The end of last week marked roughly the halfway point in the membership stage of this Conservative leadership election: yes, there is still three weeks of it to go. To which you may respond that it’s taking far too long and ducking the hard issues.
There is a tension between those two views, and it’s worth considering for a moment. That there is a gulf between the cheerful campaigns of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss and the sombre prospects facing the country is a given.
But the very length of the campaign is making it impossible not to mind the gap. Certainly, the candidates must fill the seven weeks of it or vanish from the mainstream media – hence the mass of six impossible things before breakfast promised by both of them each day. Or should I make that sixteen?
Whether the matter to hand is Sunak’s plan to set a cap on refugee numbers or Truss’s plans for minimum service levels on critical national infrastructure – both good ideas in themselves – both candidates have been filling grids rather than than thinking seriously. For with no manifesto authority to back them up, such schemes would be likely to perish in the Lords.
But the very length of the campaign has made it impossible for the candidates to get away with it. Just as this week will see the blazing weather succeeded by thunderstorms, so last week saw both of them coshed by reality.
It became impossible for Sunak and Truss to carry on pretending that populist policies as scrapping VAT on household energy bills for a year (the former) or introducing a temporary moratorium on the green energy levy for two years (Truss) represented a coherent plan for dealing with the cost of living crisis.
So it is that Sunak has fessed up to more direct payments for poorer people this winter, and Truss has been forced to concede that tax cuts wouldn’t reach many of them. At last, we are beginning to see the real colour of the candidates’ money. Which may mark the right moment to review both of them.
There is a good case for saying that there’s less difference between them than the two campaigns claim. Indeed, one of the driving causes of the mutual vituperation between them may be “the narcissism of small differences”.
Both swim naturally in the economically liberal, socially liberal consensus. Neither are associated with the One Nation Group at one end of the Parliamentary Party nor the Common Sense Group at the other. Nor have they embraced the communitarian worlds of the Centre for Social Justice or the New Social Covenant Unit.
Nonetheless, a big difference has emerged between them that offers Party activists a meaningful choice. It’s over the central thrust of economic policy. And it explains why making the choice between the candidates is simple but not easy – far harder than in 2017 and 2019, when Theresa May and Boris Johnson piled up over 60 per cent and 50 per cent of Tory MPs’ votes.
Broadly speaking, Sunak wants to stick with the present plan and Truss wants to change it. In the medium term, she is right: we can’t just carry on with the near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, zombie economy model of the last ten years.
But in the short term, Sunak is right. The combination of tax cuts, higher spending and politicians fiddling with the Bank of England’s mandate during uncertain times could spook the markets. Wanting higher rates in principle is a good thing; getting them in practice quite another, if it guarantees, lengthens or deepens recession.
The economics of the choice is wrapped up in the politics – as ever. As Lord Ashcroft would be the first to remind us, present polling is a snapshot, not a prediction. It can’t tell us what voters would make of a Prime Minister Sunak or Truss once they cross the threshold of Downing Street in early September.
Sunak has served in government for five years and Truss for double that time, but he comes with more baggage than she does – due as usual in both cases to character and luck.
He has become trapped in the cage of the status quo, and hasn’t offered the sense of change that activists want. Truss, by contrast, has shown an formidable capacity for self-reinvention. For me, the choice has boiled down to a outfoxed candidate with a more practicable offer – Sunak – versus a more nimble one with a less convincing prospectus: Truss.
And it should be thrown forward, as it were, to the coming winter of discontent, a 1970s-type phrase for a 1970s-type thing – complete with strikes, supply cuts, possible blackouts and energy bills that, as John Oxley reminds us, may represent 14 per cent of the post-tax income of the average household. For many voters, this “will mean destitution”, as he says.
Either candidate will have to grapple with this crisis not during the high summer of campaign pledges, but amist the bleak midwinter of Parliamentary politics. Brood on how fissile the Parliamentary Party can be – and just has been.
Many of my predictions, like those of everyone else, turn out to be wrong. But I was correct to write last December that a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson was more likely than not, while some Conservative commentators in our most distinguished national titles were claiming otherwise.
This required no genius on my part, goodness knows, let alone second sight. It may help to have been a Tory MP for almost ten years, and so to understand what preoccupies many of them: a fear, if they have an unsafe seat, of losing it; or, if they have a safer one, of career damage. That will matter a lot soon, with so many backbench ex-Ministers: a record number, I suspect.
Sunak would have to ride this testy horse with Johnson hurling dung at him from the stables. Truss would have to do so with less support from her colleagues than he gained in the Parliamentary ballot.
This makes up my mind. Truss will have more campaign pledges to eat than Sunak if she wins. As the high risk, high reward candidate, she might well be able to gulp them down more convincingly than her rival. But the judgement of her colleagues was otherwise.
He got 38 per cent of the vote and she won 32 per cent. If as a Party member you can’t quite make up your mind, might it not be sensible to let Tory MPs do it for you? After all, they will have to work with the winner, or try to, in the cockpit of the Commons – amidst a culture that shrivels the power of that 80-seat majority. Johnson’s fate is a bleak warning.
I write as though the contest were still up for grabs. But if the sum of YouGov, Opinium and our own survey are right, Truss has already won the contest, because most Party members have already cast their votes.
If you complain that they have ducked the hard issues, I counter that most voters often do the same. I wrote earlier in the campaign that ConservativeHome wasn’t endorsing either candidate at that stage.
But one must make up one’s mind sooner or later, and it would be odd to fill in a ballot, send it off, and not fess up to readers. If you want to call doing so an endorsement, then I suppose this is an endorsement, for what it’s worth. Now over to you.