It doesn’t bother me being the underdog, says Grant ‘I’m a geek’ Shapps...
Launching his campaign in the MoS, the spreadsheet addict Transport Secretary vows to cut the cost of living
TRANSPORT Secretary Grant Shapps launches his bid to be the leader of the Conservative Party today in The Mail on Sunday with a simple pitch – ‘I can win you the election.’ His confidence stems from his experience as party chairman in 2015 – ‘I helped David Cameron win’, he says – his ‘grit’ as a campaigner and his love of spreadsheets.
He promises an agenda of being ‘instinctively’ in favour of lowering taxes and cutting red tape, adding: ‘The level of taxes is totally unsustainable. We need to leave money in people’s pockets.’ However, he is short on the details of how to achieve it.
The Cabinet Minister criticises the way so many taxpayers have been dragged into paying higher rates as tax thresholds have not moved in line with inflation. ‘People aren’t stupid,’ Mr Shapps says.
Last week, he used his number-crunching skills to urge Boris Johnson to quit while the Prime Minister was in his Downing Street bunker vowing to stay, telling him he would lose a second confidence vote.
Languishing behind in the leadership rankings does not faze him, and as someone who has cheated death twice – in a serious car
The level of tax is unsustainable, we need to leave money in people’s pockets
crash and beating cancer – he relishes defying the odds and coming out on top. We meet in his Westminster office on Friday as he calls Tory MPs to shore up support.
His team says the 53-year-old has not spent the past few months planning a leadership run, unlike many of his Cabinet colleagues. Backbenchers appear to confirm this, saying his calls started from Wednesday when it was clear the end was nigh for Boris.
But while MPs and Ministers demanded Mr Johnson’s head on a plate, the family of Ukrainian refugees that Mr Shapps has taken into his home lamented the Prime Minister’s downfall.
He says: ‘They were really sad to see him go. Say what you like about Boris Johnson, you cannot fault his approach to Ukraine, in my view. They intuitively understand that.’
The three-generation family have settled in well – although their dog has scared away his two cats. Having them stay has taught Mr Shapps – a third-generation immigrant himself – that ‘freedom isn’t free’.
He says he feels sorry for the Prime Minister on a human level, recalling Mr Johnson’s own near brush with death from Covid at the start of the pandemic – but reveals it has been ‘frustrating’ sitting around the Cabinet table during these ‘self-inflicted’ scandals.
‘You’ve got all these other distractions going on – not just Covid – but self-inflicted governmental, No10 things, meaning too much of the machine has been dealing with things which are not about people’s everyday lives, but about the Prime Minister’s position, frankly.’
Despite this, he repeatedly defended the Government on air as it went from crisis to crisis. Why? He says he understood people’s anger, and felt it himself. His father went into hospital with a stroke in December 2020 before catching Covid there, and Mr Shapps did not see him for four months – apart from once ‘through a window’.
He pledges to restore integrity in public life, and points to his management of the Department of Transport, and his low turnover of staff in his MP’s office. Accountability is key, he says, adding that he insists on audit trails and putting every decision in writing, with named officials on documents to know who made them.
‘Efficiency in government comes from the top,’ he says.
Born in Hertfordshire, the Welwyn Hatfield MP became involved in politics from an early age, and at 21 set up a printing business.
He has survived two brushes with death. One was a car crash in Kansas when he was 20 and travelling in the US. The car flipped five times, with Mr Shapps thrown out. He was in a coma for nearly a week, and says the odds of coming out of it were 50-50. A decade later he was diagnosed with the cancer Hodgkin lymphoma and had a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Here, too, he beat the odds. Recalling both now he says: ‘I’m a fighter. I don’t mind being the underdog.’
He completed a business and finance course at Manchester polytechnic and points out that he does not have the typical ‘PPE at Oxford’ background of many Westminster Tory peers, such as leadership frontrunners Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, who both read Philosophy, Politics and Economics there.
As a teenager Mr Shapps said he was ‘never particularly rebellious’ and spent his time programming video games and selling them. The self-confessed ‘geek’ says: ‘I have a spreadsheet for everything!’
Asked if he had taken drugs, he says: ‘I have never done hard drugs. I have been to Amsterdam. Put it another way – never where it’s been illegal.’ Asked whether that meant he had had cannabis, he adds: ‘I’m not actually sure whether I actually tried it or just sat in a tea room.’
In 2015 he quit as a Minister after allegedly failing to tackle claims of bullying in the party that may have led to the suicide of an activist. As co-chairman at the time, he said: ‘The buck stops with me.’
He says the party had told ministers not to speak to the family directly, but to go through lawyers, which made him uncomfortable. He quit, even though he says David Cameron asked him not to, and says he contacted them privately.
As Transport Secretary he has taken a tough line on the rail unions’ pay dispute. He says there is a way to boost pay, but only if staff contracts ensure standardised working on Sundays, for example. Once ‘Remain-lite’, he backed Brexit after the vote in 2016 and now hails its opportunities and freedoms. He wants Britain to be the biggest economy in Europe by 2050 and praises the potential of investing in technology such as hydrogen.
He had his own scandal to deal with after it emerged he used pseudonyms to publish marketing guides. He was accused of hiding a second job, but insists all the ‘pen names’ were historic, as was any publishing income earned.
‘Labour weaponised it. It was a load of nonsense,’ he says. ‘Perhaps now when I look back, it’s a bit garish, but it’s bloody ancient history.’
As for the country, Mr Shapps says, ‘We are in a hole’ – pointing to everything from paying the bill for Covid, inflation, spiralling energy costs and the global effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
However, his specific agenda is not yet mapped out, and he speaks more of his ‘instincts’ as a Conservative than of policy pledges.
There were too many distractions… self-inflicted No10 things
DAYS before the curtain fell on Boris Johnson’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 Democrat, inspired by Joe Biden’s vehement rejection of Trump’s ‘racist’ immigration policies, ‘demonisation’ of Mexicans and climate ‘denialism’? No. Flores is a Republican.
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 highenergy 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, societywide 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 highminded 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 fairminded 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.
Proudly working class, her message is clear and conservative
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, 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’.
Most people aren’t on Twitter and don’t care about politics
Don’t get bogged down in grandiose plans for saving the world