I'm a Tory - get me out of here
I'm a Tory - get me out of here
Matt Hancock may be the most, well Matt Hancock of them. But there are almost certainly lots of Tories looking for lifeboats right now.
Governments run out of steam quite fast at the end. And the people inside can tell it’s the end. There’s a change in the wind, a change in the air. You can taste it and feel it even if you can’t quite put your finger on the exact moment it happened.
Was it the mini-budget? The Tories were already sinking under their failures on cost of living long before that.
Was it the election of Liz Truss? She was elected because Boris could no longer be supported.
Was it the defenstration of their great election leader Boris? He was ejected because he was deemed to now be a loser. Not able to command support in the country.
The morning Liz Truss became leader I had conversations with a number of Tory supporters. Not one of them thought the Tories would win the next election. At that point they weren’t expecting a wipeout, but they were generally very gloomy.
I have a couple of barometers that I always use when looking at where I think the Labour Party is at in relation to power. Things that I look for at their Party conference for example. Who is buying stalls? Who is sponsoring fringe events? How many of each are happened. This year the numbers and levels of sponsorship shot up. The money thinks Labour is going into power and is looking to have a conversation (I will save for another day questions about whether that’s a good thing or not).
After the Truss leadership started and their poll ratings nose-dived, there were a lot of dispondant MPs in Westminster eyeing their majorities, the polls and a newly confident Labour and starting to think about what they want to do next. The insertion of Sunak may have calmed a few nerves, but it hasn’t changed the minds of those Tories I talk to who firmly believe the writing is on the wall. So I don’t think it will have stemmed the flow of ‘can we have a quick coffee?” conversations happening as MPs (and their staff) weigh up their options.
Not all of them are so utterly lacking in self-awareness, so clunky, so prattish to go on I'm a Celebrity. But then not all of them are Matt Hancock. A man who created his own app. However, there are almost certainly coffees happening all over SW1 at the moment as Tories nervously try to line up their next job.
Ironically, of course, the PR and Lobbying firms they are trying to woo are actually looking for people with Labour connections ready to connect to the party they think will be in power soon. So many may find themselves less popular than they have been at the exact moment they are looking to jump ship. Those who have only been in power since 2019 may not have the deep connections or the junior ministerial role that nicely plumps up a CV. Many may return to a Red Wall they had spent years turning blue to find that levelling up never happened. There has been no local investment. There are not the high level new jobs they promised their constituents. Not even for them.
Governments fail for two reasons - they run out of ideas and they run out of good people. They fail to maintain the pipeline of both while in office.
This is true of government who haven’t spent a decade slashing at everything they are also trying to convince the public they are the right people to be in charge of. And that the right plan for these is more cuts. Oh and as I typed this I got a BBC News Alert which said ‘Everyone will be paying more tax, says Chancellor Jeremy Hunt”. Now that’s an election slogan and a half…
Ideas can come from the outside - in fact they usually do. Pressure groups, academics and think tanks beavering away at the solutions to the problems of today and tomorrow have the capacity to think much bigger than government. It is up to good governments to provide the right ways for these groups to feed this knowledge into the system. All too often the system close ranks against new ideas. That is the first thing any new government will have to change. Ideas have to be tested certainly (we don’t need the left replicating the Kwarteng and Truss trick of outsourcing their entire agenda to Tufton Street and not letting anyone question that). But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be readily listened to and accepted.
But government’s need the right people to find theses ideas, to be open to them. They need a body of people that stays hungry and engaged and interested and wedded to finding the best new ideas as well as protecting what works now.
As this government has gone on, their brightest - and hungriest - stars have long since left the stage to be replaced by the second, third fourth tiers and now the dregs of a party that absolutely has not renewed in office in a sensible way.
The problem is, in politics, it is not in your own interest to shore up the future and develop talent to come up behind you. It does your personal career no good at all to build up a talent pool just behind you. The idea seems to have fallen vastly out of favour in the Conservatives over the notion of building up either a hyper-loyal set of nodding dogs to sit around your cabinet table when you're at the top or a dubious and talent-free collection of warm bodies from each of the factions to try and stop them tearing each other's throats out.
The farce around Suella Braverman, the drama around Gavin Williamson and the comedy of Matt Hancock are just symptoms of the wider Tory problem. They're tired and they want out.
It may well be too late for this government to start to renew in office. A Labour victory isn’t certain, but they can and - as I have argued - should be acting with a certain amount of swagger right now. But what they could also do is think about how to avoid the mistakes the Tories have made towards what seems like the end of their reign of error.
There’s a concept I love called ‘cathedral thinking’. It’s based on the idea that most of the great cathedrals are often not finished by the time the designer dies. They have to put in place - deliberately - plans for their personal obsolescence in order to ensure the ongoing glory of their creation.
We need more of a sense of this in Labour. An understanding that no politician - however much we like them - will last forever. We need to decouple our ideals from the people we entrust to deliver them - be that Corbyn, Blair or Starmer. One of the failures of the first two was that their politics got far too intrinsically linked with them personally - making it all the easier to knock down once they left the stage.
Politicians feel under threat from their own side all the time. But a great politician must learn not justto rise above this, but to lean into it. Build up the bench of people who will one day topple you and make they as strong as you possibly can. Enjoy the challenge and use it to strengthen your ideas and skills. It is, in fact, the very best way to protect your own legacy.
I run a political and communications consultancy called Political Human. Please get in touch if you are looking for political or media consultancy advice, strategic communication and campaign planning, ghostwriting, copywriting, editing, training or coaching.
You can read some lovely things that some of my clients have said here.
House of Comments Returns
My somewhat dormant weekly podcast House of Comments has returned with a new co-host in the lovely Charlotte Henry. You can find all past, present and future episodes here - please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!
This week we mostly discussed the meaning of Gavin Williamson and the US Midterms.
What I’ve been up to
I went to see the rather interesting Something is Happening at the Lion and Unicorn and the utterly baffling How to Build a Better Tulip Upstairs at the Gatehouse.
Welcome
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