In the wake of this week’s Conservative leadership election BBC debate, the Political Editor of the Times tweeted: “A spokesman for Liz Truss claims that Rishi Sunak is not fit for office: ‘Rishi Sunak has tonight proven he is not fit for office. ‘His aggressive mansplaining and shouty private school behaviour is desperate, unbecoming and is a gift to Labour’ “.
Sunak’s campaign hasn’t gone so far as to say that Truss isn’t fit for office, but he has been prepared to attack her personally – using the question to an opponent allocated to him in the earlier ITV debate to press Truss about her Remain and Liberal Democrat past.
Mind you, neither candidate has said that if Conservatives vote for the other, they will “murder the party you love” – as Penny Mordaunt tweeted on the day of the final Parliamentary ballot (the tweet was swiftly deleted). The other two candidates in the final five also raised eyebrows.
Tom Tugendhat revealed a private conversation in order to go after Sunak over the national insurance rise. Kemi Badenoch did the same over Treasury team talks about Covid and fraud. How can the new Prime Minister be able to trust either, if appointed to Cabinet in September, not to blurt out confidential discussions on live TV?
Robust debate is one thing; self-destructiveness is another – inflamed by TV’s pursuit of ratings, social media’s feeding frenzy, the craze for celebrity and the way we live now. For make no mistake: the most likely winner of this frenzied contest so far is…Keir Starmer.
Labour sails on as I write, seven points ahead in Politico’s poll of polls – gleefully filing away these gibes, assaults and demolitions of each other’s programmes: all to be projected during the run-up to September, while the splits and sackings in Keir Starmer’s own team grab less attention.
Perhaps the factor that most maddens both campaigns is the timetable. Ballot papers go out on Monday. Many members vote early. Sunak and Truss have thus had a single working week between the Parliamentary and membership stages in which to make their case. This has done nothing to cool the temperature.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s bulky shadow looms over this contest. As a friend of mine put it, echoing Diana, Princess of Wales: “there are three of them in this election, leaving it a bit crowded”. Peter Cruddas’ Draft Johnson campaign may be daft but is also telling: the Conservatives’ can’t get the blond monkey off their backs.
These hectic proceedings leave this website in an unusual position. This is the third Conservative leadership election in six years, and there are familiar steps to the campaign dance. One of these is that publications endorse candidates as the ballot papers go out, in order to ensure that their view has maximum impact on their readers.
I’ve no idea what impact ConservativeHome’s view has on anyone – insofar as it does at all – but we’re letting the opportunity pass us by this time. In a nutshell, this leadership election so far has been at best a damp squib, at worst self-destructive – either way unconvincing. We’re not yet prepared to endorse anyone, and may not do so in any event.
You may think that this take is out of proportion. That the more debate there is, the better, whatever the content – because it tells us stuff that we need to know. That the new leader will have time to turn Labour’s poll lead roiund. And that I am being unfair to two purposeful and intelligent potential Prime Ministers.
You may have a point. After all, there is plenty of the 2019 manifesto left to implement, and it wasn’t the last word in Conservative politics. That Sunak and Truss have plenty of new ideas is a good thing. But the more one probes them, the more questions one asks.
Take Truss’s proposal to make personal allowances fully transferable between couples. This is a nice idea, but how would it work? She has adroitly spotted the political peril of restricting the plan to married couples only, but how would a Truss Government then work out who is really co-habiting with whom?
Or consider Sunak’s plan, no less welcome, to cap the number of refugees. Presume for a moment that he is prepared to tear up Britain’s Refugee Convention commitments. How is he proposing, without the manifesto authority to apply the Parliament Act to the measure, to get it through the Lords (assuming that it clears the Commons)?
You could argue that campaign pledges shouldn’t be taken too seriously. For example, whatever happened to Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign promise to cut the top rate of tax? But if these commitments aren’t worth the pixels they appear on, what’s the point of them?
There are bigger fish to fry. Britain faces an extraordinary triple economic, constitutional, and generational crisis, as Brexit beds itself in and Covid is shaken off. We are an ageing country, like other western democracies, sustained by immigration – on a scale previously unknown, which brings its own challenges.
Ownership of capital divides starkly by age. And by region, too – with one part of the UK, Scotland, threatening to leave and another, Northern Ireland, destablised by the Protocol’s workings. The hand grenade of the cost of living crisis is being chucked into this fragile building.
October’s energy price cap may be 150 per cent higher than the year before. NHS waiting lists could approach ten million by 2024. The prospect of power cuts is real this winter – potentially collapsing Europe’s anti-Putin alliance. The National Security Adviser warns that diplomatic structures are broken and the world risks nuclear war.
The contrast between those blithe leadership campaigns and this baleful landscape is unnerving, and raises profound questions about politicians and truth. The most contested ground of the campaign is the economy – with Sunak painted as the candidate of growth-crushing tax rises and Truss as that of recession-boosting interest rate hikes.
But the £30 billion or so tax difference between them is far less than what unites them, with public spending this year due to top £1 trillion for the first time. Can’t the candidates level with Conservative members in this election, warning them that the third or so that goes on healthcare and pensions is unsustainable?
Or is that just too scary for activists, given their age and profile? And if the candidates can’t be frank with Tory members, what odds them doing so with the whole country? Of the two, Sunak, with his neatly-assembled five point plan for migration, criminal justice, schools, security and the cost of living has come closest to telling members the truth.
He’s also the candidate that most voters seem to prefer, though the evidence is inconclusive, and certainly the one with the most support among Tory MPs. However, telling the truth is one thing and persuading people of it another. And to date, Truss is proving the more persuasive salesman of the two.
This may be because she is more likely to tell Tory activists what they want to hear. Nonetheless, she is the candidate who appears more restive with the status quo, and more willing, in the challenge I flung down last weekend, to make Britain a more conservative country – given her more substantial track record on the equality/diversity/inclusion continuum, for example.
The poll closes on September 2. That’s five weeks away. A mass of hustings lie in between. Some members will already have made up their minds, will vote early, and go off on holiday. Others will wait, and are right to do so. They may wonder if it was a surge of frustration that sent Kate McCann swooning to the floor.