The next PM will inherit the worst situation since 1940 – but with a divided party
Whoever wins, I fear Tory MPs won’t wake from the delusion that hard choices can be avoided
When Theresa May resigned, the Conservatives stood at 23 per cent in the polls. Seven months later, under Boris Johnson, they won the general election with 42 per cent. Now they are at 21 per cent.
That, in a nutshell, is the case for the former prime minister. Like Nietzsche’s Blond Beast, he transcends conventional morality and smashes his opponents. “Hasta la vista, baby” has gone via “I’ll be back” to “Come with me if you want to live!”
Plenty of MPs, including some who resigned from Johnson’s government less than four months ago, feel the pull of that appeal. They wonder how many of their constituents who wouldn’t vote “for the Tories”, might just vote “for Boris”. Could it work a second time, even without the Brexit and Corbyn factors?
Johnson’s would be a Pitt the Younger-style comeback. In 1801, the hard-drinking father of the Tory party passed the reins of government to his reluctant colleague Henry Addington, only to snatch them back again. Addington lasted three years as PM rather than six weeks, things being more leisurely in Jane Austen’s days. “Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington,” jibed George Canning, who has just been surpassed as our shortest-lived PM. Interestingly, Addington went on to become our longest-serving Home Secretary. Suella Braverman is our shortest serving. A lot of records are being broken right now. But I digress.
Might Johnson win? My guess is that, if he makes the run-off, he will edge it, though not by much. Speaking at a Buckinghamshire Tory dinner on Friday, I conducted a straw poll. It came out as 45 per cent Sunak, 40 per cent Johnson and 15 per cent Mordaunt. Then again, this was Rishi country: affluent and fiscally conservative. An election of all party members might be different.
Still, I was struck by how many former Johnsonians, though fond of their man and indignant at how he had been treated, fretted that he had let Tory support drain away in the home counties seats on which their majority rests. They worried, too, that the party might again become ungovernable.
If Johnson does not gain the backing of 100 MPs, Sunak will win unopposed. The former chancellor has immense virtues: charm, honesty, intelligence and a real understanding of how markets work. Much of his analysis has been vindicated. Indeed, one of this election’s oddities is that Boris, the self-styled “Brexity Hezza”, draws his support mainly from the party’s Right while Rishi, more a Brexity Thatcher, draws his mainly from its Left.
This paradox partly explains the party’s discipline problem. Things have become personal as the number of MPs who know that they will never (or never again) be ministers grows. Two successive PMs have been toppled in Parliament rather than in elections. Who can say it won’t happen again?
Sunak has an advantage here, in that he commands a clear majority of MPs. The irreconcilables who brought down Johnson and Truss would presumably behave themselves on his watch. But the dapper Sotonian might face a different set of internal adversaries, denouncing him, however absurdly, as the beneficiary of an elitist stitch-up. Nor are his supporters always helpful. “The free mkt experiment is over – it’s been a low point in our Party’s great history,” tweeted Tobias Ellwood, dimwittedly insulting Tory voters.
The fundamental problem is that the Tories are likely to remain irritable. And the reason for their irritability is obvious, namely that the party in office must do unpopular things. Until now, all the candidates – indeed, all our leading politicians, since Labour and the Lib Dems want to go further – have shied away from spending cuts. The expansion in budgets prompted by the pandemic is treated as permanent. Instead of lowering spending to 2019 levels, we are hiking taxes to meet it.
The idea is taking hold that Truss tried to force wacky Tufton Street libertarianism on a reluctant nation, and that her defeat marks a return to orthodoxy. In fact, what she was proposing was remarkably orthodox. No school of economics suggests raising taxes going into a recession. The wacky thing was continuing with quantitative easing and ultra-low interest rates, conceived as an emergency response in 2008, not a drug on which both market traders and home-owning voters would become permanently hooked.
Offering tax cuts as part of a growth package, alongside easier fracking, more housebuilding and deregulated financial services, would recently have been regarded as completely mainstream. So would reducing spending to pre-pandemic levels.
But, as this column kept mournfully predicting at the time, the lockdowns changed our attitudes. Middle-class voters have become possessive about subsidies. A quarter of pensioners have assets worth more than a million pounds, but no one dares touch the triple-lock. More than four million people have dropped out of work at a time when shop windows are thick with vacancy signs, but heaven forbid that wages should rise faster than benefits. Government employees were insulated from the pandemic, in most cases not furloughed but sent home on full pay, yet getting them back to their desks is proving impossible.
And things are about to get worse. The economic fundamentals will not change whether the PM is Johnson or Sunak or, indeed, Keir Starmer. Taxes will rise, taking more of the economy out of production. There will be a spate of strikes as nurses and teachers join railwaymen in seeking to preserve their living standards. But, strikes or no strikes, living standards will fall: that is what shutting down an economy for two years does.
There remains a quite extraordinary reluctance to accept it. Labour MPs, who opposed every loosening of the lockdown, now complain with straight faces of “Tory inflation”. Even the small nips and tucks proposed by Jeremy Hunt are howled down as if they were a sadistic urge rather than a recognition that the money has run out.
All of which raises a question. What if Starmer got the thing he claims to want? What if there really were an early election, in which the fiscal crisis were placed squarely before the country? Would people believe Labour’s claim that everything could be solved with even more taxation and spending? If they did, it would then be up to Starmer to deal with the strikes, to cut public sector pay, decommission Royal Navy ships, to adjust to rising interest rates and all the rest of it. How long would Labour MPs stand for it?
Ask the question the other way around. Why should the Conservatives slog away for two years to reduce the deficit, with ever-greater unpopularity, only to bequeath Starmer a better fiscal position?
This has often been the pattern. The last Conservative government gave Tony Blair a golden economic legacy, partly because, rather than cutting taxes, Ken Clarke, as chancellor, had concentrated on bringing the budget back into balance. Result? Labour was in office for 13 years.
I realise calls for a swift dissolution will go down like a lead balloon with a lot of readers, especially those who are Tory MPs. Many of them will look at the opinion polls and hope to cling on to their salaries and pension contributions for two more years. I don’t blame them.
Indeed, that might be the factor that pushes Johnson over the 100 MPs threshold. Those in marginal seats might conclude that their best shot at avoiding an early election is to bring back the man who won a direct electoral mandate in 2019.
Yet there is a constitutional as well as a tactical case for an early election – perhaps immediately after the King’s coronation in May. The constitutional case is that circumstances have changed: neither the pandemic nor the war had happened in 2019, manifestos have been overtaken by events, and there is a need for fresh mandates.
The tactical case is that a Labour government elected now is more likely to be short-lived than one elected in two years’ time when the Tories have carried out arduous and unpopular repair work, and when the economy is recovering.
It is even possible that, if the choice is put starkly enough, the Tories might win. True, a fifth election victory is a big ask, even in prosperous times. It has never happened before – at least, not since the Tory hegemony of 1807 to 1830. Still, as I say, a lot of records are being broken right now. The Tories’ best chance may be a new leader and an election while the honeymoon lingers. But only if everyone gets behind next week’s winner. Any more fractiousness and the party is over.
The Tories gave Tony Blair a golden economic legacy. Result? Labour was in office for 13 years