bourgeoisvalues

[bourgeoisvalues]

The Tory leadership pt. 2

Good afternoon. In the first part of this post I argued that in roughly ascending order, Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid were some of the likeliest contenders to enter 10 Downing Street in the next six to twelve months.

I should also add before I continue that one Steve Baker, a former junior Brexit minister and anti-Theresa May schemer, is also tipped to run as the dark horse anti-COVID, ultra libertarian candidate. However I’m very happy to write him off as a factional dead-end. The size of the upcoming rebellion over Plan B will represent the most optimistic assessment of his support in the parliamentary party (around 70 MPs out of 365).

The real frontrunner, in my view, is the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. Appointed to that role by Johnson as a means of giving Rishi Sunak a rival, she could be viewed by the large minority of Tories (many of whom are based in the so-called Red Wall) who do not want a return to the Thatcher/Cameron days as the best-placed candidate to offer Johnsonism without Johnson. She certainly has some of his showmanlike insticts (I direct you to her instagram and her speech about British cheese), though she will never match his ability to radiate Main Character Energy. Indeed, she was the first cabinet minister to endorse him in 2019, proving that she was a step ahead of her colleagues in understanding that his unique, heterodox appeal was the only thing that could guarantee a resounding defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, despite his differences with her on economic policy.

Her political instincts and presentation are Thatcherite all the way down, however. She was even pictured the other day on maneuvres in a tank, apeing one of the most famous pictures of the Iron Lady. Moreso than her rivals, she knows that making an enthusiastic, patriotic effort to sell Brexit Britain at home and abroad is the glue which binds the otherwise very different appeals of both Thatcher and Johnson. She has managed to be a classic Tory on the issues that matter (taxes, taxes, taxes) without coming off, as Sunak and Javid inevitably will, as an evil banker who wants to steal your alzheimers-ridden father’s house to pay his social care bill. This gives her an extremely wide appeal to both the grassroots, who make the final decision, and the parliamentary party, who whittle the candidates down to two.

What makes her particularly formidable is that, as I have described, she understands vibes better than the other candidates. Just as her Boosterism game is stronger than her rivals’, helming the Department for International Trade for several years gave her many opportunities to shed her Remainer background more successfully than Javid or Hunt. Flying around the world signing (paltry) trade agreements with decidedly non-European countries like Japan and Australia is the reason that she has the second-most Brexity vibe of all Tory politicians after Boris himself, as well as the highest approval rating (+80%) among Conservative Party members. This role was heavy on theatrics and light on impact while still giving Truss the credibility of managing a policy area related to the economy. This dynamic is similar to the one I described in my last post, where Javid has ample opportunity to earn anti-lockdown plaudits without having to take actual, consequential decisions.

Another fascinating aspect of Liz Truss’ career is that she has retained the Women and Equalities brief throughout her tenure in charge of international trade and now the Foreign Office. This is another sign that Johnson views her as an ally. By allowing her to keep what amounts to a podium with which to have a loud voice on contentuous social issues, such as net-zero (sceptical), gender  self-ID (anti) and gay rights (she likes dancing in gay bars), without having to abandon the diplomatic posts which have been so rejuvenating for her political fortunes. Along with Patel, Truss is among the foremost anti-woke candidates for PM. That said, unlike the Home Secretary, Truss knows how to have fun, and her sunny outlook means that she never comes off as unattractively socially conservative. On the spectrum of anti-woke politicians (which you should really be on to have a chance at winning over the Tory selectorate) she sits comfortably between Boris, who is a hypocritical, unserious boor, and Patel, who is a cruel, buttoned-up puritan. Again, I think her genius is all down to political positioning. She can be the candidate of anti-woke crusties and the candidate of (relative) liberals. It is all about vibes.

In sum, Liz Truss has huge appeal to many different parts of the parliamentary party and Tory membership (the latter of which already favours her hugely) because of

a) her proudly Thatcherite economics

b) her comfortably liberal personality

c) her overt, bubby patriotism and anti-woke bromides

d) her suprisingly authentic embrace of Brexit and her ability to frame it in a way which resonates with people who *genuinely* think it’s still a very good idea

e) her nonexistent positions on COVID restrictions, which give her leeway to be as cynical as she needs to be

f) her ability to put on a show; her potential for *star appeal*

g) her understanding of vibes and political communication more generally (you really must look up her tank photoshoot)

Javid and Sunak are too similar and draw from uncomfortably similar sources of support and Hunt is yesterday’s man. One of the former two will end up in the final round with Truss, and barring a major scandal, will be defeated by a similar margin to Jeremy Hunt in 2019. The only things holding her back are that she is relatively untested, and that Tory MPs may be wary of supporting somebody as potentially dangerous and ambitious as Johnson. She is hardly an obscure back-becher, but if the mood of the parliamentary party is resolutely set on choosing a safe pair of hands, or on cutting short their flirtation with populism, she may have reason to worry.

