STEVE HILTON: What the next Tory leader could learn from Mayra Flores

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Days before the curtain fell on ‘s premiership, on the other side of the Atlantic it rose to welcome on to the stage the latest star of American politics: 36-year-old Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-American congresswoman, representing a district in southern Texas.

So is she a young , inspired by ‘s vehement rejection of Trump’s ‘racist’ immigration policies, ‘demonisation’ of Mexicans and climate ‘denialism’?

No.Flores is a .

Her message is simple, clear and conservative. Faith and family are the most important things in her life.Taxes should be cut, the government kept in check, the border secured to stop illegal immigration.

She is a mother of four and proudly working class. Born in Mexico, she’s the daughter of migrant farm workers and is married to a border patrol agent.

Mayra Flores’ political trajectory, unlikely as it may sound, in part explains Johnson’s untimely political demise — and could hold the key to his successor’s chances of living up to the promise of the massive electoral mandate the Prime Minister ruefully referenced in his resignation speech.

To understand why, we need to remember the historic significance of the election victory that Johnson delivered in 2019.

It wasn’t just the scale of it — the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday — it was the nature of it: the type of places that voted for a Conservative MP and the type of people being elected as Conservative MPs.

Up and down the country, Britain had its own versions of Mayra Flores — unlikely new champions of the Conservative cause, fresh faces with diverse backgrounds representing working-class areas and working-class interests.They were swept into Parliament on a wave of enthusiasm for Johnson and his message. But what exactly were those voters hoping for?

Higher taxes and bigger energy bills? More red tape in their lives? Did they want net zero emissions?

Of course not.They voted for a Conservative Prime Minister to ‘get Brexit done’.

The problem is, they ended up with a not-especially-Conservative Prime Minister who failed to deliver what Brexit was supposed to do.

The idea was to use the opportunity provided by leaving the EU to make the UK the world’s most dynamic and enterprising major economy, replacing the bureaucratic, risk-averse mindset of Brussels with the vim and zip of an ambitious, can-do British powerhouse (and not just a northern one).

Instead it was endless tax increases, bucketloads of the ‘green crap’ that David Cameron allegedly wanted to get rid of when he was Prime Minister, and bizarre Covid rules about who could sit on park benches when and with whom.

None of this is to say that fiscal responsibility doesn’t matter, that we shouldn’t protect the environment and fight climate change, or that we should have been cavalier about the pandemic.But if you’ve been elected on a platform of high-energy liberalisation, there are far better ways of achieving those important goals than anything the Johnson Government seems to have come up with.

The best way to lift public finances is to boost the economy with an unashamedly pro-growth economic agenda.It is possible to decarbonise industry without impoverishing consumers.

And as for the pandemic, the biggest mystery about ‘Partygate’ is why freedom-loving Johnson joined Team Lockdown when we knew very early on that the particular characteristics of the Covid virus meant that protecting the vulnerable would have saved far more lives, and avoided far more collateral damage, than broad, society-wide restrictions.

Now, of course, it’s true that the immediate reason ‘the herd moved’ against him, as Johnson put it last week, was nothing to do with high-minded policy disagreements.But I am convinced that if he had led and delivered the kind of positive, practical, energising agenda that he campaigned on three years ago, he would now be planning his own party conference speech as Prime Minister rather than preparing to watch someone else’s.

Why did he do it?Why did he throw away the enormous opportunity of 2019, with its historic electoral realignment, Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ bulldozed as thoroughly as the polystyrene blocks in that ‘Get Brexit Done’ election stunt that’s been replayed on TV so often in the past few days?

Funnily enough, I can relate to this strategic mistake directly.

While I remain enormously proud of the work we all did under David Cameron’s leadership to make the Conservative Party relevant and electable after three successive General Election defeats, a fair-minded and self-reflective analysis would surely come to the conclusion that there was too much focus on the concerns of metropolitan elites and not enough attention paid to the needs and aspirations of working families.

And this is where the example of the Republican Party in the US is so instructive.

Not long ago, in the Obama era, Democrats and their allies in the media were complacently patting themselves on the back that they were in command of a new ‘coalition of the ascendant’; that demographic change would give them increasingly secure political victories while Republicans would be left as an ageing rump of mostly white voters in declining parts of the country.

