Tim Bale's Blog

For aficionados of irony, the spectacle of a free-market-fundamentalist finance minister being forced from office by the markets themselves is nothing short of delicious. But for Prime Minister Liz Truss, who at the end of last week decided to throw her Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng to the wolves in an attempt to save her own skin, there’s nothing remotely amusing about the situation. ‘KamiKwasi’ may have been a hapless failure but he was at least a useful lightning-rod. Now he’s gone, Truss is left horribly exposed.

A prime minister firing their finance minister is hardly unprecedented: after all, arguments between Number Ten and Number Eleven Downing Street have been a near-constant feature of British political life, and successive chancellors have often had to pay a political price when the UK economy has run into trouble. But two things about Kwarteng’s spectacular fall from grace stand out.

First, the UK has never seen a chancellor dismissed so soon after being appointed – especially not by the very same prime minister who gave them the job in the first place. Second, Kwarteng’s dismissal had nothing whatsoever to do with policy differences with Truss: indeed, in another delicious irony, he is probably the first chancellor ever to be sacked for agreeing wholeheartedly with his boss.

Both Truss and Kwarteng had long argued that the state should shrink, taxes should be lower, public spending should be cut, welfare benefits should be less generous, and regulations on businesses should be removed. Only then could the British economy be made fit for the 21st century, ensuring that the country could carry on fulfilling its destiny one as of the world’s great trading, diplomatic and military powers.

True, Truss – unlike Kwarteng – initially saw Brexit as something of a distraction. But once the UK voted to leave the European Union, she embraced it with the zeal of a convert, convinced, like him, that the only way to reach the neoliberal nirvana foreshadowed in their 2012 book Britannia Unchained would be to exploit the sovereignty regained by its departure from the EU to bring about the changes they longed for.

Truss winning the leadership of the Conservative Party, becoming prime minister and appointing Kwarteng as her chancellor, then, was the chance for the pair to finally realise their dream. But their decision to do so via a shock-and-awe, move-fast-and-break-things, ‘mini-Budget’ that promised supply-side reforms and unfunded tax cuts for the rich rapidly turned into a nightmare.

The pound plunged, the cost of government borrowing shot up, prompting sharp increases in interest rates on home loans and obliging the Bank of England to intervene in order to safeguard occupational pension funds. Rescuing the situation has required a reversal of many if not all of the mini-Budget’s proposals as well as Kwarteng’s replacement (announced in a humiliating, even excruciating news conference conducted by Truss on Friday afternoon) by Jeremy Hunt – a more experienced politician who has immediately made clear that he will be effectively scrapping his predecessor’s plans so as to calm the markets.

The question everyone is asking, however, is will that be enough – even if, for the moment at least, the markets seem prepared to give Hunt the benefit of the doubt – to save Liz Truss? Opinion polls suggest, after all, that the public hold her every bit as responsible as her former finance minister for the calamity and chaos of the last few weeks. They also suggest that voters, who currently say they prefer the opposition Labour Party to the Conservatives by an eye-watering margin of something between 21 and 33 percentage points, now see her as generally untrustworthy, incompetent, overly-ideological and even dislikeable – something that research suggests matters a great deal electorally as politics even in parliamentary systems has arguably become more ‘presidentialised.’ Unsurprisingly, perhaps, around six out of 10 British voters now think Truss should step down.

The problem is, of course, that the only people who can make that happen are her own colleagues on the Conservative benches at Westminster. But in reality it’s not as big a problem as many imagine.

The party’s rules say MPs can’t try to vote their leader out for a year. But those rules can be easily changed by MPs themselves – and they will be if she refuses to go voluntarily.

True, Conservative MPs know they cannot then inflict another full-blown leadership contest on the country. But they also know those same rules can, if necessarily, be flexed to ensure that grassroots members of the party are cut out of the process.

Currently, as happened over the summer (and back in 2019) MPs first vote to decide on two candidates who then go through to a ballot of all party members. But there are several ways of avoiding that ballot.

MPs could negate the need for even a parliamentary vote by agreeing on who should take over. Or, should the fact that at least three or four of their colleagues are clearly interested in the job render a ‘coronation’ impossible, they could hold that vote and agree that whoever finishes second should concede defeat. Or they could set the nomination threshold so high at the outset that only one candidate enters, and therefore wins, the race.

‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’, as the saying goes. Most Conservative MPs are now thinking not about whether they should replace Truss as prime minister but about how – and when. It could be sooner. It could be later. But make no mistake: Liz Truss’s days are numbered.

Originally published in Spanish at https://elpais.com/opinion/2022-10-18/todas-las-miradas-puestas-en-liz-truss.html

Anyone who’s being paying attention to the disastrous start of Liz Truss’s premiership may have seen it blamed on ‘Tufton Street’ —shorthand for a network of free-market think tanks five minutes’ walk from the Palace of Westminster.

It’s rumoured that some of the tax-cutting and deregulatory policies in the government’s pound-crashing, interest-rate-hiking Growth Plan were dreamed up by right-wing wonks so in thrall to neoliberal economic theory that, ironically enough, they failed to realise how the markets would react when Truss offered no plans to balance the books.

