Rishi backs Red Wall rebels
Chancellor shares ‘frustrations’ of northern Tory MPs over Covid curbs
RISHI Sunak last night said he shared the ‘frustrations’ of a new bloc of angry Northern Tory MPs as it emerged he could try to win their support with a string of major infrastructure projects.
The Chancellor suggested that he sympathised with the MPs who stunned Downing Street on Monday by writing a joint letter outlining their frustrations with northern Covid lockdowns.
The 55 Tories in the Northern Research Group ( NRG) have demanded that No 10 produce a roadmap for a way out of the restrictions, warning they risk damaging the Prime Minister’s ‘levelling up’ agenda.
Yesterday, one MP in the group warned that No 10 faced a ‘tussle’ over the tiered system of local lockdowns, which have hit the North, particularly in ‘Red Wall’ seats the Tories won from Labour last year. Others said they would use ‘our muscle to argue our corner’ – but denied that was a veiled threat.
Collectively, the MPs have the numbers to overturn the Government’s majority. Boris Johnson is yet to respond to the letter, but last night Mr Sunak told the backbenchers that as a fellow MP for a northern constituency, he understood their concerns.
‘I absolutely share my colleagues’ frustration at restrictions – of course that’s frustrating if you’re having to live under these things and you want to know when it’s going to be over,’ he told BBC Radio 1’s Newsbeat.
‘But I also share their passion and ambition for the North. I want my constituents to make sure they have the same opportunities that everyone else does. The conversation can’t always just be about what’s going on in London, marvellous as London is.
‘And so whether you’re constituent of mine in rural North Yorkshire, whether you’re, you know, hanging out in Teesside, you should have access to the same set of opportunities.’ He said the Government remained committed to investing in infrastructure, education and skills, new job placements and rural broadband. Last night. sources told the Mail that the Treasury may seek to placate the MPs with offers of big infrastructure projects in their seats.
Though departmental budgets will be restricted to a year in the next spending review, large road, rail and infrastructure projects will be exempt. Northern constituencies could be the beneficiaries of some of these projects which will be allocated based on the manifesto commitment to ‘level up’, Treasury sources said.
Simon Fell, Tory MP for Barrow and Furness, said the group was ‘trying to essentially keep the Government honest on its promises to the north’, adding: ‘It’s going to be a bit of tussle for a while getting No 10 into the position where they understand what our voters are hoping for and what they expect to get out of us.’
The Tory MP for Shipley, Philip Davies – who signed the letter – said the NRG could ‘ use our muscle to argue our corner’. He added: ‘The Government is pursuing a strategy which is collapsing the economy and this is disproportionately falling on the north of England. It is not what I call levelling up. If the Government brings forward any further restrictions, I won’t be voting for them.’
More than 8 million people in England, mainly in the North, will be under the most stringent restrictions by the end of the week. Warrington entered Tier Three yesterday and will be followed by parts of Nottinghamshire tomorrow.
WHEN I think back to that evening in 2004 when, heavily pregnant with our son, I accompanied my nervous husband to the final selection round at the Surrey Heath Conservative Association, the memory is crystal clear.
We sat together for a while in the car park, going over his speech. We talked about what it might mean for our young family if he got selected, and of all the reasons he wanted to give up journalism to become an MP.
As I watched a pair of magpies flit to and fro, I had a strong sense that his dream was about to come true.
Many moons have passed since then and much has changed. And while I know Michael has relished the chance not only to serve his constituents in Parliament but also as a Minister, there are times when, on a very personal level, I look back to that late summer’s evening and wonder whether we made the right choice.
I think if I’d had even the slightest inkling of the pressures involved I might have been less thrilled when he emerged excited and victorious from that selection meeting. Of course, like him, I was delighted — what wife wouldn’t be to see her husband achieve his heart’s desire?
But, 16 years on, I am rather less naïve — and have no illusions left.
There are, I have learned, no depths to which certain individuals and organisations will not sink in order to destroy those whose political ideology does not match their own.
A case in point is this week’s vicious, highly personal online campaign against the Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Led by Adam McNicholas, who worked on Labour’s 2017 election campaign and is a man who has made no secret of his intention to fight dirty, it portrays Sunak — one of the most intelligent, nuanced and effective members of the current Cabinet — as a rapacious capitalist cliche. ‘There will never be a better time to go low,’ McNicholas wrote in The Times last month. ‘Labour must seize its moment.’ And how.
In the sneering online campaign Sunak is characterised in a northern commentary — designed no doubt to appeal to the voters Labour lost in its Red Wall — as a sort of cross between Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney and Louis XIV.
He enjoys a ‘lavish celebrity lifestyle’. He has ‘a whole country estate’. He worked for a hedge fund. He has ‘mates in the City’ (cue clinking of champagne glasses). He doesn’t care about key workers. He hates poor people. And so on. There aren’t any actual pictures of him devouring babies, but the inference is definitely there.
It is everything you would expect from a Corbynista schooled in the politics of envy. It’s also very effective.
It attacks the man, not the policies. Sunak could (and has) presided over some of the most social-minded fiscal interventions in history, but it doesn’t matter because he’s rich, and therefore — in the tiny minds of the tribal Left — inherently evil.
It doesn’t matter how thick-skinned a person is, attacks such as these hurt. But that’s not the main concern, it’s the broader effect it has on the political landscape as a whole — and on the kind of people who end up running for office — that, to my mind, is the real problem.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the country where this sort of attack has long been common practice at elections — the U.S. — is currently facing one of the most uninspiring presidential contests in its history. TRUMP
v Biden, let’s face it, is hardly the dream ticket. On the one hand a foulmouthed populist with dangerously demented ideas; on the other a doddery old man who seems to struggle with a basic grasp of facts.
If this undynamic duo is truly the best America has to offer, I dread to think what the rest are like.
They’re not the best, of course. They are just the last two standing in an arena in which only the most brutish survive. So power-hungry they’ll do anything to get to the top. Which makes them the least suited to the job.
British politics needs people like Sunak — intelligent, serious, responsible individuals prepared to set aside their own personal interests for the common good. Yes, he could be living the high life depicted in that ridiculous ad; instead he’s given it all up to try to make Britain a better place.
Let grunts like McNicholas drive him out, and it’s not just politics that suffers — it’s all of us.