It’s not sleaze that is eroding support for the Conservatives, it’s spending too much
TSpending increases can no longer be explained away as a one-off response to the pandemic
hesis: sleaze is a symptom, not a cause, of the Government’s unpopularity. The sudden spate of stories about alleged crookedness, some out of date, some plain wrong, is not the real problem. Rather, it is a product of the Tories’ alienation from their base. The benefit of the doubt has evaporated as conservative-minded people gawp in horror at levels of spending beyond anything that Jeremy Corbyn suggested.
All governments reach a moment when the presumption of innocence is reversed. Six months ago, even three months ago, almost no one would have complained about MPs working as lawyers or company directors. The fast-tracking of PPE contracts would have been seen as a speedy response to a crisis rather than as cronyism.
The spending of nearly £96billion on transport infrastructure – a vast sum, even in these wastrel times – would have been celebrated as a vote of confidence in our old industrial heartlands rather than prompting a whinge-fest about miserliness. But once the narrative of a besieged administration takes hold, almost all news stories tend to get folded into it.
Not convinced? You’re in good company. The general view is that the Conservatives are in trouble purely because of l’affaire Paterson. They led in the polls (with only one blip when they announced the National Insurance rise) until this month’s fateful parliamentary vote on the standards commission. Since then, they have been ahead in only one of seven published surveys.
Stories about fatcat MPs, runs this argument, throw Red Wallers back onto their ancestral loyalties. Each new headline about outside earnings undermines Boris Johnson’s appeal to former Labour voters. The old clichés are coming back: “in it for themselves”, “same old Tories”, “don’t care about ordinary people”, “pinstriped spivs”.
The trouble with this explanation is that there is nothing new in what is being reported. MPs have always had outside work, and a good thing, too. In an ideal world, they would all have second jobs – or, rather, being an MP would be their second job – and we would be governed by citizen legislators who shared the ups and downs of the economy with the rest of us.
Why is it suddenly newsworthy that, for example, Sir Geoffrey Cox is a well-paid barrister? He was already a QC when he was elected in 2005, and he paused his legal career only to serve as a minister. His constituents in West Devon keep re-electing him with large and growing majorities, perhaps because they believe that, given what he could be earning outside, they are getting a first-class MP at a darned good rate. Nothing in Sir Geoffrey’s circumstances has changed. What has changed is the attitude of Tory supporters.
Something similar was true of every sleaze crisis going back to John Major’s lamentable premiership, when the word first came into common usage. A casual observer might have got the impression that, at some point in 1993, Conservative MPs started behaving badly. In fact, though there are always a few scoundrels, most of the stories making the front pages, from Alan Duncan buying a neighbour’s house to David Mellor having an affair, were not about corruption in any meaningful sense. Rather, they reflected anger at the government over the ERM fiasco.
Similarly, the 2009 parliamentary expenses crisis was not just about bathplugs. It was also about the widespread sense that the entire political class had failed in the face of the global financial crisis.
Sleaze is baked into voters’ assumptions. Most people vaguely assume that MPs are up to no good. Their definition of corruption overlaps heavily with their definition of “holds views with which I disagree”. They rarely distinguish between tiny transgressions and major malfeasances.
Still not convinced? OK, here’s a test. Can you name either of the two peers suspended from the House of Lords after offering to move amendments for cash in 2009 – the first such suspensions since Cromwell’s time? Here were legislators offering to change laws in return for big payments. But – be honest – you had forgotten all about it until I mentioned it just now, hadn’t you?
When people feel that a government is broadly on their side, they shrug off the peccadilloes of individual MPs – even of senior ones. Tony Blair got away with rewriting his public health policy following a million-pound donation from Bernie Ecclestone because he was at the start of his term and was still thought to be, as he himself put it at the time, “a pretty straight sort of guy”.
Until very recently, the Conservatives would have been able to overhaul the parliamentary standards commission without anyone much minding – quite rightly, as that institution is badly in need of reform. But, somehow, a tipping point has been reached.
Why? My guess is that the easing of the coronavirus restrictions, and the associated sense that the crisis is passing, has focused attention on the Government’s economic policy. Spending increases can no longer be explained away as a one-off response to the pandemic. It is becoming painfully clear that we are seeing a permanent increase in the size of the state unrelated to the recent emergency.
To be fair, the PM was always happy to call himself a big spender – a “Brexity Hezza”. He takes a boyish, almost infectious, delight in bridges and airports and whizzbangs of every kind. I remember him posing on the site marked out for the Millennium Dome, his thumbs raised, convinced that Blair’s grand projet would be a triumph.
The trouble is that we have spent perhaps £500billion more than we were expecting to spend two years ago. Restoring our finances should be the chief aim of economic policy as we claw our way out of lockdown. Yet we are carrying on as if nothing had happened – net zero, levelling up, the social care fund, a military presence east of Suez, an increase of nearly 40 per cent in day-to-day spending on the NHS, new railways.
We might, after the pandemic, have been able to afford one of these things. Perhaps even two. But we can’t carry on with all of them as if we still had that half trillion.
On Friday, the Office for Budget Responsibility reported that inflation had pushed the Government’s debt interest payments up by £14.8billion, an increase of 62.9 per cent in a year. And this is just the beginning. Yet we gaily carry on printing money.
At this stage, it is customary for a columnist to blame the Tsar’s wicked counsellors – to argue, in other words, that the PM needs new advisers. But I don’t buy that argument. There are some hugely talented people in No10; and, in any case, there is no other Conservative who could hope to hold together the coalition that backed Boris in 2019.
Nor is it fair to say that the PM has run out of steam. I don’t believe anyone else would fight as he is doing to get Northern Ireland out of the clutches of Brussels. I can’t imagine any other leader ensuring that our statues remained standing. I can’t see who else would pursue the idea, so successful in Australia, of processing illegal immigrants offshore, while still being ambitious when it comes to legal migration.
The first freeport has opened on Teesside. Trade talks are getting under way with India and the Gulf states. Iain Duncan Smith’s report on deregulation, which proposed scrapping a number of needless EU rules, has been warmly received. We have avoided the wave of continental lockdowns. There are, in short, plenty of things for Tories to cheer. But none of it will amount to a row of beans if Britain runs out of money.
The conventional wisdom is that over-spending is popular in the short term, before the full effects become apparent. But I’m not sure even that is true at present. Fiscal conservatives may be a minority, but they are an influential one. Their sense of betrayal is behind most of the bad press. Restoring order to our public finances, quite apart from being right in principle, may also be politic.