The unruly Tory party looks unleadable

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Who in their right mind would like to become leader of the Conservative party at the moment? Yes, the holder of the office gets to be, for now, Prime Minister until the voters stage an intervention. The pay and conditions are good, by most standards. The post of PM also comes with the use of a large country house suitable for entertaining. And a flat and a garden in Downing Street ideal, outside of a pandemic, for hosting parties.

But really. Imagine taking over now. Surging energy prices could cause non-payment and even social unrest. The Bank of England warned this week of a recession involving five quarters of negative growth. Even if the Bank is too gloomy and turns out to be wrong, again, overcompensating for having underestimated inflation it said wouldn’t take off, the economic prospects look grim. Other countries such as Germany may be in an even worse position, thanks to reliance on Russian oil and gas, but that won’t save a British government if it gets as bad here as it might this winter. British voters live in Britain, not Germany, and vote accordingly.

It is far from inconceivable that a new PM could be swept from office if, that is if, they fail to cope well with the emergency.

In such circumstances, the new Tory leader could do with having a relatively united party. Instead, the leadership contest has revealed a party riven by deep personal and philosophical splits.

The two contenders in their attacks give the impression of loathing each other. My suggestion here, last week, that Sunak should serve in a Truss cabinet if she wins looks hopelessly optimistic. If Sunak pulled off a surprise win, Truss has said too much about her rival to work with him.

In the parliamentary party there is the pro-Boris rump, a large anti-Boris cohort and a befuddled group in the middle. That’s before one gets to policy differences. The European Research Group wants Truss to go as hardline as possible against the EU, while many other MPs fear a stupid trade war with France and Germany on top of everything else.

The internal contradictions are most apparent in the Truss campaign. This week Chris “eco” Skidmore MP defected to Truss from Sunak. Skidmore is for accelerating to net zero as fast as possible. Meanwhile, Lord Frost, a Truss supporter tipped (by himself and fans) for high office, says net zero must be scrapped. How can these fundamentally opposing worldviews be contained within one governing Tory coalition of interests? It looks as though we’re about to find out what happens when they try.

As it stands, the Tory party looks like an unleadable rabble. That is, anything substantial a new leader proposes or chooses will infuriate one group or another. While the Tories have always had their splits and factions, on Europe and the economy or social policy, it’s not been quite this dysfunctional since the 1990s, and this time it is happening in the face of a national and international crisis.

An extraordinary act of leadership will be required just to hold the party together, otherwise the much more important task of running the country will become impossible. The voters are already in a mood to punish the Tories. Further internal warfare, and it looks unavoidable, would make the electoral kicking being stored up even worse.

Sturgeon is not Scotland

Iain Dale got some criticism this week for his interview with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, conducted at the Edinburgh festival. Critics asked why he was polite and respectful. Iain responded that his approach got Sturgeon to relax and produced several news lines. A shouty confrontation would have got nowhere, he suggested.

Sturgeon admitted this week she may not lead the SNP into the next Scottish parliament elections, and will decide nearer the time. The Nationalists have a shortage of talent and no likely successor, and after her departure there is a void, though she won’t admit that.

What is interesting about letting Sturgeon range freely is that when she ruminates she crosses quite easily into regal territory.

This week she suggested that Liz Truss’s recent statement that Sturgeon should be ignored, as an attention seeker, amounted to a snub of Scotland.

How presumptuous. Sturgeon is not head of state. Sturgeon is not Scotland, though she speaks now as though they are one and the same.

A criticism or snub of Boris Johnson is not taken as a criticism or snub of England, or the UK. No PM would claim they are bound up so closely with notions of country and identity as Sturgeon does.

Unintentionally, Sturgeon revealed too much about how grand she has become. This happens to political leaders who stay too long in office.

Hot weather will reshape Britain

Having spent the last week in Scotland and then Lancashire before returning to the parched southern desert in and around the capital, a thought forms. It is not an original thought, many of us will have had a version of it during this heatwave. If this terrible, unsuitable weather, temperatures of 35 or 40 and above for long spells, is the way of the future, will London and the south east become virtually unliveable every July and August? New infrastructure will be needed to store and supply water. The rush for air conditioning will accelerate, but that’s not really an answer. Much of the housing stock here isn’t built to cope with AC, and it’s a highly intensive and wasteful use of scarce energy. If we could start again we might opt to build miles of portico streets, that is partially covered streets, like those in Turin I mentioned recently, built to provide shelter from the rain in winter and shade from the intense sun in summer. Our avenues in Britain aren’t wide enough to reconstruct, there isn’t the room.

If these punishing summers are sustained, it might even alter the economic geography of the country. Successful northern cities such as Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, will become even more appealing, thanks to their lower temperatures. Live there, work remotely, and trek to London when necessary, when it’s not summer.

On holidays, it will be even hotter, unbearable, in the places Britons tend to favour for peak summer breaks such as Spain and Italy. Some people of means will presumably look north, buying or renting houses further up Britain, perhaps on the east coast, to hide from the heat, venturing abroad when it cools down in September. That doesn’t fit with the school holidays timetable, but maybe that will need to change too. Poorer Britons may not have the option to move or adjust their lifestyles and are likely to resent it. The scope for increased unrest is obvious. Other countries will face similar challenges.

In Close My Eyes, the Stephen Poliakoff masterpiece from 1991, there’s a picnic scene by the Thames, filmed in Marlow, Buckinghamshire on a hot day. Sinclair, a futurologist who made a City fortune in the 1980s predicting trends, holds forth on climate change. This used to be a swamp and dinosaurs roamed around here, he says. Now the climate is changing again, Sinclair says, and it’s getting hotter.

Seeing the film on a hot day in central London in 1992 with a friend, it seemed to me at the time, and ever since when I’ve rewatched one of my favourite films many times, that Sinclair’s little speech was unduly alarmist. The kind of speech a futurologist makes to scare us and make money.

We adapt, of course, and “we’re all going to fry” climate alarmism isn’t much use when we need practical policy and mitigation measures. But three decades on, Poliakoff’s Sinclair character looks prescient. Unless this is a temperature blip, this is the new British weather and it will change how many of us live. Three decades on, the future is here.

What I’m reading

It’s way too hot to read much. The Scottish brain struggles above 30 degrees. So, still picking my way through Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, by J. Bradford DeLong. Next, I’m about to launch into the new work by Sir Ian Kershaw, which is out late next month, I think. Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe contains assessments, portraits, of influential leaders who shaped, for better or worse, European history in the modern era. To what extent do powerful leaders alter the course of history? It looks like a new twist on an old argument about the individual in history. After Ukraine, this is a timely book, as they say. The paperback out later may need a section on the heroic President Zelensky.