Those rumours aren’t unfounded. Truss and her cabinet brought in a host of staffers with past or present links to various right-wing outfits. This traffic is hardly new: think tanks based in Tufton Street (pictured above) were invited to pitch, dragons-den-style, suggestions for the Tories’ 2019 manifesto.

Moreover, there is a long history—or at least a mythology—of think tanks influencing governments. In the 1970s, some of those very same organisations supposedly supplied the policies that helped Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives unleash socioeconomic reform upon an unsuspecting nation.

That claim is debatable: the Centre for Policy Studies set up by Thatcher and her intellectual mentor Keith Joseph may have helped them win the battle of ideas, but nearly all the actual policymaking in opposition was done by the party’s MPs and the Tories’ in-house research department.

Attention-seekers

This is not to dismiss the influence of think tanks. Given how stretched the research capacities of our main political parties are, and the revolving door between them and think tanks, that would be foolish. But they are seldom if ever as responsible for government policy, as they love to claim.

In truth, think tanks are best seen as ideas factories, pressure groups and more-or-less partisan outriders. They supply (hopefully evidence-based) research to politicians, and occasionally civil servants, who lack the resources or inclination to gather it themselves, offering novel solutions to familiar problems or highlighting overlooked issues.

This usually happens in public, via the media, where broadsheet opinion articles are particularly prized, or reports. The latter are produced either by in-house staff or in conjunction with some kind of commission made up of genuine experts and those recruited for their high political or media profile.

So far, so unproblematic—although there are legitimate questions about the extent to which the media seems to give more attention, and so legitimacy, to some think tanks over others.

Funding, however, is thornier. The ideal source is a recurring donation untethered to any particular piece of work. But most think tanks must rely on one-off income from individuals and companies willing to sponsor a specific project. This must be handled carefully, so as to avoid producing research to order.

Many of the UK’s best-known think tanks, including the widely respected—and very well-funded—Institute for Government and Resolution Foundation are educational charities. The Charity Commission regulates their finances and the extent to which they can be explicitly partisan.

Dark money

But, surprisingly and somewhat controversially, charitable think tanks can also stake out a defined point on the political spectrum. The best-known examples are the Institute for Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange on the right, and the Institute for Public Policy Research on the left. The Social Market Foundation and Demos are seen as more centrist.

Others, particularly on the right, are not subject to oversight by the Charity Commission. They include the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute, Bright Blue, Onward and the Centre for Social Justice. On the left, the Fabians fall into this category.

The consequent lack of transparency leaves those most associated with Tufton Street, including the Centre for Policy Studies and Adam Smith Institute, especially open to accusations that they are funded by ‘dark money’ from business people with vested interests and market-fundamentalist viewpoints.

This is making the ecology of UK think tanks ever more like that of the United States. The resulting downsides and dysfunction should lead us to look elsewhere for a model.

One possibility is Germany. There, the state funds, and so regulates, a number of foundations (stiftungen) associated with, but operating at arm’s length from, each of the main political parties.

They function both as think tanks and, by having offices in other countries, boost Germany’s soft power. But they do so transparently, consensually, inclusively and democratically—values we could do with a lot more of in the UK right now.

Originally published at https://researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-views-of-the-uk-2022-10-nationalised-ideas-factories-would-make-better-policy/

It’s hardly surprising that, in a country where both women and people from ethnic minorities were so underrepresented in politics for so long, a huge amount of attention is being paid to the fact that, for the first time ever, none of the top four posts in government have gone to white men.

But we shouldn’t allow our wholly understandable desire to celebrate that development to blind us to the fact that on another, surely equally important, measure of diversity, British politics has, if anything, been going backwards rather than forwards.

Gender and ethnicity matter – of course they do.  But so too does social class.  And on that score, neither the new Cabinet, nor the House of Commons as a whole, is anything like representative of the country it is responsible for governing.

Take the three Conservative politicians who are being feted as examples of diversity right now – James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  All went to fee-paying schools, the latter to Eton, the private school which charges full fees of over €50,000 per pupil per year and which also educated Truss’s preternaturally posh predecessors, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

And they are not alone.  More than two-thirds of Truss’s new Cabinet were privately-educated, compared to under ten per cent of the UK’s population as a whole.  And the same, incidentally, goes for nearly half of all Conservative MPs.

Interestingly, Truss herself, like both of the other women who have risen to become British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, was state-educated, even if, like them, she went onto study at the elite Oxford University.  But she has hardly struck a blow for increased socio-economic diversity by appointing a Cabinet which not only contains more privately-educated members than Cameron’s and Johnson’s but fully twice as many as Theresa May’s.

But this is not just about where politicians went to school, even if, in the UK at least, that does serve as a useful proxy for their class background.  Nor is it just about the current Cabinet or the Conservative Party.  In reality, they are all part of a wider trend toward the near-complete disappearance of working class people from representative politics at a national level.

For the first time ever, the parliament elected in 2019 contained not a single MP who was employed in a manual occupation immediately prior to entering the Commons.  In part this is a function of the fact that British politics is increasingly seen, whichever party people are elected for, as a profession only (or at least largely) for people with university degrees.

