Giles started all six interviews with the same question to the candidates: why should it be you?
MS: So, the party is in a critical moment in its history, just badly lost an election. It needs reuniting… needs to develop a policy platform that’s going to deal with the threat from Reform, but also to bring back those voters from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and that needs leadership. Why me? I didn’t come into Parliament until I was 48 years old, so I had a lot of real-world experience outside…. that’s what most people tell me they want to see a politician. What I did with that time was: I built my own business, literally sitting at the kitchen table, starting from scratch, bringing teams of people together, motivating them, getting a common objective, storming those metaphorical mountains, and I did that here in the UK and in the United States of America.
And I know how to lead.
So the biggest thing that I will bring as leader… is leadership, and that is the most important thing that anybody participating in this election should be thinking about.
GD: I knew of you in government. We’ve worked on things together, and you and your teams. But would you accept that perhaps the rest of the party doesn’t know you as well?
MS: So, I think there’s some profile raising to be done, but I think a lot of the people out there whether they’re party members or not… know of me. I mean, I did about 25 per cent of all the broadcast rounds during the run-up to the general election…. why did I do that? Because I cared about my colleagues winning their seats rather than losing them, and I was the one that was prepared to stand up, be counted, put my head above the parapet, take the incoming, and to deal with it. So, you know…it’s a long contest… there’s a lot of time to get to know more members between now and early November as well.
GD: Do you think the party as a whole has accepted what happened to it and worked out why it happened?
MS: So, I think there were five things, at least, that happened.
Three of them were things that we had no control over. Two of them we had control over.
The three that we had no control over, was Covid, which turned us into a big spending party for a while … 400 billion support the economy and families and so on.. that in turn, of course, leaned into a higher tax burden that became part of the issue for us economically.
The second thing was the import of inflation as a consequence of the Ukraine/Russia war, and once again, having support families of cost of living payments through that and the challenges of high inflation and inevitably higher interest rates as monetary policy got tightened.
The third thing we had no control over was we’d been in government for 14 years. It’s always harder after a long period to sustain or present yourself as something new and the kind of engine of change for the future.
But there were two things we did to ourselves, and one of those is around losing trust and integrity and that sense of values that the electorate look for. So look… as members, we always typically think about policies and the left, and right spectrum and so on. But a lot of voters actually just asked a simple question, does this party share my values? And I think things like party-gate… and a number of the scandals that were… not just around at that time, but subsequently, and went on right up to the eve of the election, were about that sense of trust and values…and that got broken.
But the second thing that we did to ourselves was the mini-Budget, and was the loss of that sense of economic competence that our party had built up over very many years. And of course, we have in the past lost it, but generally we’ve maintained it to the extent that the Labour Party were perfectly happy to drag us onto that terrain and beat us over the head with it.
So, I think those two things were particularly difficult. So it’s left us with a trust issue. It’s left us with a delivery issue that we need to address, but before we even get into a conversation with the public, they’ve got to start wanting to listen to us again, and that’s going to be about a new leader providing effective and responsible opposition to this government.
GD: Do you suffer at all from being very much allied with Rishi? Are you aware of that? … or do you think that’s just not the case?
MS: It’s not something that’s come through the campaign, actually.
I thought there were perfectly good reasons why we should want Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, particularly after, as I mentioned, the mini-Budget… what we needed to do was settle the economy and take some serious and sensible decisions. And I thought he was the right person to do that at that time.
And I think amongst the many successes, actually, of our entire period in office since 2010… which, of course, have now been blotted out and overshadowed by the calamity of this general election result… restoring economic stability and settling markets, getting inflation down to its target of 2 per cent… getting real wages growing in each of the last 12-13 months… getting high levels of employment, low levels of unemployment and so on, a considerable achievement, and I think he was very much part of that.
GD: Do you think that there is something in this whole left/right division? I see quite a lot of people and candidates… is there something there?… that we are conservative enough?
