“Whatever happened to Nick Boles?” is not a question that I imagine keeps many ConservativeHome readers up at night. The former Skills Minister and member of the Notting Hill set quit the Tories in 2019, after his ‘Common Market 2.0’ Brexit bodge failed to woo MPs. Since then, he has endorsed the Lib Dems, voted for the Greens, and backed Labour. Natalie Elphicke could never.
This helps explain why a man who founded Policy Exchange and served as Boris Johnson’s Chief of Staff found himself as Rachel Reeves’s warm-up act two days ago. According to Boles, the Shadow Chancellor “understands what many of the great chancellors have understood” but “recent chancellors and prime ministers have not”: that “stability in economic policy will unleash investment”.
To be charitable, it is an open secret that our recent Tory-induced political turbulence has left many moneymen praying for a Labour government. Blame historical illiteracy, Brexit, and The Financial Times. But there are undoubtedly many investors who look at the stolid figures of Reeves and Keir Starmer and feel a great sense of reassurance. The grass is always greener…
The starring role of Boles in Reeves’s B movie is unsurprising. He is said to be offering “informal insights” to Labour on how to transition from opposition to power. But it is still somewhat remarkable to see a figure so closely identified with David Cameron’s time in office conspicuously switching to the Dark Side. It’s not quite Brian Clough at Leeds United, but close enough.
Yet Boles seems to have started a trend amongst Cameron-era figures for switching to Labour. Mark Carney has given Reeves his fulsome backing. So has Andrew Cooper, Cameron’s studiously inaccurate ex-pollster. Dan Poulter has joined Anna Soubry and Claire Perry O’Neill as members of the 2010 intake who, by their own circuitous route, have found their way to Starmer’s side.
Most intriguingly, George Osborne has bestowed upon Reeves the mantle of the “heir to Cameron/Osborne”. His logic as Cameron’s former Number 2 was that “moving on from lost battles was the key to future success”. As the pair “appalled” Tory “refuseniks” as they “accepted parts of the Blair inheritance”, Reeves has accepted the OBR, austere fiscal rules, and lower corporation tax.
This was not an exhortation to vote Labour, but a self-aggrandising list of all Osborne’s policies that the Shadow Chancellor has adopted. But it places Starmer and Reeves in a continuity. If Cameron was the “heir to Blair” – and if Tony Blair was Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement – then Labour’s leaders are the next step in that consensus. Thatcher and sons (and daughters).
This can only be pushed so far. Plenty of Cameron-era Conservatives have not gone red as part of their mid-life crises. The Foreign Secretary himself laughed off Osborne’s comments, claimed Rishi Sunak as his real heir, and is much enjoying his globe-trotting Indian Summer. It’d be funnier if Johnson followed his ex-wife – and Elphicke’s advice – and backed Starmer to annoy Sunak.
Still. This defection trend is enough of a phenomenon to be worthy of explanation. Having done God’s work in trying to circumvent our socialist planning system, Boles may have a point in thinking Labour is more likely to pass planning reform than a Tory Party that has positioned itself studiously against it. But a more obvious feature belies Cameronite sympathies for Starmer: Brexit.
The referendum was the great break-in that post-Thatcher chain of inheritance. A ‘modernised’ Conservative Party that had learn Blair’s lessons found itself on the wrong side of history. They thought that by clinging to the consensus of social and economic liberalism they were sat in the mythical centre-ground. Vote Leave proved that that was very far from the case.
When Cameron supposedly described himself as the “heir to Blair” when running for the Tory leadership, he had an obvious reason to pitch himself in the Blairite mould. He was the future, once. New Labour had just won a third election. Bringing his party towards Blair, seemed the obvious route to bring them back to power, as Blair himself had done for Labour by accepting Thatcher’s legacy.
But Brexit made clear that the voters were fed up with ‘centrism’. They had been on the wrong side of stupid wars, soaring migration, financial crises, austerity, and an identikit political class that kept proving untrustworthy and incompetent. Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, and Johnson each, in their way, mobilised this anger, winning larger vote shares than Cameron managed.
