"Britain needs to be saved from a left-wing establishment that has infiltrated institutions including the police and education system." So declared Liz Truss at the inaugural CPAC Great Britain conference this week. The line, delivered with characteristic bluntness, cut through the polite evasions that usually pass for debate in Westminster. It was not the sort of remark designed to win friends in the broadcast studios. Yet it landed with the force of an overdue diagnosis.
The event, held at the InterContinental London - The O2 from 16 to 18 July, brought together speakers ranging from Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman to Ron DeSantis and Mateusz Morawiecki. Sessions tackled free speech under siege, defending borders, rebooting the economy and building alternatives to the current model of governance. Truss herself chaired the gathering, delivered opening remarks, paid tribute to Ann Widdecombe and helped launch the Atlantic Strategy Institute. On paper it looked like a statement of intent: a British chapter of the long-running American conservative action forum, announced back in March as a summit for common-sense politics, pro-growth economics and national sovereignty.
Yet the optics told another story. According to Left Foot Forward the hall was around one third full on the opening day, with some observers describing it as almost empty. Attendance figures matter less than one might think. What counts is the signal. For years the Conservative Party has chased the centre ground only to watch it shift steadily leftward. High taxes, open borders and the relentless march of identity politics became the default setting not because voters demanded them but because institutional capture made dissent unfashionable. Truss's warning about the left-wing establishment's grip on policing, schools and beyond was not conspiracy rhetoric. It was a recognition of how power actually operates once cultural hegemony is secured.
The ideas on offer at CPAC GB, unfashionable though they remain in polite society, represent the bare minimum of a serious recovery programme: secure borders, economic realism, institutional neutrality and a willingness to speak plainly about cultural cohesion.
Consider the historical parallel. Margaret Thatcher did not triumph by triangulating with the prevailing consensus of the 1970s. She confronted it. The current Conservative Party, bruised by its 2024 defeat and now watching a Labour government grapple with the same structural failures, shows little sign of similar resolve. Instead we see the same reluctance to confront migration numbers that have transformed communities, the same hesitation over reforming institutions that prioritise ideology over impartiality, and the same allergy to tax cuts that might actually reward work and investment.
Matt Goodwin, Toby Young and Jacob Rees-Mogg are not fringe figures conjured from the internet. They are analysts and politicians who have watched the data on public attitudes towards mass immigration, net zero costs and speech codes. Their presence alongside American conservatives and international voices such as Pauline Hanson underscored a simple point: these debates are transnational because the progressive assumptions that produced them are transnational. When Truss spoke of the need to save Britain from an establishment wedded to high taxes, open borders and transgender ideology, she was naming realities that polling after polling has shown ordinary voters recognise even if their representatives prefer not to.
The modest turnout should not be spun as failure. It should be read as symptom. Decades of marginalisation have left the centre-right intellectually thinned out and organisationally cautious. Rebuilding requires precisely the sort of gathering CPAC GB attempted: a space where ideas can be stress-tested without the instant presumption of bad faith. The real test will come not in Greenwich this week but in the months ahead, when those who spoke there must translate rhetoric into the harder work of shifting party policy, donor priorities and, ultimately, voter coalitions.
