, standing on the more patriotic platform but that counts for little. Nor does the fact that Trump has said in terms that he would rather deal with Carney. Tariffs had a nuclear effect on Canadian public opinion, comparable to the first phase of Covid. While younger Canadians are sticking with Poilievre, pensioners are bolting in panic back to the Liberals, terrified of the 'disruptor' vibe which, before Trump's inauguration, had attracted them.
Never mind that they will be voting for a PM who will outlast Trump. Never mind that Poilievre's policies – growth, resilience, restoring energy exports – are the obvious antidote to a hostile US. Canadian media need only give wall-to-wall coverage to Trump's constant fatuities. In a country where media receive state subsidies – subsidies that the Tories have promised to end – they need no encouragement.
Any lessons, then, for the British Conservatives? Yes, three.
First, stick to your strengths. No one knows what else will be happening by the next election, but we can be certain that Labour will have made a hash of the economy. To convince people that they have a credible growth plan, the Tories need to start explaining their approach now. Kemi Badenoch has been curiously reluctant to talk about economics when it ought to be the focus of nearly everything she says.
Second, unite the Right. The Australian Liberal Party fights elections in coalition with the National Party, its rural, conservative and economically nationalist partner. If the two parties were ever to fall out, they would lose. The Conservative Party of Canada is itself the product of a merger in 2003 between the Tories (the Progressive Conservatives) and the Reform Party. During the previous decade, when the two Rightist parties were split, the Liberals enjoyed large majorities with small shares of the vote. Sound familiar?
Third – and this applies to all three countries – start talking up CANZUK. In a world made vertiginous by the sudden alliance of the US and the Kremlin, we need to stick to the countries that share our values reliably and reflexively. A common market among the four CANZUK states, bolstered by free-movement of labour and enhanced military collaboration, is the perfect hedge against a rogue White House. If the US comes to its senses after Trump, CANZUK will enhance the Anglosphere alliance; if not, it is the only credible alternative to defining ourselves as American allies.
A final thought. It would be a pity if people as level-headed as Canadians, people as independent-minded as Australians, allowed their elections to be dictated by a foreign leader. A girl who marries an unsuitable man so as to annoy her parents might succeed in annoying them. But, when their annoyance passes, she is still married to the unsuitable man. I hope our allies will focus on what would make their countries stronger, and so enhance the security of the free world.