This realignment has stalled, lost in the inadequacies of its figureheads and the exigencies of recent global history. But Brexit was still the transformative moment of the 2010s – the hinge point of the people’s decade. Stamer and Reeves were on the side of Remain, The Financial Times, and the sensible chaps. Sunak was not. Who do yesterday’s modernisers find to be better vibes?
Starmer has superficial similarities with Cameron. If he enters Downing Street this year, he will, like Cameron in 2010, have been an MP for nine years, without previously having held a ministerial role. Like Cameron, he won the leadership by posing as his party’s best hope of compromising back to office. Like Cameron, he tends to go slightly puce when under stress.
Yet the differences are equally obvious. You may not have noticed, but Starmer is the Labour leader. Even for Tories who might despair at the current leadership and want to see a few houses built, turning to the socialists is quite a leap. By suggesting they prefer a leader that wants to double down on the Blairite consensus to the Conservatives is saying the quiet bit out loud.
Some of the Cameron-era figures who have crossed the floor were not card-carrying Conservatives, and carry more credibility for it. Reeves was chuffed to have received Carney’s endorsement last year. The imprimatur of a former Governor of the Bank of England carries a little more weight than that of, say, an obscure backbencher with little in common with her new colleagues.
Similarly, even if they are happy to take the advice of their former hangers-on, one imagines being compared to Cameron and Osborne is not something Starmer and Reeves entirely enjoy. Blair’s electoral alchemy could be respected by power-hungry young Tories in the mid-2000s. Few members of the Shadow Cabinet look back on the age of austerity with much admiration.
Unfortunately for them, it is in that respect that an incoming Labour government is going to resemble the administration of Cameron and Osborne the most. The emergence of “Heeviasn” economics not only signifies the intellectual exhaustion of our politicians, but reflects the vileness of the fiscal situation that Starmer will inherit. Sorry! I’m afraid there is no money.
Starmer has acknowledged this. “Compared with 2010, now debt is much higher, interest rates, are much higher, growth is stagnant,” he said in a recent speech. “Public services on their knees, inflationary pressure serious. Taxes higher than any time since the war.” Since Reeves has adopted Hunt’s fiscal rules, this leaves precious little wiggle room. ‘Securonomics’ is dead.
According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, expenditure in so-called “unprotected departments” would have to fall by 3.4 per cent a year in real terms for four years from 2025-6 to keep spending in line with current plans. But the only group less keen on spending cuts than the average voter are Labour MPs. In government, they will be first disappointed, and then be very angry.
Unless Reeves wants to upset her new City friends by adopting the nonchalant attitude towards the markets of Corbyn and Liz Truss, this is a square she and Starmer are going to find very difficult to circle. Like Cameron in 2010, their backbenchers have been out of power for too long, long and want radical action their leaders cannot deliver. How long until the Starmtroopers mutiny?
For Cameron, backbench intransigence manifested as Eurosceptic campaigning. He could blame the Lib Dems for not being sufficiently Tory. Who can Starmer point to if he has a majority of 150? An FT editorial? Either way, Starmer and Reeves can learn from the experience of the Cameronites that government isn’t always what it is cracked up to be. Why take the chance?
Then again, as Stephen Bush has pointed out, Cameron’s instincts were to the right of his centrist hangers-on. Sunak really is his heir. Cameron’s government may have few active defenders now. But it cut taxes, reformed welfare, and achieve a damn sight more than its successors. In education reform, it saw the stand-out success of time in office (even if that was, erm, nicked from Blair).
In a perfect world, the ability to be quietly radical against a grim background would be the lesson that Labour’s leadership take from Boles et al. Maybe, dear God, they might build some gosh-darn houses. Or they might ignore it, double down on a political consensus that has repeatedly proved unwanted, but which nobody has yet created a workable alternative, and be swept away.
A new future, much like the old. Stand by for yesterday’s men.