In 2019, for instance, nearly nine-out-of-ten UK MPs were graduates.  And since, in spite of the massive expansion of higher education we’ve witnessed over the last few decades, working class people are still significantly less likely to go on to higher education, that also means they’re less likely to end up in parliament.

The British Labour Party still has strong links to the trade union movement, which, by getting involved in the party’s selection processes and by financially sponsoring particular candidates, continues to have an influence on the make-up of parliament.  But Labour MPs with trade union backing no longer come straight from the factory floor as, traditionally, they used to; instead they’ve worked for unions in a research capacity or in their regional or national headquarters.

The Conservative Party, predictably enough, never had as many MPs from ‘ordinary’ backgrounds as its Labour rival.  But there were some – more often than not, self-made men who’d done well in business and then went into politics.  Now, however, even those who come into parliament that way are increasingly people from thoroughly middle class backgrounds who went to university before starting their careers in the City of London or as entrepreneurs.

It’s also the case that, as media has become more important to politics, and as candidates are now expected to engage far more with their constituencies even before they are elected, the costs of getting selected by a party in the first place have increased, making it even harder for people from working class backgrounds to make it into parliament.

But does this matter?  I would argue strongly that it does.  While what political scientists call ‘descriptive representation’ doesn’t automatically provide ‘substantive representation’, since politicians’ backgrounds don’t wholly dictate their policies, they are often correlated. There is also a strong correlation between class and turnout at elections – which, one can argue, is hardly surprising when ordinary working people can see hardly anyone who looks and sounds like them among the people they are urged to elect.

All this, remember, may even have helped deliver the vote for Brexit in the 2016 referendum.  At least in part, that result was the revenge of working class voters who didn’t normally vote on a political class from which, sadly, they’ve been disappearing for decades.

Originally published (in French) at https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/10/01/le-nouveau-gouvernement-britannique-et-la-chambre-des-communes-ne-sont-absolument-pas-representatifs-du-pays_6143943_3232.html

Contrary to what you might have read, Boris Johnson has not been entirely idle over the summer.  As well as taking his latest wife and children on a couple of foreign holidays and doing what he can to ensure that Rishi Sunak (who he seems to hold personally responsible for his downfall) didn’t succeed him, he has apparently been busy talking to publishers about a book based on diaries he claims to have been keeping for the last few years.

The fact that someone as preternaturally disorganised as Johnson has, amidst the political, economic and diplomatic chaos he has created since 2016, managed to summon up the daily self-discipline required to journal his innermost thoughts will come as a huge surprise to many.  But the fact that he’s aiming to negotiate a seven-figure book deal will not.  Johnson’s money problems, combined with his obsession with besting David Cameron (who was allegedly paid ‘only’ a six-figure sum for his memoirs), were always going to make such a deal inevitable.  Besides, Johnson, of all people, is familiar with his idol Winston Churchill’s quip that ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.’

Johnson is not, of course, the first disappointed Tory prime minister to attempt to reinforce and/or rescue their legacy by effectively getting their retaliation in first. It’s just that less and less time seems to be elapsing between their defenestrations and the emergence of their occasionally dubious accounts of their rise to power and their time at Number Ten.  Getting on for a quarter of a century had passed before Ted Heath released The Course of My Life, but his successor, Margaret Thatcher, managed to publish The Downing Street Years less than 36 months after she was booted out (or, as she saw it, betrayed) by her colleagues.  Cameron achieved a similar feat with his For the Record.

As a keen student of the Conservative Party, I have been obliged (nay, keen) to read each of them from cover to cover.  Predictably enough, they are, all of them, at once illuminating and infuriating – at points genuinely self-aware while, at others, transparently self-justificatory.

Whether Johnson, by all accounts something of a narcissist and a sociopath, is really capable of much (indeed, any) halfway honest insight into his own character and motivations remains to be seen.  But we can pretty much guarantee that the money-spinner he produces will portray him, his motives and his actions in the best possible light while painting his rivals and opponents in altogether darker (or at least drearier) colours.

Certainly anyone naïve enough to believe Johnson might supply us with something that might conceivably pass for the truth on Brexit is bound to be disappointed.  In fact, if I’ve learned one thing from reading reams on Europe from Conservative politicians over the years, it’s that their party’s interminable infighting over the issue makes it virtually impossible for them to level with readers – not just when it comes to the inevitable trade-offs involved in Britain’s relationship with the EU but also when it comes to the reasons they themselves did what they did. 

Until Johnson’s effort emerges in due course, Cameron’s book, which came out almost exactly three years ago, will have to serve as the latest case in point.  Indeed, its attempt to effectively rewrite history when it came to why he called the 2016 in/out referendum (as well as his inevitably partial take on why he lost it) was one of the main reasons why I’ve just published my own slim volume on the issue.

While it might suit Cameron (and others) to suggest that by holding a vote he was somehow bowing to the inevitable and to the democratic demands of the British people, it won’t do. The referendum was, in effect, a war of choice – and one fought largely to manage his own party. Cameron also wanted to spike the guns of the populist radical right insurgency, UKIP, that had so spooked Tory MPs and whose rise was fuelled by his failure to fulfil his patently unrealistic promises on immigration.

