The Conservative Fracture: Hunt, Starkey, and the British Right

The Conservative Fracture: Hunt, Starkey, and the British Right, a Movement Divided

One of the most significant shifts in contemporary British politics is the changing character of the ideological landscape on the right. This goes well beyond the Conservative Party itself to encompass a wider conservative movement, involving a shift in emphasis from political economy to culture and, in some cases, to ethnicity. While the Conservative Party is now a much diminished force, the right as a whole remains prominent: Reform, despite a plateauing in the polls, is still well placed for the May elections. The British right, in short, cannot be ignored.

This article examines the widening fracture within the British conservative movement through the recent exchange between Jeremy Hunt and David Starkey. Their sharply contrasting visions (one rooted in liberal-internationalist conservatism, the other in a culturally defensive, radical-right critique) show how questions of identity, power, and national purpose now divide the right more deeply than economic policy ever did.

The 1980s and 1990s were dominated by a free-market conservatism centred on individual liberty. This is something of a simplification: within the broader New Right and Thatcherism there were deeply socially and culturally conservative currents. But there was a prevailing faith that invigorating the market would revitalise the economy and, many believed, traditional social and cultural values, a view most fully articulated in Shirley Letwin’s The Anatomy of Thatcherism.

Today, the conservative movement is more visibly fractured. One wing, the “moderate” tendency, holds that revitalising free-market economics is the path to restoring conservatism’s fortunes. Another believes that something more culturally focused is required, on the grounds that the most serious threats to national cohesion derive from excessive immigration and the dominance of a progressive, “woke” mindset in Britain’s cultural institutions and the civil service.

Two Men, One Right

The divide was on full display in a recent debate between former Conservative minister Jeremy Hunt and the historian David Starkey, centred on Hunt’s book Can We Be Great Again? The two men are separated by fundamental differences, despite both placing themselves on the right.

Starkey represents that strand of conservatism (or radical-right thinking) which regards itself as marginalised within British culture and pushed to the fringes of public life, though it is certainly far from marginal in our politics today. Having made his name as a combative presence on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, he has found a new outlet through new media, operating primarily via his YouTube channel Starkey Talks. In recent videos he has positioned himself within the emerging conflict between Reform UK and Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe’s new outfit, which articulates an ethnic nationalist position at odds with the civic nationalism that, in their view, the rest of the British right has wrongly embraced. Starkey has taken the ethnic nationalist side and serves as an adviser to Restore Britain. Yet, as his recent discussion with Lowe revealed, he remains sceptical about whether Restore can achieve significant electoral impact. For now, the Reform versus Restore divide remains largely a preoccupation of the online right, yet to penetrate mainstream political discourse. What has penetrated is the deeper divide between conservatives of Starkey’s kind and Hunt’s.

Each sees in the other a warning about where conservatism must not go. For Starkey, Hunt embodies a liberal, multicultural outlook that places him within a broader “uniparty,” largely indistinguishable from much of the Labour Party. For Hunt, Starkey represents a drift towards Trumpian politics which prioritises a narrow conception of national interest while in practice weakening the United States both at home and abroad, and placing such conservatives on the wrong side of the divide between democracy and autocracy. The spectre haunting this argument is Orbán’s Hungary: a model for many on the radical right, and a warning for many on the liberal right. Anne Applebaum’s critique of former allies on the free-market right who have ended up embracing autocratic regimes, most sharply expressed in Twilight of Democracy, gives that warning its clearest form. These are the fault lines running through the Starkey–Hunt discussion.

Hope versus Realism

The discussion opened combatively. Starkey accused Hunt of Panglossian optimism, mocking his book’s claim that Britain remained Europe’s greatest military power, an assertion undermined, he noted, by a general’s recent admission that the UK could “on a good day” capture only a small town. He relished describing Britain’s position as “genuine national humiliation,” invoking Warren Buffett’s line about discovering who is wearing a swimming costume when the tide goes out. Hunt pushed back. Citing the US admiral overseeing the Indo-Pacific fleet, he argued that “hope is the first duty of command,” insisting that realism without hope collapses into defeatism. The exchange set the tone: both men agree that Britain is in deep trouble, but they diverge sharply on why, and on what conservatism is supposed to achieve.