Overall, however, I find it difficult to imagine an anti-Truss campaign coalescing around two alternative figures in order to ensure she does not reach the membership round, which she would surely dominate. She has not made enemies in the way that the current occupant of No. 10 had even before he became PM, and she has made plenty of friends. John Major rose to prominence in 1989 and just over a year later he was Prime Minister. Both Sunak and Truss are on a similar trajectory, but of the two, the Foreign Secreary is the more formidable by far.

[bourgeoisvalues]

On the Tory leadership

Hello, this is my first post on politics and maybe other things I’m interested in. Hopefully this will be a regular blog but if only I read it I’ll probably be the only one to blame.

I’d like to write something about the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, to start with. No, not Keir Starmer. Now that the media have started saying things like ‘this is the beginning of the end for Boris Johnson’ we can be fairly sure there’s at least a reasonable chance Tory MPs are thinking the same and feeding back to their contacts in the BBC, Spectator, Daily Mail and elsewhere that they’re very cross with the PM.

An inexhaustive and brief summary of why different parts of the party (all of which have large and complex overlap) are angry with Johnson would look something like this:

The remaining (in both sense of the word) liberal-conservatives are frustrated with Boris because of all the Brexity, culture warry, right-wing stuff; the Tory right are annoyed about all the Channel migrant crossings, the existence of (limited) COVID restrictions and the lack of progress on ruining the Irish peace process; the economic liberals see Boris as betraying the small-state, low-spending traditions of the party; plenty of particularly older men in the parliamentary party are anxious that they’ve either been passed up for promotion or been demoted to make way for fresh Northern and/or minority ethnic blood; and all Tory factions are angry about The Trolley’s (as Dominic Cummings calls him) lying and inconstancy on issues as varied as whether or not he knew who was paying for the redecoration of his Downing Street flat, whether or not Owen Patterson should be rescued from suspension for breaking lobbying rules, and whether or not illegal Christmas parties took place at Downing Street last year.

Apparently, his flirtation with compulsory vaccination, which the BBC has used as a basis for producing a fairly supportive sounding explainer on the subject, has Tory MPs feeling like they no longer know him. Throw into the mix Labour’s new lead in the polls and the survey findings showing that a majority of the public think Johnson should resign, and you can see, even after decades of self-serving melodrama which has yet to bring him down, why the parliamentary party are beginning to think Boris may no longer be a winner.

So, imagine that in six months time Johnson has been unable to steady the ship, as seems likely, and a bad winter has led to a weak performance in May’s local elections. Labour does alright, and the smaller parties clean up in the affluent Tory heartlands. The letters go in to the chair of the 1922 committee and Boris becomes the first Tory leader to lose a confidence vote since the venerable Iain Duncan Smith back in 2003, and the first Tory Prime Minister to be deposed since...Theresa May? If you don’t count the ones who jumped before they were pushed, you arguably have to go back to Edward Heath, but now I’m getting off topic.

Who would the leading candidates be in the event of a leadership election? Well, right now, Tory MPs seem to believe that Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are the frontrunners.

Other relative Big Beasts are Priti Patel, the Home Secretary; Jeremy Hunt, former Foreign Secretary and current chair of the Health and Social Care select committee; Michael Gove, man of many jobs; and Sajid Javid, Health Secretary and former Chancellor, among other things. Dominic Raab gets an honourable mention here but being fired as Foreign Secretary for fucking up so publicly during the Afghanistan withdrawal probably puts an end to his chances.

Two up-and-comers who might run but probably have no chance are Kwasi Kwarteng at Business and Nadhim Zahawi at Education. Both seem to be highly regarded and in possession of upward momentum but any run on their part would probably be done for the purposes of increasing their overall clout and name recogniation.

Finally, several MPs who served in the armed forces and made powerful speeches during the Commons debate on Afghanistan include Johnny Mercer, Tom Tugendhat, and Tobias Ellwood. Any, though particularly Tugendhat, could act as a lightningrod for a party in a mood to recover its seriousness, but none have expressed interest in running or have much of a media presence beyond their soldierly niche.