When it comes to why Cameron lost the referendum, yes, he was let down by colleagues (most obviously Johnson himself) and by Corbyn.  But he could and should have predicted that. Moreover, he did  himself (and the country) no favours by fighting with what amounted to one hand tied behind his back for fear that, when he won (as, for the most part, he thought he would), he might otherwise find it tricky to put his party back together again.

And talking of putting the Conservative Party back together again, we are – thank goodness – finally about to find out who is to succeed Boris Johnson as its leader and as prime minister.  Given the perfect storm of problems with which he’s left whoever takes over, it seems unlikely that they will have much time to keep a diary.  We may well be reading their memoirs, however, rather sooner than they probably hope.

Originally published at https://encompass-europe.com/comment/memoirs-are-made-of-this

With Liz Truss apparently so far ahead in the Tory leadership contest, talk is inevitably turning to who she will appoint to her first cabinet. Kwasi Kwarteng, an ideological soulmate since he and Truss helped write the state-shrinkers’ bible, Britannia Unchained, is routinely tipped as her chancellor, while her old friend and karaoke partner, Thérèse Coffey, seems destined (depending on who you believe) to become home secretary or chief whip. Top jobs are also expected to go to former leadership contenders Suella Braverman, Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat, all of whom backed Truss after falling by the wayside. Kemi Badenoch may pay a price for not jumping on the Truss bandwagon but few expect her to miss out entirely.

Precisely what will happen to Rishi Sunak, who looks likely to end up being just another of Truss’s erstwhile rivals, is less certain. Given the bad blood that has developed between their respective campaigns over the contest, is Truss going to offer Sunak a job – and not just a job but a job he would actually be willing to accept?

Truss’s decision on Sunak’s future, as well as her other cabinet picks, should give us an invaluable insight into one of the most important questions facing any party leader who takes over as prime minister after their predecessor has resigned (more often than not as a result of being forced out by their colleagues). Namely, in trying to put the party (and the government) back together after it has fallen apart, is it best to preserve some sense of continuity or to signal regime change by replacing what have arguably become all-too-familiar faces? Should one aim to emphasise unity, believing the old saw that voters don’t like divided parties? Or, as some suggest, is a clear-out essential if a new direction is the order of the day?

A couple of supplementary questions arise. Which of the two approaches – continuity or clear-out – has been most commonly pursued by the Conservative party and which seems more likely to produce electoral success?

A glance back at postwar political history reveals a clear, if relatively recent, trend – at least when it comes to Tory leaders who have taken over at No 10 courtesy of their colleagues rather than the electorate. As for which strategy – clear-out or continuity – better delivers eventual victory, that’s a little harder to tell.

The simplest way of determining the trend over time is to compare the cabinets of the outgoing Conservative prime ministers with the cabinets first appointed by whoever took over from them. What proportion of those who sat around the table at the invitation of the ousted (or at least the ex-) PM retained their seats – even if they were appointed to a different post – under the new dispensation? Some of the churn will be accounted for by genuinely voluntary departures on the part of a few of those previously appointed as cabinet ministers. But that’s most easily controlled for simply by ignoring it in all six postwar handovers – 1955 (Winston Churchill to Anthony Eden), 1957 (Eden to Harold Macmillan), 1963 (Macmillan to Alec Douglas-Home), 1990 (Margaret Thatcher to John Major), 2016 (David Cameron to Theresa May) and 2019 (May to Boris Johnson).

What we can’t ignore is that “cabinets” have effectively got bigger because of the fashion (presumably arising from a desire to minimise disappointment and also the number of colleagues outside the tent who might otherwise be tempted to piss in) to allow those not formally appointed to the cabinet to attend it nevertheless. But we can allow for that and we can also note that this de facto increase in those “in the room”, if not sitting around the table, could make unity (assuming that’s the path that’s chosen) easier to achieve: after all, it makes more slots available to any new leader anxious to soothe bruised egos and/or reward personal loyalty at the outset of their premiership.

First things first, the trend is clear, but recent: whereas past Tory prime ministers who took over midstream tended to opt for continuity, their more contemporary counterparts have, for good or ill, opted for clear-outs. When Churchill was forced to make way for Eden in 1955, nearly 90% of his cabinet picks were kept on. Macmillan, in turn, retained three-quarters of Eden’s outgoing cabinet in 1957, while 80% of those serving in Macmillan’s last cabinet made it into Douglas-Home’s in 1963. True, after the brutal defenestration of Thatcher, in November 1990, her successor, Major, famously found room for Michael Heseltine, the man who did more than anyone else to bring her down. But – and this is all-too-easily forgotten – he also reappointed nearly 90% of those who’d served in her last cabinet.

Fast forward to 2016, when May took over from Cameron and a very different picture emerges: barely half of his picks kept their jobs when she put together her first cabinet. In 2019, when Johnson helped take out May in order to succeed her, fewer than a third of those in or attending her cabinet made the cut. In both cases, the number of new faces (some of whom were old faces who had previously been sacked or had resigned from cabinet) ran into double figures for the first time.

