The right are in crisis. Can the left just enjoy it?
The Tories are going through more than an electoral crisis. The right in the UK and wider are in a deep existential crisis. This will impact on all of us.
Apologies for the break in service. I got very ill just before the Labour conference. Normal service should now resume.
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The recent byelection results have been disastrous for the Tories and show a Labour Party on track for victory at the next election.
So far, so normal. Governments lose popularity over the years and it’s hardly uncommon for them to start to look like they are failing after over a decade in power. Some of what has happened to this government does come down to external factors. The war in Ukraine, Covid and the inevitable economic aftermath.
But equally, they are the reason why we were so lacking in resilience. Cameron’s and Osborne’s austerity left the public realm unable to cope with crisis. And there will always be a crisis. That’s why, though it wasn’t truly showing in the lives of average voters (though, of course, it was very different for those on the sharp end) by 2015, the seeds of this destruction were sown back then.
This was - of course - made significantly worse by Brexit. In almost every way possible. It took swaths of government and civil service time and energy during which little else got done just to get us to the pretty bad place we are now. It left us economically, politically and socially isolated at a time when we needed better on all fronts. Businesses that would have been hard enough hit by Covid were also suffering under the uncertainty of new or changed regulations, pipelines and trading arrangements.
But while both terrible ideas, austerity and even Brexit do not fall outside of the larger mainstream of right wing thinking.
But more recently, the Tories have gone - and there’s no polite way of saying this - completely off their rocker.
Sure Sunak is Mr Spreadsheet competence - even though he does come across like a tech bro accidentally booked to present Playschool. But my point as I will expand on below is that the cancer that is creeping through the Tories is affecting him too. And those who would like to govern in a more traditionally right wing but ‘small c’ conservative way.
It’s a bit clunky and there is a lot of cross-contamination, but I think Tory MPs can - in the terms of this argument - be boiled down into three tendencies.
There’s the ‘let’s look moderate’ tendency that is currently embodied by Sunak. Readers will know that I see little that is actually moderate in Sunak’s platform, but in this vibes-based world, that is definitely the lane he is seeking to occupy.
There’s the ‘let’s be radical’ tendency occupied by Sunak’s shameless predecessor Liz Truss. Who want to combine a hard line Tory small state agenda with a posture of cool radicalism.
Then there’s the ‘lolz’ Tories. Possibly best encapsulated by Lee Anderson or Jacob Rees Mogg. Neither have the slightest respect for politics at all. In fact their entire posture - from Mogg falling asleep in the chamber when Leader of the House (a grotesque position for a ‘lolz’ Tory to be given) to Anderson finding that his pontificating is a lot easier to a TV audience who agree with him than a chamber who might pick apart his flimsy arguments, is about denigrating the hard work done by their colleagues on all sides of the house. It can be done in the worlds poshest accent or with the voice of the working man, it’s still just as disrespectful. And it still draws on the same well of poison.
The ‘moderate’ Tories are in a desperate defensive crouch at present. That’s why those who would more easily fit the Liz Truss mould - such as Suella Braverman - sit in high profile government positions. It’s also why they seem unable to do very much. Want to change planning - there are 100 Tories in opposition to you. Want to stop all building - there’s 100 in the other direction. Everything is about staggering rather than swaggering forward - but also about pretending that you could possibly have the slightest reason to swagger.
Despite the increasingly shrill briefings from Number 10 Sunak has to know he is very unlikely to win the next election. I mean, he’s a numbers guy after all. So what does he - or more importantly the ‘let’s look moderate’ wing - want from the next year?
My guess is that they want to leave themselves as much of a chance to return as soon as possible to running the Tory opposition and then leading them into government and restoring normality to their world. They look at the Truss and Anderson wings with almost as much horror (perhaps more) as their political opponents do.
These are the people who truly believe in the Tories as the natural party of government, and while that tends to arrogance, it also tends to mean that they don’t actively try to break the machinery of a government they expect to be at the helm of most of the time.
As institutionalists they are in horror that their own side seem to be actively destroy our institutions. As people who believe in politics they are in horror at the anti-politics mood previously well employed by Johnson and Cummings before biting them both in the arse on the way to taking a big chunk out of the rest of the Tory Party.
There are Tories who don’t think the Prime Minister should lie to the country; Who don’t think you should create unmandated economic conditions so extreme the bank of England has to take extraordinary measures to stop the country going bankrupt; For whom the culture wars are not why they got into politics.