But the demographics seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

Bizarrely — and no doubt unintentionally, as he is not exactly renowned for long-term strategic thinking — it was Donald Trump who helped to upend the Left-leaning establishment’s smug assumptions about their future hegemony.Far from embracing the kind of elite-friendly agenda advocated by some Republican Party insiders -‘Tone down the rhetoric on immigration, they’ll say we’re racists!’… ‘Don’t talk about tax cuts, it will make us sound selfish!’ — Trump went all in on strong borders, low taxes and many other staples of traditional conservative fare.

But there was something else, something fresh.A questioning of globalist ideology on issues such as trade with China and the primacy of Wall Street. A rejection of rigid fiscal dogma if that was the only way to cut taxes across the economy. A direct and respectful appeal to blue-collar workers and their interests.

The economic outcome was an innovative mix: pro-business on tax and regulation but pro-worker on trade and immigration.

The political outcome has been even more interesting: a steady and growing class and race realignment, to the point where the Republicans appear to be building a multiracial, working-class coalition while the Democrats seem to be becoming the party of the rich, white and woke.

And there certainly aren’t enough of them to sustain a permanent governing majority.

In particular, Latino voters are deserting the Democrats in droves, turned off by what they consider to be extremist policies on crime and climate change, and the Left’s embrace of woke cultural values that are utterly alien to their traditions and beliefs.

Hence, Mayra Flores elected as the first Mexican-American congresswoman in US history.

Of course it is always a mistake to try to draw parallels too precisely between different countries’ politics.But it’s clear that the 2019 General Election contained strong elements of the political realignment that’s now happening in America. The big difference is that the Republican Party is trying to encourage these trends while the Conservative Government in Britain seems to have been running away from them.

The danger in that approach is that the Tory Party ends up losing its newfound working class support without winning over the elites.

Indeed, it becomes ever clearer that the Conservative Party’s pursuit of establishment approval is a task as fruitless as looking for that oft-promised Boris Johnson ‘reset’.

Who could possibly imagine that the Left-leaning, pro-Brussels elitist consensus represented in the higher echelons of Britain’s ruling class — the civil service, the BBC, the universities, Sportsbook software the self-righteous virtue-signallers on Twitter — could ever contemplate anything but contempt for Conservative ideas, Conservative politicians and, frankly, though few of them would admit it publicly, Conservative voters.

The good news for the next Tory leader, whoever she or he may be, is that there are more people who identify with the values and aspirations of many working-class voters than with the anti-human ideology of the elite, with its disdain for the building blocks of a strong society: family, community, love of country.

Because the great lesson of the often unsettling and divisive upheavals of recent years is that sustained economic dynamism needs a strong social foundation.

Free market economics won’t, in the end, command public support if the social fabric has frayed.But you can’t repair the social fabric without a strong, dynamic economy.

Ironically, it seems to be the Left that endlessly denigrates the social institutions that have held fast for years — and the opportunity for the Conservative Party is to fight back and protect them, while setting out a much more robust set of ideas for how to get the economy moving fast.

This task is particularly urgent as the Left flirts with radical constitutional vandalism — whether that’s lowering the voting age or introducing proportional representation — designed to keep them in power for ever, able to impose an ideological agenda that is rejected by the mainstream.

So there’s a lot riding on the choice that Conservative MPs and members will make over the summer.

Character, charisma, competence, the ability to communicate: candidates to replace Boris Johnson must be evaluated for all those essential attributes.

But there really shouldn’t be much of a debate about the party’s overall direction.

It’s possible — indeed, essential — to combine the best of the modernising approach with the requirement to focus on the everyday, practical needs of working families.That’s how to recapture the momentum that produced an 80-seat majority.

No more talk of raising business taxes or introducing new regulations. Instead, cut them so Britain becomes the best place in the world to start and run a business.Explain how that creates more jobs and higher earnings — the real purpose of leaving the EU.

Rather than taking more and more money from taxpayers to pour into public services that don’t perform well enough, lay out plans for improving them.

People respect directness.Don’t get bogged down in grandiose plans for saving the world that only a handful of academics and activists understand: offer simple, practical solutions to the immediate problems we face today.

Above all, forget about pandering to the woke establishment and the sneering elite, and remember that most people aren’t on Twitter, don’t care about politics, and just want a government that helps them protect the things they actually do care about: their family, their community, pride in their country.

That’s what the voters meant by a Conservative government that ‘gets Brexit done’.