That big shift says something profound about how politics and the Tory party have changed. As regards politics, it’s another reminder that prime ministers, inasmuch as they ever were, are no longer primus inter pares but have become more presidential figures – not merely captain of the team but also its manager and hence more willing and able to part with those whose faces and playing styles don’t fit, in exchange for those who seem happier to do their bidding.

As regards the party itself, although it’s a simplification to suggest that the Conservatives had little or no ideology before Thatcher, it’s nevertheless the case that, ever since, and especially as Europe and culture wars have moved up in the mix, the party has become more of an arena, even a battleground, in that respect. Inevitably, and far more so than used to be the case, contested changes of leadership tend to revolve as much around principles (or what passes for principles) as around personality and practicalities. As a result, those who succeed to the premiership don’t merely want to stamp their authority on their party – they want to impose their worldview too.

Whether the clear-out that is the correlate of that desire is more likely to bear fruit than opting for continuity is more of a moot point. Certainly, the “huge great stonking mandate” Johnson claimed to have won in 2019 suggests it might. Even if May’s catastrophic loss of her majority when she ill-advisedly went to the country in 2017 suggests otherwise, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that, while she sacrificed seats, her commitment to Brexit and ending austerity increased the party’s vote share substantially, especially in the Midlands and the north, helping to set up her successor’s big win two years later.

But continuity can also work. Not for Douglas-Home admittedly: in 1964, a year after he took over, the Tories were out after 13 years in power. But others did better. In 1955, Eden increased the Tories’ overall majority from the mere 17 Churchill had managed four years earlier to 60 seats, and in 1959 Macmillan increased it to 100. Admittedly, the majority of just 21 that Major won in 1992 paled in comparison with the 102 Thatcher achieved in 1987. But, compared with the drubbing that appeared to be on the cards when he’d taken over 18 months earlier, it represented something of a triumph – and one achieved with the economy struggling to emerge from recession and with a startlingly similar vote share (42%) to the one the Iron Lady had realised five years earlier.

Nor does continuity of personnel necessarily preclude major changes of policy direction: Macmillan hastened the end of empire and began the UK’s move towards Europe – hardly minor adjustments. Meanwhile, clear-outs don’t always prefigure anything like a 180-degree turn: Johnson simply did Brexit harder than May and talked even more (even if he didn’t really do much more) than she had about investing in public services and in those parts of the country that had supposedly been ignored by previous governments.

In any case, clear-outs can disguise continuities of a more worrying kind. Truss might appoint a new-look cabinet but, if they, like their predecessors, end up spending most of their time denying reality in order to save their boss’s skin, will anything have changed?

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/21/wonder-who-liz-truss-will-reward-with-a-job-or-punish-with-exile-history-can-tell-us

Boris Johnson was sooner or later bound to crash and burn.

He was the salesman suddenly promoted to CEO by a firm desperate to avoid loss of market share to a disruptive rival – in the Conservatives’ case Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which finished so far ahead of them in the 2019 European elections that they literally feared for their survival.

In the short term, it seemed like a smart move.

Johnson won the ensuing general election on the promise (false, it turned out) that he had cooked up an “oven-ready” deal that would “get Brexit done” so that he could “level up” the country and repair the damage done to our public services by a decade of Tory austerity.

But it very soon became obvious that he had no talent for (nor, if truth be told, very much interest in) governing as opposed to campaigning.

As a result, Covid hit the country far, far harder than it needed to.

Indeed, no amount of Johnsonian boasting about Britain’s successful vaccine programme should be allowed to disguise his manifest failure to prevent so many people losing either their lives or their long-term wellbeing.

Meanwhile, instead of establishing a genuinely cooperative trading relationship with Europe, Johnson simply couldn’t let go of the Brussels-bashing that had become his trademark – with the result that Britain’s economy is growing more slowly than nearly all its major competitors while politics in Northern Ireland remains gridlocked.

The only bright spot has been our support for Ukraine. But does anyone seriously believe that another Prime Minister have behaved differently in that regard? I don’t think so.

So…throw in his lawbreaking, his lies, and his sheer disregard for the norms and conventions underpinning our parliamentary democracy, and you have, in Boris Johnson, one of the least admirable, as well as least successful, premiers this country has ever seen.

Originally published at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-one-least-admirable-27446006

Especially after the chaos of the last few days – and even, some would argue, the chaos of the last few years – it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Boris Johnson is somehow sui generis among Conservative leaders. That might be true with respect to his character – his flamboyance, his willingness to flout convention and break the rules, his narcissism. But it’s far from being the case when it comes to his policy emphases and his electoral strategy.

Johnson, in fact, is as much a culmination as he is an aberration. Ever since Margaret Thatcher took over as its leader in 1975, the Conservative party has been transforming itself – albeit not necessarily in linear fashion – from a conventional centre-right outfit into one that, in some crucial respects anyway, resembles the populist radical right. Johnson may have accelerated that transformation but he certainly didn’t kickstart it.

