Yesterday, after the news broke about Michael Gove’s resignation from Parliament, I was asked about the significance of the timing. Why had he waited so long to make the announcement? Was it a last twist of the knife, somehow intended to damage Rishi Sunak?
One can’t rule it out, of course. But the much more likely reason was washup. Two of the departing Housing Secretary’s bills – the Renter’s Reform Bill and the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill – still hung in the balance when the Prime Minister made his announcement on Wednesday afternoon.
It made sense for Gove to hang around long enough to know what his legacy would be. Lo, his resignation letter boasts of delivering “wide-ranging reforms to leasehold”, and discretely avoids any mention of abolishing no-fault evictions.
He was thus spared the ignominy Sunak inflicted on himself by listing the creation of a smokefree generation amongst his accomplishments in office, only for the Bill to fall 24 hours later.
Frankly, the loss of these pieces of legislation is probably not going to cost many Conservatives much sleep. We have published pieces about the awful design of the smoking ban, and I’ve written about the steep cost of the populist crackdown on private rented housing. (The sadly-overtaken filleting of the great freehold robbery is coming soon.)
But even without relitigating the merits of each case, washup has added another fascinating dimension to the timing of the election. By choosing to go now, Sunak seems to have dropped the guillotine on his entire legacy.
In his conference speech in October, he lead with three policies. The smoking ban? The bill has fallen. Replacing A Levels and T Levels with the Advanced British Standard? The funds have apparently not been committed. Cancelling HS2? The fire-sale of land has barely started.
The Prime Minister has even got into trouble for abandoning Martyn’s Law (a plan to freight struggling hospitality venues with a raft of new obligations, none of which would not have prevented the Manchester Arena bombing.)
Last month, I wrote about how Sunak was trying to take a shortcut to a legacy. But he hasn’t even seen out the shortcut.
Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt has been left talking a big game about inheritance tax, but without a final, concrete programme of actual policy offers he ought, as a Chancellor going into an election, have been able to conjure – because the decision to go to the country was made after his decidedly non-pre-election Budget in March.
And the big policy for the day-three campaign relaunch is… national service? Which the Defence Secretary dismissed as “nonsense” only in January?
There has been much ink spilled, since the advent of New Labour, about the decline of Cabinet government. But it’s hard to think of a clearer example of the very opposite, government by bunker, than we have seen in the past year. The headline conference policies, like the election, were cooked up secretly in Downing Street – and like they election, they were botch jobs.
Now the same thing is playing out again. What would be the consequences if an 18-year-old refused national service? We can hardly send them to prison, not whilst ministers are having to extend early release programmes. Even if Conservative candidates support national service in principle, they need and deserve answers to those questions, and a fully worked-out policy.
Because how long will it be before this, too, implodes? Before people realise that only five per cent of 18-year-olds could even do the military component, and not a single one in a combat role (even if they wanted to), or that it’s funded by scrapping the levelling up money.
Maybe it will peel a couple of percentage points off Reform UK’s. But as I have written elsewhere, in the medium term Reform’s prospects aren’t amazing.
The long-term challenge for the Party is going to be regaining the trust of all those generations (broadly, the under-50s) who have abandoned the party over its failures on issues such as housing, childcare, and the cost of living. Some of those voters may well recall the promise to conscript them, or their children, long after the immediate threat of Reform UK has faded.
Nostalgia for a lost golden era of British politics is usually unhelpful, even where it is not misinformed. But it is increasingly clear that the withering of the Party as an institution has reached the point where it is self-destructive.
A handful of people should not have a free hand to commit the entire party to new policies at zero notice. At least when a prime minister had to get policies through Cabinet, their colleagues knew what they were going to be defending week to week.