MS: So I think really, these labels are left and right are quite unhelpful. And classically, what people do is they say, well, the issues that Reform voters are concerned about, so net migration, stopping the boats, lower taxes, for example, are naturally the preserve of the rights. I didn’t think they are actually I think they’re common ground issues that actually matter to voters right across the political spectrum. And, if you poll Liberal Democrats on things like net migration, they’re quite concerned about it too. So I think we’ve got to kind of step away from that.
I think what we have lost is this sense of a Conservative Party being a bright, shining beacon for opportunity, aspiration, and achievement. And we last really felt that, probably back in the 1980s and I think that is probably the most important thing that we have to provide the fiscal space…because I think it’s a fiscal issue and a tax issue, as much as anything else… to try and reignite that. I think the platform, therefore, that we need to build going forward… and I would build as leader… would very much have the economy, and what kind of economy we are going to have, right at its heart.
GD: Do you think we have sorted out what it is to be a Conservative as a party? Do we know what a proper Conservative is?
MS:Yeah… I think we do.
I think it’s about opportunity and aspiration… and achievement …and facilitating that and being an opportunity-based society. And I think it is about a party that believes in lower taxation, freedom, it’s a party that believes in public services, but public services that are provided in an efficient and productive way.
We believe in sound money, in a stable economy… We believe in home ownership and communities being stronger if people have a sense of involvement in them in that way… We believe in strong defence… I think all of those things are very strongly agreed to across the Conservative Party.
I think there have been some issues that have kind of been a litmus test as to whether you’re on the left or the right… the ECHR, for example, would be be one of those, I think. Brexit, clearly I think in the past, to a degree, has been as well. But I think this far, far more that unites us that we have in common, than divides us across the party.
GD: What would you do… what do you want to do with the party as a structure? Because most of the candidates have seemed to say it needs to change in some way, how would that look under your leadership?
MS: So I was the first person actually to start…. one of your illustrious predecessors, Tim Montgomerie, recognised it, I was one of the first people to start talking about the party structure… because it really matters, because whereas we’ve got a slow time lane for policy development… this can take months and years, and that instead, is one of the reasons why you don’t paint yourself in too starkly, too early on certain issues, like ECHR for example… you take the parliamentary party with you and take your time over it…but on the May election track, of course, time is very, very short, and that’s why the party…and the shape of the party is so important: So what would I do?
The first thing I would do is: we’ve got to build a mass membership organisation, and part of that is answering the question: “what does it mean to be a member?” At the moment, it means you pay 39 pounds, and all you ever hear from the centre is an endless stream of requests for more cash! I think we should look to the trade unions… I know that’s not a very popular, sort of … “trade unions and conservatism”… although a lot of their members are conservatives … they’re very good at generally looking after their members and providing them with benefits and a form of engagement that is inclusive and makes them want, in their case, to pay rather more than 39 pounds a year to be a member.
So I think we’ve got to look very closely at what it means to be a member….. the second thing is, we’ve got to have more respecting the centre for the associations. So the days of parachuting in a central office nominated candidate … allowing a vote of the local association, right at the very last minute, have got to finish, so I will absolutely stop to that …we need candidates voted in by local associations and, you know, four plus years in advance of the General Election.
The third thing which is really important is the way in which we function currently at the centre as an election winning machine…. It’s dysfunctional and it’s not working. What we need to do is we need to bring together the digital function, the rebuttal function, research function of CCHQ… and I as a leader, need to be going in and ask the following questions and get a satisfactory answer: Right, Show me…. tell me… what are the issues in Devon, or Northumbria, or whatever, at the local level…. tick that box. Now tell me where all the opposition councillors stand on those issues.. and what other issues they are attacking us on… and where they’re vulnerable.
And most important of all now, show me the ammunition that you’ve generated, digital or otherwise, that we’re sending out to our candidates and our councillors in the field to allow them to win those battles. Now that doesn’t necessarily require a huge amount of financial investment, but it is about management and structure, and I think that’s one of those 80/20 changes we can make fairly quickly, and we need to, because in order to win in May, we’re going to have to get that kind of stuff working, and fast. If we don’t start winning in May, then we’ll get more hollowed out on the ground and it’s going to be more difficult for 2029.