William Hague is now a venerable (and very perceptive) newspaper columnist. But between 1997 and 2001, when he was leading the Tories in opposition, he found himself caricatured as a skinheaded cabby – and not, his opponents argued, without reason.

Hague’s almost archetypally populist approach – one that counterposes “the people” against a metropolitan elite that doesn’t understand them, doesn’t cater to them and secretly looks down on them – was typified by his famous “foreign land” speech. Speaking at the Tories’ spring conference in Harrogate in 2001, he sought to identify the party, in tones that could easily be confused for Boris Johnson’s (or, for that matter, Nigel Farage’s), with “the decent, plain-speaking common sense of its people”, those who “believe in their country”, “take pride in what our country has achieved”, and who were fed up with their values being derided by Labour and those Johnson and his minions nowadays like to label “woke”.

“Talk about Europe,” Hague claimed, “and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about asylum and they call you racist. Talk about your nation and they call you Little Englanders.”

Then came the policy promises, not least: “We will welcome genuine refugees but we will be a safe haven not a soft touch. That is not bigotry. It’s plain common sense.” Eat your heart out, Johnson’s pick for home secretary, Priti Patel. The road to Rwanda, it seems, began not on the shingle beaches of Kent but the green hills of North Yorkshire.

Not everyone in the party was happy with Hague. Indeed, the Tories’ progress towards radical rightwing populism might have stalled slightly had Michael Portillo not failed in his bid to lead the party after Hague stepped down. Instead, we got Iain Duncan Smith, and then Michael Howard and his promise to cut taxes and the bureaucrats who had allowed political correctness to go mad, as well as the “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” immigration poster that featured in the 2005 election campaign masterminded by Johnson’s go-to guy, Lynton Crosby.

So when Johnson blew on the dog-whistle during the 2016 referendum with his talk of Turkey joining the EU, it was hardly something no Tory had ever done before. He just blew it harder and longer – and, naturally, lied about it afterwards.

Of course, the Tory leader most affected was David Cameron, for whom Brexit meant an early exit from Downing Street, albeit one made (in marked contrast to Johnson’s) voluntarily and with his dignity still intact. Indeed, if anyone (apart perhaps from John Major) could at least claim to be the aberration among recent Tory leaders, it is probably Cameron rather than Johnson. Cameron, after all, wanted to persuade his party to stop “banging on about Europe” and barely mentioned immigration in his first two years as leader.

To Cameron, the path to power lay not through “white-van man” (the prototypical “Red-Waller”) but through creating a Conservative party that, by selecting a new breed of candidate and softening its strident tones, looked and sounded more like contemporary Britain – and one that recouped the party’s recent losses among the rapidly expanding ranks of the graduate middle class.

But even Cameron soon succumbed to the gravitational pull of populism. Under pressure from his own restless rightwingers, and confident that his hoodie and husky-hugging had done enough to win him “permission to be heard” from more socially liberal voters, he reverted to the “Tebbit trinity” of Europe, tax and immigration, with a big dollop of “law n’ order” on the side, albeit still accompanied by serving after serving of “our NHS”.

As Cameron’s great rival, Boris Johnson may have been safely (or supposedly safely) out of the way in City Hall; but he was nonetheless watching as well as waiting – learning exactly what would go down well in all the small towns, suburbs, and rural communities outside liberal-lefty London.

Sadly for Johnson, having dished Cameron, his best-laid plans went awry when his pet snake, Michael Gove, unexpectedly turned on him, forcing him out of the 2016 contest. But the winner was another supposed moderniser turned martinet, Theresa May, who had set aside her earlier worries about the Tories looking like “the nasty party” as she pursued her mission to create a “hostile environment” for unwanted migrants.

Even more importantly, it was she and Nick Timothy (her Dominic Cummings) who effectively moved the party toward the uber-patriotic, rhetorically more interventionist and anti-austerity Conservatism that, notwithstanding her losing her parliamentary majority in 2017, put the Tories within touching distance of so many of the seats that Johnson – with the same kind of approach, just more effectively and charismatically executed – was able to win two years later.

Nothing comes from nothing – and nor did Boris Johnson. True, he’s shown himself to have less regard than his predecessors for liberal democratic norms, as well as for the feelings of the business community (although even that difference can be overdone). However, he is not a Tory like no other. Johnson is merely the latest representative of a tradition whose worrying trend towards radical rightwing populism his successor will find hard to reverse – always assuming, of course, that he or she even wants to.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/tories-have-been-lurching-further-right-for-years-boris-johnson-was-just-the-latest

No army trying to defend territory wants to fight on two fronts. But the by-elections in Tiverton and Honiton and Wakefield suggest that’s exactly the challenge the Conservatives are facing.

Boris Johnson won in 2019 precisely because, by promising to ‘Get Brexit Done’, invest in public services and ‘level up’ the country, he managed to bring together traditionally Tory voters in the South and former Labour voters in the North and the Midlands.

Keeping both sets of voters onside is now proving very tricky.

It’s not just that, no matter where they live, they’ve realised that many of the PM’s promises meant nothing. It’s also that they want different things.

If the Tories try to win back voters the so-called ‘Blue Wall’ with tax cuts, where will that leave voters in ‘Red Wall’ areas who were promised more government spending?

