What on earth do the Tories do now?

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. By now, a year into the premiership of Rishi Sunak, the polls were supposed to have narrowed and the next general election would be looking competitive. Sunak’s team hoped that by governing responsibly and restoring order he would create such a contrast with the farce of the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss carnival of chaos that it would be obvious. Politics would swing back in a Tory direction.

Instead, with the anniversary of his ascent to power looming in a few days on 25 October, a depressed Tory party has lost two key by-elections in ultra-safe seats on swings so large they point to Conservative wipeout in a general election. 

The Sunak plan to revive the Tories a year ago wasn’t completely implausible. It was a long shot given the mess his party had made, but it was not impossible. If he could get a couple of lucky breaks on the economy, and if Sir Keir Starmer blundered, and later if Sunak’s increasing confidence on the world stage and in geopolitics translated into increased domestic heft, and if all this was noticed by enough of the swing voters and disgruntled Tories he needed to win back, then maybe there was a chance. This was the “narrow path to victory” school of thinking.

There were a lot of “ifs” in there but at the start of this year it looked as though something might be stirring. There were signs of life in Tory polling numbers. The party had nudged up a little. Labour, with its gift for screwing up a winning position, looked nervous. The Tories, or those of a moderate persuasion, dared to dream.

No longer. The party’s spokesmen can provide all the unlikely excuses they want about those two by-elections, in Tamworth and Mid Beds, but it is futile. These swings if replicated in a general election would mean more than defeat. They would cause the Tory party to be reduced to a rump. One website ran the numbers and came up with a Labour majority of 380. Yes, 380.

One of the eternal truths about the Conservative party – I was told it as a young political reporter and it is always true – is that what really gets Tory MPs going is a fear of losing their own seats. When MPs see safe seats falling, as happened on Thursday, they think: what does this mean for me? It takes less than a second for them to work out that it means their own seat – their own job, pension, position – is at threat.  

This is not so true of the other parties, where on the left there is perhaps more naive idealism and less of an assumption that their party will be in power, and less of a tradition of removing leaders.

In the Tory party, when MPs start to feel they are in personal jeopardy, that is a very dangerous moment for a party leader. The last three leaders – Liz Truss, Boris Johnson and Theresa May – have all been removed. The leader before that, David Cameron, resigned after losing the 2016 Brexit referendum in part because he judged that his party would remove him if he did not quit first.

This weekend there are the first reports of letters going in to the chairman of the 1922 committee. If 15% of Tory MPs submit such a letter, there will be a leadership contest among the MPs.

It should go without saying that the very last thing the Tory party should do now is inflict a leadership contest on the country. At root, the Tories are in this mess because of the way in which they disgraced themselves and embarrassed the country a year ago. The decadent Johnson premiership ended in farce, then the Tories chose Liz Truss as leader. She governed so foolishly and ineptly that it lasted only six weeks, before the losing candidate in the summer leadership contest, Rishi Sunak, had to be drafted back in.

After that experience, opting for another leadership contest now would be madness, only inflicting further embarrassment on the nation. Another new Prime Minister being foisted on the country would guarantee an extinction-level event at the general election.

Among weary Tory MPs I’ve spoken to on WhatsApp in the last few days there seems to be an understanding of this. If enough of their colleagues are mad enough to submit letters, then presumably Sunak would win a leadership vote.

What seems more likely than a leadership election is unrest being channeled into calls for action in other areas. There are demands for the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to do something, anything, like cut taxes, in the autumn statement next month. 

There are mutterings and speculation that Number 10 might even remove Hunt because they want someone who can engender hope and optimism. This is deluded. As a market signal, during a bond market emergency with investors primed to punish unstable governments running large deficits, removing the Chancellor would be extremely misguided and reckless.  

So what can Sunak do?

Despite all the gloom, there is plenty the Prime Minister, Hunt and government can do now if they go at it with a bit of brio.

The tax system is gummed up. The freezing of allowances in particular increases the burden on families. Business taxation is a mess. The investment climate is not what it should be. There are signs of hope, though. The work that Hunt has commissioned on reforming the UK pensions industry – to get small funds to consolidate and get “superfunds” to boost investment in British companies and sectors likely to grow – has the makings of a generationally transformative reform.