GD: Are you more concerned about how one defeats Labour, or are you worried about any kind of existential threat from Reform, and how would you tackle it?
MS: So I’m concerned about both ends. I mean, if you look at 97 which was a very difficult result for us, you could argue… it’s worse… in the sense that there’s a bigger Lib Dem block in the Commons now and we’ve got, over to our right, a small number of MPs for Reform. We didn’t have that in ’97.
So I think there is a huge challenge but we’ve got to address both groups,…but the way to do it: with the Reform group, is… no deals with Nigel Farage. We’ve got to start attacking populism, and we’ve got to start recasting Nigel Farage as a populist, rather than somebody that “tells it the way it is… and channels popular policies”.
And by populism, I mean this kind of politics that is about setting up a them and an us… the bogeyman… “the man of the people who is going to stand up for the masses against the bogeyman”. And we’ve seen that around the riots: So what Nigel Farage did was stepped out and started suggesting the police were not being truthful to the public about the circumstances around Southport. He also linked that to the attack on a uniformed officer in Kent and questioning whether terrorism might have been part of what happened there or not… were the security services by implication telling us the full truth…. All of that erodes trust in the system, in authority, etc, and moves us a bit closer to where Trumpite-America is and that really disturbs me.
So I think there’s a bit of work to do in terms of revealing to people what Nigel Farage is really all about. But …. we have to have absolute respect for the issues that are of concern to reform voters…
GD: Lots of those people think he’s “spot on”…. or stopped being our members because of that …..
MS: They are right, absolutely right
We did NOT deliver on stopping the boats… we didn’t certainly didn’t deliver on net migration, in fact, which was up over 600,000 last year, I mean, absolutely fell short…. and on lower taxes and so on. So the way to get back to your question is that we reach out to to those voters by addressing the issues that they care about. But…. they are also people who, many of them are voting Reform because they just simply protested against the fact that we were not competent generally, and they lost trust with us… so the two issues that we talked about earlier. So if we regain that, I think some of these people will naturally drift back.
We shouldn’t assume Giles, of course, that everyone in the Reform column would otherwise have voted Conservative. About 20 per cent of them would have gone for Labour or Liberal Democrats, and a good proportion of them would have probably stayed at home in the absence of Reform. So that’s that point.
And then on Labour and the Lib Dems (voters), I think, you know, we have those kind of issues that matter to them as well. They want to see good public services. They want to see an economy that can afford to fix the roads and do all the things…. you know, police the streets and all the things that we expect of a civilised society, and that is, at its core, an economic issue.
How do we go from what since 2008 and the financial crisis, has been an economy characterised by more anaemic growth and productivity… to one in which both of those lines are going up more steeply, and … ending up in a position where we are 18 per cent less productive than America, France, and Germany, which, if we were at their productivity levels, would mean that overnight, our economy would be 18 per cent bigger. Imagine what we could do.
The answer to that is … a lot of it is around investment, around our tax policy, around skills and our infrastructure, around planning and things of that nature, and we’ve got to improve productivity, particularly in the public sector, where, for example, with the NHS, we pump more and more and more money in, and productivity has actually gone backwards. And some of that is about the nature of the investment. Too much revenue spend, not enough capital spend. So you’ve not got the systems, the IT, and all good stuff you need in an organisation that size to make it efficient.
So this is the kind of thinking we’ve got to do now over months and years to get to a position where we can credibly say we have created fiscal space… because we have the right plan…and, do you know what, the IFS and the OBR and everybody else says that it kind of stacks up (in the way they didn’t for the mini budget) and as a consequence of that space, “we’re going to do this for you”: and I’d include welfare incidentally in the mix as well: We’ve got save money from the welfare budget, as I was doing as Secretary of State. And we then say “we’re going to do this for you” and part of that will be lower taxes.
Part of it will be a big, big, bold offer to younger people…the average age of a Tory voter at the last election, was 63 that’s totally untenable. But if we’re to address that, we’re going to have to address housing, student loans… there are things that we’re going to have to do that are going to cost money… and not all of it will cost money, but some of it will… such that young people get out of bed and say, “The Tory party is on my side”.