Turns out Boris can’t have his cake and eat it after all.

Originally published at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/60-target-seats-boris-johnson-27326809

Anyone who’s ever encountered a level crossing in France may have seen a sign reading Un train peut en cacher un autre — one train can hide another. That warning also applies to the two by-election defeats for the Conservative party this week. So spectacular was the Liberal Democrats’ win in Tiverton and Honiton that it risks obscuring the significance of Labour’s supposedly so-so win in Wakefield. Yet, inasmuch as by-elections can be harbingers of a general election to come, the latter matters just as much — if not more — than the former.

That’s not, of course, to deny the import of what happened in Devon on Thursday — and not just because it joins the list of iconic victories by Britain’s third party, going all the way back to Orpington in 1962. Following on from Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire, it completes a hat-trick of huge wins in traditionally true-blue seats for Ed Davey’s party over the past year.

True, if the experience of the 1980s and 1990s is anything to go by, then all three of those seats may well return to the Tories at the next general election — especially if the sheer scale of their defeat in Devon persuades Boris Johnson’s MPs to ditch him. The loss of Eastbourne to the Lib Dems in 1990 persuaded their predecessors to ditch Margaret Thatcher and John Major, her successor, held on in 1992.

But that should come as no comfort at all to the Conservatives. There are somewhere between 20 and 30 seats (recent boundary changes make it difficult to be more precise) that the Lib Dems could take from them on a 10-point swing at a general election. And the swing in Tiverton and Honiton was a truly terrifying 30 points.

Moreover, what was particularly encouraging for the opposition about the result there, and certainly for the Lib Dems, was the seeming willingness of Labour voters to vote tactically, setting aside any lingering resentment at the party going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. Yes, Richard Foord is the constituency’s new MP mainly because the Tory vote fell by 22 points while the Lib Dem vote rose by 38. But the fact that Labour’s vote-share collapsed from 19.5 per cent to just 3.7 per cent came in very handy too.

That collapse matters because there were 17 seats where the Lib Dems came second to the Tories in 2019 and where the number of votes won by Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens put together exceeded not only the Tory majority but the combined total for the Tories and the Brexit party. If, at the next general election, the Lib Dems can squeeze the Labour (and Green) vote in anything like the way that they’ve managed to do in these recent by-elections, those seats are ripe for the taking.

Sadly, for Keir Starmer’s party, there are actually relatively few seats in which they finished a decent second last time round and where Lib Dem voters returning the favour and voting tactically for Labour is likely to make that much of a difference.

Obviously, were Liberal Democrats to win a fair number of Conservative seats at the next general election, it wouldn’t harm Starmer’s chances of becoming prime minister, albeit, perhaps, as the leader of the largest party rather than one with an overall majority. But his main task is persuading people who voted Tory in 2019 to switch directly over (and, in many cases, back) to Labour.

And that’s why we shouldn’t ignore Wakefield.

Admittedly, the result there was hardly a ringing endorsement of Starmer and the Labour party, relying more, perhaps, on the Conservative vote dropping by 17 points than Labour’s rising by 9. Labour might also be a tad concerned that some former Tory voters may have plumped for minor parties rather than coming over to them.

But a 13-point swing in a so-called Red Wall seat still shouldn’t be sniffed at. For Conservatives, the Lib Dems are clearly a worry. But, even after Thursday, they simply aren’t their main competitor. That’s Labour, and a swing on the scale of the one Labour achieved in Wakefield would be more than enough to kick the Tories out of office at the next election.

Originally published at https://www.ft.com/content/92685858-90cf-42b5-8f63-ae882114fad5

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly,” argues one of literature’s most famous regicides, Macbeth. Conservative MPs wanting rid of Boris Johnson, however, don’t seem so sure.

Some Westminster watchers, having convinced themselves that a vote of no confidence would be triggered as early as this week, are now picking up signs that even some of the prime minister’s most determined detractors would prefer to delay things, believing that byelection defeats in Wakefield and in Tiverton and Honiton will convince more MPs to vote to oust him.

Their hesitation is understandable but mistaken, based as it is on the assumption that, should Johnson survive such a vote, he is safe for another year. Yet, thanks to those who sought to defenestrate his predecessor, we know that this is not in fact the case. Should the 1922 Committee’s executive decide that another vote should be held, no matter how soon after the first one, then, if its chairman receives enough letters demanding one, it can go ahead.

The would-be assassins on the Tory backbenches, then, should be (to borrow from Macbeth again) “bloody, bold, and resolute”, “screw [their] courage to the sticking place” and just get on with it.

Yes, they’re right to worry that the PM might see off an attempt to unseat him this week, although the idea that every single one of the 160 or so Conservative MPs who form part of the government’s “payroll vote” would vote to hang on to him is for the birds. But were the number of MPs voting against Johnson to run into three figures, he would be badly wounded – so badly wounded that he might find it very hard to survive a byelection double whammy on 23 June.