Britain’s Strengths and Britain’s Vocation

For Hunt, Britain’s problems are real but recoverable. The failures of the last Conservative government, he concedes, were significant, and migration stands out as the most serious among them. But the country retains formidable strengths: third-ranked global soft power, a tech sector exceeded only by the United States and China, and universities that attract global talent and generate world-class research. Some City forecasters, Hunt notes, predict that Britain will be the fifth-largest economy in the world within fifteen years. His vision of national greatness is explicitly outward-facing. A great country, in his formulation, is “one that can shape the world as well as be shaped by it,” and he locates Britain’s purpose in defending the democratic international order. The case for soft power, for international institutions, for remaining open to the world, is in his view not sentimentality but strategic realism. As he put it: “I don’t want a world in which just Britain is okay.”

Hard and Soft

Starkey regards this as a comfortable illusion. Soft power, in his view, is “gossamer”: “a drapery that protects you from the reality of decline.” Real power has always rested on the capacity to muster force, and Britain’s recent conduct has exposed the gap between the country’s self-image and its actual capabilities. His critique of Hunt goes deeper than policy, however. It is a critique of a cast of mind. Hunt, in Starkey’s analysis, belongs to what David Goodhart would call the “Anywheres”: a universalist, a “rootless international liberal cosmopolitan” who believes in abstract principles of human dignity and democratic values as entitlements belonging to all people everywhere. Reaching for Disraeli’s 1867 Edinburgh speech, Starkey argued that the real conservative question had always been whether change should proceed “in accordance with the traditions and customs of the country” or “in accordance with rootless international liberal cosmopolitanism.” Hunt, he suggested, had chosen the latter, and the whole book was the evidence.

The Soft Power Argument

When Hunt offered the personal anecdote of a Chinese student at Oxford who later became a Tiananmen Square demonstrator (suggesting that the experience of a free institution had changed her thinking), Starkey’s response was telling. He did not dispute the story; he disputed its relevance. What he objected to was not education or cultural exchange in themselves, but the extrapolation to national mission: “That is not the projection of the kind of myth that I’m talking about. That is a specific institution.” The “mouthing of platitudes, the shaking of hands” that passed for soft power diplomacy was, in his view, vanity of a different order. Hunt pushed back, pointing out that Britain attracted 400,000 international students annually, ranked third globally for soft power by independent consultancies, and that Starkey appeared to despise soft power until universities were cited as one of its central components, at which point he “rather liked it.” Starkey’s counter was that institutional excellence and national mythology were simply not the same thing, and that conflating them was the kind of muddled thinking that had led Britain astray.

Democracy, Autocracy, and the National Interest

Hunt argued that “the world is becoming quite similar to the 1980s” in that it represented “a struggle between autocracy and democracy,” and that Britain had both a stake and a role in ensuring that democracy prevailed, as it had in the last century. This is why he had been such a wholehearted supporter of Thatcherism and its mission of promoting free-market capitalism internationally, believing that the spread of the free market would also lead to the further spread of democracy.

He was explicit about where this led: “I don’t agree with Donald Trump on that, and I don’t want to see the world carved up between America, China and Russia.” Starkey countered that this kind of expansive universalism had eroded British national interest from within, producing a governing class more committed to abstract international norms than to the wellbeing of the people it served. The figure he invoked was Gus O’Donnell, former head of the civil service, who had apparently indicated that global wellbeing, rather than British wellbeing, was his governing principle. “The central duty of a British government,” Starkey insisted, “is to Britain and to the people of Britain.” The charge, barely concealed, was that Hunt belonged to a governing elite that had forgotten this elementary point.

The Blair Legacy and Conservative Failure

This connected to Starkey’s broader critique of the Conservative governments in which Hunt served. The problem, in his account, was not merely that the Conservatives had failed to reverse the legal and expert architecture constructed under Blair (the quangos, the expanded judicial review, the Equality Act, the Supreme Court), but that they had actively extended it, most damagingly through the 2015 statutory instrument bringing forward the net-zero target to 2050, which Starkey argued had “effectively given judges control over extractive policy.” Hunt offered a partial defence, acknowledging that the immediate priority had been fiscal consolidation and that Cameron’s government had abolished or merged some three hundred quangos. But on climate change he held his ground, accepting that the specific policy approach had produced “the most expensive energy prices in the developed world” while maintaining that the underlying commitment to environmental responsibility was correct. Starkey was unimpressed: “You added to them,” he said flatly, and Hunt did not vigorously dispute it.