GD: You’re a wise enough man to know that there will be some people listening to this who will go: “This sounds very much like, ‘Okay, we lost, but the plan is to do business as usual, just do it better’ and that misses something we feel is fundamentally wrong and needs a whole rethink.”… That this sounds a little too much like managerialism…. “I’d just be better at managing it”. You know, you know, there will be people who’ll think that… Tell them why they’re wrong.
They’re completely wrong.
So we went into the last election actually promising something about the future that was very different to the past, and that was a strong downward trajectory on taxes. We said to the British people, we will abolish National Insurance. I mean, that is quite an extraordinary thing; abolish National Insurance…
How was that funded? That was funded through £18 billion worth of savings. At least two-thirds came from my department, so I had worked out how to take £12 billion out of the welfare budget as part of a process of getting hundreds of thousands more people back into work. That’s an example of radicalism that can be translated into very dramatic changes, in this case, in the tax terrain.
So there are many, many radical things that we can do.
I do think that it was very difficult, and it would have been for any government with Covid and with the cost of living crisis… and the money I had to spend… all the interventions we had to make at that point… to cut through with radical cuts in taxes, for example, doing all the exciting things that I think could have happened in the absence of that. But no, we can be radical.
And I think I’ve proven that the Department of Work and Pensions that that’s exactly what I can do.
Take long-term sickness and disability: my reforms to work capability assessments, the OBR says means over 400,000 fewer people will be going on to those benefits. They will be going on the road to work… that’s over 400,000 people. So I’m prepared to be really radical, because the prize is very large.
GD: You know, in the system that we have, people want to have a feel of you as a person. The leader is a person. What should they know about you that they don’t know now?
Well, I don’t know what they know! So listen, what I think they should know is that I have a past that is outside of Parliament, that I set up business here and in the United States… my own companies …starting from scratch. So I’m a self-starter. I can motivate people, build teams, and meet objectives… just the kind of leadership qualities that are needed for the task here.
I have a variety of interests. I trained, at one point, just as a hobby, to be a qualified tour guide. So I’m qualified to tour the British Museum, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, Stonehenge, Windsor Castle….all sorts of other places, because I’m very interested in history.
What else did I do back in my past? I qualified…I have private pilot’s license. So I’ve done all that and flew all over America, did lots of flying… things of that nature.
And I think I’m a, you know, a rounded individual. I care very much about my family, my wife and my children, and all that kind of stuff, and I find generally, the more people meet me and get to talk to me, the more, perhaps… the more interesting they find me.
GD: It’s quite a daunting thing. Being the leader of a party puts you under a level of scrutiny… that the sort of normal bounds of privacy really don’t hold… You know, it’s….. people want to get right into your life, at every angle…
MS:…. into your dustbins! That’s what they want to get into.
GD: …is that where they should be looking… where they should go?
That’s where they should be looking! They should be looking into my takeaway cartons…from the weekend
GD: You do realise someone might take that as a signal to do that! I mean, there’s a level of scrutiny that one needs to think about when contemplating doing this.
Yeah. Well, I’m very satisfied there are no skeletons, in my cupboard that I need to worry about. There’s not to say that people won’t concoct things and give me a hard time, and that’s all part of the job. But I think you get used to that to a degree, Giles, you know?
I mean, I’ve been an MP now for 14 years and being in the Cabinet… as Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. And you know, you do get a very high level scrutiny, and quite rightly so. And if you have a thin skin, then you know… politics is not it’s not a game to get involved with I’m afraid.
GD: Last thing of all…obviously you’re “in it to win it.”…If you don’t: would your analysis of what needs to be done to bring the party together…Would that include working for any of the rest?
I’d be totally supportive of whoever wins this contest. And I have to say, I think one of the very positive things about this contest is that tone between the candidates has generally been pretty positive. And I think we’re all united. All the conversations I have with my competitors here are along those lines. I think we all know we need to unite, and that means every one of us, irrespective of all hands in this country.
GD: Mel, thank you very much indeed for sitting down with ConservativeHome.
A great pleasure. Thank you,