Of the names I have listed here, we can probably say that the soldiers and the up-and-comers are out of the running. None (yet) have the star-factor which is generally required in the current media environment and are fairly early in their careers. Kwarteng’s Thatcherite politics and profile are not unique enough to get him far and Zahawi’s brand of gentle, dentist-like competence is untested and underdeveloped. The Education brief is his first real cabinet role.

As I noted above, Raab’s disgraceful exit from the Foreign Office makes it unlikely he would be able to improve on his 2019 performance if he wanted to. To the list of likely-nots we can add Patel for the simple reason that she is very well known and very unpopular. Bearing in mind that female politicians are subject to unfair scrutiny, the woman has the charisma of a chest of drawers and comes across as Thatcher if Thatcher didn’t have style. Her focus on illegal immigration also makes her look very bad in light of what is percieved on the right of the Tory Party (her obvious constituency) as a dangerous migrant crisis which is ongoing and looks impervious to government’s efforts to stymy it. I do not believe that either of them will stand, but if they did they would be certain to lose.

Next are the candidates who could run and do quite well, but probably would not win.

Michael Gove is one of the most interesting men in British politics, having served - off the top of my head - as the Secretary of State for justice, the environment, education, the cabinet office, housing and ‘levelling up’ (his current joint role), as well as taking on the jobs of chief whip and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at different stages. Most famously, he ran for the leadership in 2016 after stabbing the current PM in the back, coming third, and ran again in 2019, also coming third. His politics are heterodox: he was seen to take on the teachers’ unions at Education and results have improved since then (though I’m not equipped to argue causation), he was the highest profile Brexiteer to support May’s deal in 2019, and now he’s the loudest voice in government for strong and fast measures on COVID. That he’s been tasked with solving the housing crisis and giving shape to the Tories’ ‘levelling up’ agenda shows that he’s probably the minister who is most highly regarded in the party in terms of getting actual results.

Despite his two failed attempts in the past, this track record might make you think that he’s the obvious choice. Three things are getting in the way, in my view. First, Gove’s generally sensible, evidence-based attitudes towards COVID probably preclude him from being Prime Minister. The mood of the parliamentary party right now is too set against things like mandatory masks and vaccine certification, let alone further lockdowns (inshallah we shall never go into another lockdown). At the time of writing, 64 Tory MPs have promised to vote against the government’s ‘Plan B’, which includes only the kind of mild measures England should never have dropped. This is enough to force Johnson to pass the measures on opposition votes, and to doom Gove’s chances of becoming PM, which he probably knows. Second, he will want more time to use his current job as a means of shaping the Tory domestic agenda. He is arguably the most influential man in government after the PM and Chancellor, and will view this as a chance to secure a legacy if he can stay in Johnson’s successor’s good books. And third, something really weird and horny is going on in his private life. Admittedly this never stopped Boris, but Michael Gove isn’t Boris and he probably couldn’t withstand more videos of him clubbing in Aberdeen being made public. As I wrote above, Gove knows all this, which is why I don’t expect him to run at all.

Jeremy Hunt would be the obvious choice for MPs who are furthest towards the ‘we hate this guy’ end of the spectrum (this guy being Boris Johnson). He was a very long-serving (though unpopular) Health Secretary under David Cameron and the Foreign Secretary under Theresa May, before refusing to accept a demotion under Boris Johnson (the man he replaced at the Foreign Office). Returning to the backbenches, he has improved his already solid reputation in the parliamentary party markedly as chair of the Health and Social Care select committee while making no enemies that I am aware of by making measured critiques of the government’s COVID policies. His problem is that while he has an extremely serious and normal vibe, which is what a lot of his colleagues will be looking for after Johnson, he doesn’t appeal very much to any of the Tory tribes other than moderates who don’t much like all this populist stuff. This isn’t an inconsiderable lane, but candidates like Sunak and Javid (more below) fit this bill fairly well too but simply bring more to the table. He doesn’t have a track record of full-throated neoliberalism or the more statist variety of Toryism which is hesitantly being adopted by parts of the party. In short, he represents the old middle of the Tory Party and hasn’t done much to position himself in relation to the internally controversial developments in economic policy which will surely be a key cleavage of this leadership contest. Even if Hunt were to be one of the two candidates approved by MPs to be voted on by the party membership (which is possible, given that he was last time), there is no world in which the rabidly and consistently right-wing selectorate will choose him over a candidate who is more economically liberal/anti-woke/pro-Brexit. Remember, it’s ALL about vibes, and Hunt’s vibe is a little bland and out of step with the party’s.