The Multiculturalism Question

The exchange about multiculturalism, deferred until the closing stages, revealed the sharpest edge of Starkey’s critique. Having noted that his index search of Hunt’s book had turned up a single reference to Muslims, he accused Hunt of participating in what Niall Ferguson had described as the propagation of “noble lies”: the determination of a globalising elite to insist that “multiculturalism is wonderful and that diversity is our strength” while declining to address what Starkey called “omnipresent discontent.” Hunt’s response was careful. He argued that Britain’s historic openness to immigration, from the Huguenots to the post-colonial Commonwealth, had been “intrinsic to our success,” pointing out that a third of Britain’s Nobel prizes had been won by people born abroad. But he accepted that the social contract underpinning that tradition was under threat from the failure to control illegal migration, and indicated that he was prepared, if necessary, to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to address it. It was a position that sought to defend liberal openness by conceding the legitimacy of the grievance against it: the kind of calibrated balancing act that, for Starkey, illustrated the incoherence of the liberal conservative position.

An Unresolved Argument

Hunt’s closing argument was that the house was not as badly damaged as Starkey maintained, and that talking Britain down was itself a political choice with political consequences. He pointed to the quiet revolution in British universities, where science and business parks were producing world-class spinouts well beyond Oxford and Cambridge, as evidence that the prevailing pessimism was not warranted. The disagreement, in the end, is not simply about policy. It is about what kind of country Britain is, what kind of conservatism is adequate to the moment, and what kind of country Britain believes itself capable of becoming.

The Comment Reaction

The reaction beneath the Starkey–Hunt discussion is strikingly one-sided, unsurprising given that it was posted on Starkey’s channel, whose viewers lean hard to the right and are unsympathetic to “globalists” such as Hunt.

Hunt, as the voice of moderate, managerial conservatism, is treated by commenters as the embodiment of everything they believe has gone wrong with the Conservative Party. One of the most-liked comments captures the mood directly: “Hunt is everything that’s wrong with Britain.” Others describe him as “a Liberal Democrat in all but name” and “a fully paid-up member of the blob.” For these viewers, Hunt represents a technocratic, globalist establishment that has presided over national decline while insisting on its own competence.

A recurring theme is the perceived absurdity of Hunt’s insistence that Britain must “keep the world safe.” Commenters mock this as grandiosity from a country they see as unable to manage its own affairs. As one put it: “Keep the world safe? We can’t even provide assured security for little girls in a dance class.” Another added: “We can’t even keep our streets safe thanks in part to his Tory government’s Boriswave.” This frames Hunt’s worldview as a relic of a liberal-internationalist conservatism that no longer matches Britain’s capabilities or domestic challenges.

Starkey, by contrast, is treated as the truth-teller of the exchange. Many comments elevate him to near-sage status: “David Starkey is nothing short of a national treasure,” wrote one viewer, while another praised his performance as “a brilliant deconstruction of the Tory wets.” One commenter summarised the dynamic: “David Starkey runs rings around Jeremy Hunt… I didn’t know how wet Hunt was until this interview.”

The comment section also reflects a strong current of demographic and cultural anxiety, often directed at Hunt’s record in government. Immigration is the lightning rod. One of the most widely endorsed criticisms asks: “Why did his party give out 4.7 million visas to foreigners after Brexit?” Others go further, linking immigration to a perceived erosion of national identity. A minority of comments adopt explicitly ethnonationalist framings, such as “Patriotic, ordinary indigenous British people [should be] running the country,” or the assertion that “one of the biggest tell-tale signs you’re a globalist is when you have a foreign spouse.” These sit closer to the cultural-civilisational rhetoric that Starkey sometimes channels, even if he does not explicitly endorse such positions.

Another prominent theme is the “Uniparty” narrative: the belief that the Conservatives and Labour now represent a single managerial elite. Hunt is repeatedly cast as its archetype. One commenter quipped: “‘There’s no such thing as the Uniparty’ — Uniparty spokesman.” Others describe him as “a snake oil salesman who probably feels more at home in Davos than Westminster.”

Underlying almost every criticism of Hunt is the charge of evasion. Commenters accuse him of glossing over failures with platitudes: “Generalises the problems and takes no collective responsibility,” wrote one. Another observed that Hunt described recent crises as if they were “unavoidable acts of God… whereas they were ALL caused by incompetent governance which he was at the heart of.” This sense of betrayal, of a political class that promised conservatism but delivered technocracy, runs through the entire thread.

The comments reveal a profound ideological fracture on the British right. Hunt is seen as the face of a failed, centrist, globalist conservatism: managerial, Panglossian, and disconnected from national realities. Starkey, by contrast, is embraced as the champion of a harder-right, culturally defensive worldview that sees Britain’s crisis as existential rather than merely economic. The comment section becomes a microcosm of the conservative civil war: a revolt against the establishment conservatism Hunt represents, and a yearning for the sharper, more culturally assertive critique embodied by Starkey.