But they are not winning.
And the worst part - this is how the Tories are behaving in Government.
Labour at least left it until it had been in opposition for a significant period before electing to be led by it’s untrammelled ID in Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories didn’t just inflict Liz Truss on themselves - they inflicted her on the rest of us.
And given the Rock Star response she got at their conference, it does not look likely that the Tory membership are in any mood to go down a different path should Sunak inevitably resign if they lose the next election. Sunak was foisted on the membership after the MPs made sure he couldn’t be contested. The membership - having already rejected him once - are not best pleased about this.
So while I don’t think it will be Liz Truss who they choose next, it will be someone with the same economic agenda.
Unless…
Think about Boris Johnson - the last person the Tory membership elected before Truss.
Economically, cakeism might have been an impossibility but it wasn’t the same kind of impossibility that Truss offered. In proposing investment in public services and infrastructure, it was considerably to the left and more statist than anything Sunak would ever offer in normal circumstances (as I have noted before, the irony of Sunak was the reason for his initial popularity was the memory of the vast state intervention that was furlough).
But BoJo was the ultimate ‘lolz’ politician. He succeeded not because enough people thought he was good at politics but because they enjoyed all the ways he wasn’t. His calculatedly useless persona made it easy to vote for him as an anti-politics option. HIs opposition in Corbyn - who believed passionately in politics, just not always one that appealed to the people - helped frame this. Who was to know that we were about to go into the biggest crisis since World War II. Once for which the ‘Lolz’ brigade were patently not up to (and have since made a giant pivot into minimising as a result).
The ‘Lolz’ Tories have big platforms and a big voice in the party. And they are making it heard and felt. They have an appeal to the membership and the anti Tory right of Reform UK and whatever Lozza Fox’s party is called (I don’t care enough to Google it). The voices who want the ‘Lolz’ people in power, don’t really want them in charge. They just don’t want anyone else in charge.
I found the comparissions between Boris and Donald Trump overblown at times, but the sentiment is much the same. And if the ‘lolz’ crowd manage to get even more of a grip on the Tories (and Sunak has already made one Deputy Chairman) what could be more ‘lolz’ than bringing him back? I suspect Johnson is looking across the Atlantic with considerable interest right now.
So if we do have a post-election leadership contest, the moderates may well find themselves squeezed out in a contest between the ‘rebel right’ candidate and the ‘in it for the lolz’ candidate. Or they could even find someone who encapsulates both and would - therefore - almost certainly run away with the contest. For the party at least.
Why does this matter to anyone other than a Tory who doesn’t want to see their party dive headfirst down this rabbit hole?
Becuase the lack of seriousness is affecting the Party much more widely. Politicians who wouldn’t previously have flirted quite so disgracefully with lying are doing so now with either impunity from the leadership or worse led by Sunak himself. Nonsense like Labour is going to give you seven bins and ban meat were nonsense on stilts. Meaning that Sunak is sweving from the ‘let’s look moderate’ lane into the cul-de-sac of ‘lolz’ and it seems that is where he is planning to fight the election from.
That matters to people who want to have a real battle of ideas - which, weirdly enough, often means the Liz Truss loons too. It matters to people who think that democracy can and should have rules and standards. And it matters to an opposition who are about to be on the receiving end of it and who would prefer a more serious arena.
Come and see Venom
click on the poster below to find details of my next play in November. It’s a modern take on the Medusa story - in which I will be playing the role of the Gorgon herself.
Medusa used to be a star. From girlhood stage and screen appearances, she grew up to write the ultimate break-up album. She has been castigated, diminished and demonised for it ever since.
Percy wants to be a hero. But abandoned by his girlfriend, his life turns inwards in reality and outwards to an internet community ready to encourage his rage into hatred and violent anger.
Venom brings them together in the familiar shape of the Medusa myth but turns the narrative on its head – questioning the monstrousness of the Gorgon and how heroic an act her murder truly is.
What I’ve been up to
As mentioned I was very ill before conference and I also went straight from Liverpool to a walking holiday in Kent. This debate I had on GB News was literally the first time I had managed to get out of bed in days - you can probably tell!
I did manage to squeeze in a write up of conference for CapX in which I make the fairly unimpeachable case that Labour is Starmer’s party now.
Glad to hear you've recovered Emma