At that point, some of the more realistic members of the cabinet might eventually summon up the courage to tell Johnson the game’s up. And, if they prove too cowardly to do so, there’s nothing to stop all those who voted no confidence in him first time round immediately writing to 1922 Committee chair, Graham Brady, to demand another vote, something he and his colleagues would find it tough to deny on a technicality, especially when that technicality (as we’ve already noted) doesn’t really exist.

None of this is to say, of course, that replacing Johnson will solve the Conservative party’s problems at a stroke, thus guaranteeing it a win at the next general election. True, it is unlikely to do it any harm: all in all, the historical precedents are pretty encouraging – think Macmillan replacing Eden, Major replacing Thatcher, and Johnson replacing May. But even if we accept, as students of politics are now routinely taught, that British politics has become ever more “presidentialised”, the salesman isn’t yet the be-all and end-all. The product – what a party thinks and says it’s for, as well as what it actually does when in government – still counts for something.

Unfortunately for the Tories, as others have pointed out, they are struggling to define their purpose and to point to much by way of concrete achievements.

In some ways, this is an inevitable consequence of being in office for over a decade: nearly all governing parties begin to run out of steam and ideas after a while. But it’s also the result of a glaring mismatch. On the one hand, there’s what the zeitgeist seems to demand, namely a more engaged and enabling state willing to accept both that the present needs to be paid for and the future needs to be planned. On the other is a party obsessed with restoring what many of its parliamentary and grassroots members regard as the eternal verities of its glorious Thatcherite past: low tax, low spend, deregulation and as little welfare state as the electorate will let the government get away with.

Since this is a dilemma that cannot easily be solved, the Conservatives (unless, of course, you’re naive enough to take their talk of “levelling up” half way seriously) have effectively condemned themselves to a pathetic politics of distraction, boasting about almost singlehandedly helping Ukraine to win its war against Russia, binning off desperate migrants to Rwanda, returning to imperial weights and measures and that hardy perennial, creating new grammar schools.

The delicious irony is that, while this risible rubbish is the stuff of a thousand wet dreams for the party in the media – the proprietors, editors and columnists of rightwing newspapers who are every bit as important a component of the Conservative party as its MPs and its rank and file – it has rendered voters so cynical that they appear to have dismissed the government’s recent, relatively generous cost of living package as just another gimmick designed to save Johnson’s skin.

It may, just about, come as some comfort to those Tories who still take an interest in the domestic politics of other European countries that they aren’t the only ones struggling. Looking across the continent, there are few countries where the Christian democratic, market liberal and conservative parties that make up the European mainstream right seem to be doing particularly well.

In part, that’s because, as many social democratic parties found a decade or so ago, it’s simply bad luck if you happen to find yourself in government when an economic (or some other) crisis hits. Moreover, as German Christian democrats can testify, even when you’re lucky enough to avoid that fate, governing parties in other countries are just as prone to exhaustion and the swing of the political pendulum as in the UK. Yet the difficulties faced by mainstream right parties in Europe are also a reflection of a more profound socio-cultural, as well as political, predicament.

Partly as a result of expanded higher education, the middle-class voters who were traditionally the mainstream right’s most loyal voters grew culturally more liberal from the 1970s onwards. Meanwhile, partly as a result of a backlash against mass migration in the 1990s, a fair few working-class voters who might have been expected to vote for the left were now up for grabs.

Attempting to ensure that they didn’t gravitate to the populist-radical right involved mainstream-right politicians feeling they had to talk tougher (particularly on immigration and in more nationalistic terms) than their more liberal, cosmopolitan voters felt comfortable with. That has led some of those voters to desert, leaving those politicians relying on often less well-heeled voters who tend to expect more from the state than mainstream right parties are inclined to provide.

For a while, the Conservative party, not least because it has always been happier than its continental counterparts to indulge in a spot of nationalism, to flirt with populism and to play the immigration card, managed this predicament better than some of its supposed sister parties. But, in going ahead with an in-out referendum and then backing a “hard” withdrawal from the EU, it badly overshot.

Ending free movement in order to “take back control of our borders”, for instance, appears to have contributed to a significant decline in the salience of immigration. That may, for the moment anyway, have helped see off Nigel Farage, but it may also have robbed the Tories of a stick with which they’ve traditionally been able to beat Labour. It also robs them of an excuse should the public come to worry excessively about numbers in the future, let alone about small boats crossing the Channel in the here and now.

Even more seriously, the UK’s withdrawal from the single market (without which a definitive end to free movement could probably not have been achieved) and the customs union is, most experts agree, bound to lead to slower economic growth for years to come.

For a party whose main appeal to the electorate has been its claim to deliver a higher standard of living and a reasonable level of public services, this is hugely self-defeating. Sadly, however, as Tobias Ellwood proved last week, for a Tory MP even to discuss the matter openly is to invite ridicule, most obviously from Johnson’s supporters keen to characterise those hoping to force the PM out as embittered Remoaners.

Their reaction points to a final paradox at the heart of their party’s current troubles: it is led by a politician renowned for his lack of principles but whose continued presence obliges so many of his colleagues not just to humiliate themselves but to close their minds as well.

Originally published at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/05/tories-take-tip-from-macbeth-be-bold-party-itself-infirm-in-purpose