Battle to claim the Menzies legacy a shot across the bow

\Malcolm Turnbull visits London’s Borough Market.

Malcolm Turnbull’s London speech overnight was part political philosophy, part provocation.

The Prime Minister attempted to put rigour around his dismantling of the old regime by invoking one of the heroes of the conservative movement, Robert Menzies.

He gave a historical reasoning and political justification for his attempts to move the party to the left — or back to the centre, he says. His subtext was that the Liberal Party had never been a true conservative party and should not try to become one now.

Conservatives will understandably be outraged and consider it a provocation. Obviously, they will be in violent disagreement.

They will claim it is a rewriting of history and an intentional shot across the bow, aimed directly at former prime minister Tony Abbott and the conservative groupings within the partyroom, who believe the party should be taken in a different direction — back to the centre-right.

Whether Menzies was a small-c conservative or not will be endlessly debated.

If not by name, he was certainly conservative by nature — in any historical context.

As evidence, the conservative group will point to the letter Menzies wrote to Heather Henderson in the early 1970s in which he blasted the Victorian division of the party for moving to the left.

A man who spent 50 years in public life purportedly never referring to himself as conservative had effectively told the Liberal executive that he was sick to death of the leadership for believing in nothing, or at least anything that wasn’t designed to chase a vote.

Turnbull’s retort is to quote Menzies himself: “We took the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his right and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea.”

Given the benefit of the doubt, Turnbull’s speech to the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange could be taken as simply Turnbull trying to demonstrate that he, too, has a deeper philosophy about the party he now leads, a counter to claims he stands for little and is not of the Liberal tradition.

And nothing he says is without purpose. The context for this speech is also significant. In effect, Turnbull’s reasoning is that in shifting to the so-called “sensible centre”, the government will push Labor further to the socialist left from where, history suggests, it will become unelectable.

The danger, one now being played out, is that Turnbull will be forced to adopt some Labor policy.

This is a problem he undoubtedly will have discussed with Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May when they met yesterday at No 10 Downing Street.

May is to deliver her own speech tonight to unify the Conservative Party, which has lost its majority in parliament, and to call on Labour and other parties to help pass legislation.

“We may not agree on everything, but ideas can be clarified and improved and a better way forward found,” she is expected to say.

The BBC described May’s position thus: “Bluntly, it is an explicit acknowledgment of her fragility; her authority and majority shrivelled.”

The similarities between the centre-right parties of Australia and Britain are stark. There are divided views within the parties on the way forward but little empirical example of what will work in the contemporary setting.

Ironically for the Coalition, both the conservatives and the moderates now claim Menzies as the icon for their divergent cases.