The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The comic plotters against Rishi Sunak are tragically right about the evils facing Britain
Great political dramas – such as the fall of Margaret Thatcher – are sometimes called “Shakespearean”, the stuff of high tragedy. But Shakespeare has other modes, too. One is low comedy. Look at the cast list of Henry IV part II, for instance, and you will find characters called Mouldy, Wart, Shallow and Feeble.
Earlier this week, the third item in a “grid” supposedly designed by Tories wishing to overthrow Rishi Sunak was reported on a newspaper front page. The story was that a former special adviser to Rishi Sunak had joined the plot to depose him. His Shakespearean name was Will Dry.
I had not previously heard of Mr Dry, 26. Further reporting revealed that, in his short life, young Will had originally been a Leaver, but then turned into a sort of Nellie Wet, becoming the co-founder of Our Future, Our Choice, a Remainer group campaigning for a second EU referendum. Now Mr Dry has re-repented, living up to his name and making life difficult for his former boss.
It is aeons since I worked as a lobby journalist “conveying”, in Evelyn Waugh’s phrase of Randolph
Churchill, “political gossip on whiskyladen breath”. So I may be misjudging the situation, but it does seem to me that if Mr Dry – versatile though he is – is considered a stand-alone item in a political assassination plot, then this is a comedy and Mr Sunak need not lose much sleep.
The full story of the plot is still not known, but its first and second parts appeared in this newspaper. The first was a YouGov poll, anonymously financed, which was “shaped and analysed” (his own words) by Lord Frost. The second was an article by Sir Simon Clarke MP.
The poll seemed to show that many voters hold conservative opinions, especially about immigration, but are fed up with the Conservatives. This was weaponised, not very successfully, to encourage revolt against the Rwanda Bill. If faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer, many would prefer a better leader than either, YouGov unsensationally found.
The article, containing an analysis of the current political situation (of which, more later), concluded that Mr Sunak must go now. With a new leader “who shares the instincts of the majority and is willing to lead the country in the right direction,” Sir Simon judged, “we will recover in 2024”.
Naturally, everyone started asking which new leader was being touted. Rather like a head who cannot keep order, 10 Downing Street exhausted itself trying to identify culprits. Everyone disavowed any involvement. The Growth Group (Trussites) denied any interest in a change of leadership now, preferring Mr Sunak to take the blame for coming electoral defeat. So did the Common Sense Group and the New Conservatives.
The consensus was that if any potential candidate was the intended beneficiary of this mini-putsch, it was Kemi Badenoch. But even most of her admirers describe themselves as “agnostic” about whether there should be a contest now. Some say there definitely should not be. Others detect
“a whiff of Cummings” in everything, and fret.
In what I think is a first for a parliamentary conspiracy, an illicit photograph was circulated. It showed Michael Gove having supper on Monday in Parliament’s Barry Room with the high-Tory Sir John Hayes. What were the pair up to, its distributors wondered. Were the Government’s longest-serving Cabinet minister and a senior backbencher of the Right planning a new leader, probably Kemi?
I rang up Sir John to get his version. He pointed out that he and Mr Gove are such old and good friends that the latter has spoken at the former’s 40th, 50th and 60th birthday dinners. On Monday night, Sir John said, “We talked mainly about aesthetics, as we always do.” Aesthetics and Tory plotting do not go together.
From all of which we learn that nobody, among a group of people about half of whom expect two by-election losses next month and then to lose their seats at the next general election, knows what to do next. About half of that half, aged over 50 and unpromising “diversity hires” in our brave new world, face unemployment.
We probably also learn that there will not be a leadership challenge, and that there should not be. Even if a brilliant candidate were ready, he or she would have no time or mandate, after so many lurches of leadership, to effect change. The voters would surely punish at the ballot box a new administration that had put someone in so desperately late after having been around, collectively, for so dreadfully long.
Rather like a head who cannot keep order, 10 Downing Street exhausted itself trying to identify culprits
The last credible chance to be a “change” candidate before confronting the electorate was Mr Sunak’s in October last year. It is unfortunately now clear that he has blown it. But a replacement leader this spring could not invoke any overriding issue of principle or parliamentary stalemate of the kind which, in 2019, allowed Boris Johnson to move from becoming prime minister in July to calling and winning a general election that December. Instead of having their cake and eating it, the Conservatives have now made their bed, so they must lie on it.
If anything useful has come out of all these speculations and still-born remedies, it is that the Right of the Conservative Party is now more united, not about a candidate, but about what’s wrong. Whether they are from the free-market Right or the more communitarian, often protectionist Right, they are agreed that the present Government has become “unconservative”.
The fact that Sir Simon Clarke rashly called for Mr Sunak’s overthrow distracted attention from his main argument: that the Government has lost touch with the things that matter. He identified the failure to build enough homes, reform taxes, “protect our culture from the malign actors and useful idiots undermining it”, and, above all, to prevent illegal and excessive legal migration.
Rather than accusing Mr Sunak of being a cuckoo in the Tory ideological nest, he attacked his failure to “get what Britain needs”, instead “deferring to the failing wisdom of the ‘high status’ – elite international investors, lawyers, technocrats. Instead of conviction, we have convention.” Failing thus, the Tories have created a vacuum which Nigel Farage will try to fill.
This analysis is roughly correct. In most major current problems – immigration, the end of rising prosperity for the great majority, inflation, government over-spending and borrowing, energy insecurity, net zero, unanswerable bureaucracy, official Brexit negativity, weak public services and an increasingly inadequate defence of the realm – the “high status” answers have proved the wrong ones.
Most of the wrong answers may not have been conceived by the Conservatives, but since most of these problems have grown under nearly 14 years of Conservative government, those currently in office lack the will to address them honestly.
The natural remedy, under our parliamentary democracy, is a change of government. That is very likely what we shall quite soon get. But the problem for the small-c conservative electorate which the YouGov poll captures is that the same applies to the only available replacement, the Labour Party. If you had to seek the characteristic “high status” attitudes of our time in one living human being, you would choose Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC.
The overarching “high status” mistake began with the West’s victory in the Cold War. We no longer felt we had to guard against preventable evils. Unprevented, they are now well and truly upon us. For the Tories, this requires not political assassination, but the biggest rethink since the 1970s.