Another possible contender is Sajid Javid. The former Chancellor and Home Secretary has made a dramatic comeback as Health Secretary after Matt Hancock was found to be fondling a woman who wasn’t his wife. There isn’t as much chatter about his leadership prospects as there was when he was the frontrunner in c. 2018, but hiding behind Rishi Sunak might paradoxically be a winning strategy when both men share such a similar political lane.

Javid and Sunak are both arch-Thatcherites; the former is even said to re-read Ayn Rand every single year. Each of them sees their political mission as continuing the work of The Iron Lady and George Osborne; stripping back the frontiers of the state in order to allow the free market to reshape Britain’s economy and promote the most talented and deserving of success. This places both firmly on the side of those who want to resist the move away from laissez-faire which has accompanied the party’s pivot towards voters in the so-called ‘red wall’, which in my view is the larger share of the parliamentary party. Both of them are seen as serious and competent, but they also share a slightly wooden demeanour, a flair for unmemorable, clunky rhetoric, and are quite bad for unattractive self-promotion. Rishi has made the Exchequer into a brand, and Javid was arguably more crass in how unsubtly he used immigration, grooming gangs and Shamima Begum to increase his popularity with the overwhelmingly white Tory membership when those issues were in his purview as Home Secretary. Both men are staunch Brexiteers, which helps, but Javid unwisely supported Remain because he thought it would help his career, which doesn’t help. Both are also British Asians, which, crass as it may be, will be seen as an asset when this demographic is one of the most Conservative-friendly in the non-white population due to their percieved association with entreprenurialism, family values, and so on.

Their strange political relationship primarily comes, however, from the episode in which Javid resigned as Chancellor in February 2020 when the PM tried to impose an unprecedented level of control over his department. Johnson (at the urging of Dominic Cummings) attempted to force Javid to accept advisors handpicked by No. 10, who rightly resigned. Sunak had no such qualms, however, and has beneffitted hugely from taking the job. Opening the purse strings during the pandemic with the creation of the furlough scheme, which saved millions of jobs, has made him the most popular politician in the country. This alone makes the Chancellor a very likely replacement for Boris, who himself was chosen purely because he was percieved to be a ‘winner’.

However, the source of Sunak’s popularity makes him deeply uncomfortable, given his prediliction towards prudent, Thatcherite, small-state etc etc vibes. If he had his way, none of this would be happening, which reassures the extremely large share of the party which shares his discomfort with the measures taken to save the economy. The current equilibrium, in which Sunak is very popular with the public but still commands the trust of the economic liberals in his party, is one which would, if a contest were hold today, serve him very well. But the recent budget, which raised taxes and was described in the media as something Gordon Brown might have come up with, has undermined confidence in him and his independence from the alleged neo-keynesian Boris Johnson.

Without trying to predict what will happen with Omicron, it looks likely that one of three things could happen. a) Sunak revives the furlough scheme and takes partial responsibility for more public spending and social restrictions, further damaging his reputation with already-febrile Tory backbenchers. b) Sunak refuses to do this out of self-interest, and allows millions of people to lose their incomes and thousands of businesses to fold during another lockdown, which destoys his career. Or, c) he resigns. This would be the best option for him, but the most unpredictable.

Javid, on the other hand, a) is untainted either by association with Johnson or by unseemly opposition to him, b) occupies a very similar political lane to Sunak, c) holds a position at Health which allows him huge leeway to wax libertarian on COVID without the ability to make actual decisions with serious consequences that the Chancellor has, d) is more or less widely respected and in tune with his party’s mainstream, and e) has been out of government for almost all of the pandemic and is therefore not culpable in the eyes of the parliamentary party for being too pro-restriction or unelectably anti-lockdown. He has more room to position himself.

It is easy to see that in the event of Sunak’s star waning under scrutiny (as often happens to frontrunners, i.e. Heseltine, Osborne, Johnson and Javid themselves in another life...), his predecessor could quickly come to be seen by many of those who currently support the Chancellor as a potential replacement. This is also very unpredictable, and could well result in their mutual destruction, but it is clear to me that Javid and Sunak are the strongest candidates bar possibly one other...

Unfortunately it is midnight and I have work tomorrow, so my thoughts on Liz Truss and my overall conclusions will have to wait until I have time to write again in the next few days. This has been fun and I hope I do this regularly. Sweet dreams xx