Meanwhile, public sector productivity is a drag on growth. In April, the ONS calculated that public sector productivity fell by 13.9% in the previous year. There has to be some caution about the precision of data skewed by the pandemic, but the broad principle stands. The state poured in borrowed money and is getting less than it should in terms of effective output of services. Fixing this – with reform and better management – is an urgent national challenge.

In this context, incidentally, Brexit is a small rounding error amid Covid and the hundreds of billions extra added onto the pile of national borrowing.

Only increased growth can change the outlook. Even within the constraints, it should be feasible with improvements to productivity, a better investment picture and taxation reforms to get the economy moving.

On housing, why not launch a ten-year mission to build, creating the beginnings of a national consensus?

The signs on housing are not good, however. The government is reported to be doubtful it can get round the crazy “net neutrality” environmental rules that originate with the EU, because sufficient Tory MPs will vote with Labour if they attempt it. Sunak should at least try – forcing Labour to campaign against homebuilding which the opposition says it is committed to.

There is, then, plenty for a responsible government to crack on with.

Would such an approach make any difference electorally? Probably not because the desire on the part of voters to get rid of the tired Tories is so strong. Sunak’s team is going to have to stop thinking in those terms, anyway. Put away the focus groups, go slow on the opinion polling, and instead try to do relentlessly what is right for the country.

Richard Fletcher, Business Editor of The Times, put it well yesterday on Twitter, or X, or whatever it is called, when responding to news ministers are thinking about various tax changes in the autumn statement to impress certain sections of the electorate: “How about doing something because it is the right thing to do? Like cutting taxes that will encourage entrepreneurship and work and improve our bloated, inefficient system of taxation.”

Could this sort of thinking catch on? 

The Tory party’s best hope of avoiding total wipeout is to forget about desperate focus-grouped attempts at saving themselves. Govern responsibly, make changes the economy needs, and hope that enough people notice. If they don’t notice, then at least the Conservative party leaves office with dignity having done the right thing for the country.

Global idiot pro-Hamas rebel chic

Along the corridor of a school in California come the pupils, wearing Palestinian headscarves and carrying banners. The pied piper procession, last week, is being filmed. The chant, as they march and skip, is: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. This is, as some of us keep pointing out, a Hamas chant, an unambiguously genocidal lyric resting on a call for the extinction of the state of Israel. Hamas showed on 7 October what it envisages – more pogroms and a second go at the Holocaust. That is what from the river to the sea means.

And there it is, quite incredibly, sung by youngsters in a school in the US. What any Jewish pupil at that school thinks and feels about this display, one can only imagine.

That incident is just one of hundreds recorded and spread online, filmed on campuses and in the heart of major cities across the West, since the horrors of 7 October. There are more demonstrations taking place this weekend.

At the heart of it – looking at the groups involved and the videos – are a hard core of Jew haters, that is Islamist groups and their far-left fellow travellers. Yet around them are naive people who, when challenged, sound stunned or confused that they are being accused of sympathising with mass murdering Hamas. They are just marching for Palestinians in general, they say, and are used to thinking of themselves as “the good guys” on the side of social justice and generally being rebelliously groovy. This cross border grouping I have come to think of as the global idiot rebel chic movement. Now, in London, they have created a terrifying climate in which Jews no longer feel safe.

Covid inquiry flaws

There is a problem emerging at the Covid inquiry. Watching the cross-examination of witnesses, it is obvious those scientists who designed the lockdown policy are getting an easier time than those who had doubts or raised concerns. The assumption in the questioning is that lockdown should have been earlier, harder and longer. Academics who think that the societal, medical and economic harms were not taken account of properly when lockdown was continued far too long are treated by the inquiry dismissively. Those defending the disastrous official position – talking their own book, covering their backs for closing schools and shutting down non-Covid health care – are treated deferentially.

Something, somewhere, has gone wrong in the design and remit of the inquiry.  

What I’m watching

Still the Rugby World Cup. Last weekend it was the quarter finals with, obviously, four matches. This was a lot of rugby for others to tolerate when I’m the only rugby fan in our household. At home I was asked: is there much more of this World Cup? Well, there were two semi-finals this weekend. England were unlucky to go out by one point and New Zealand were lucky to face Argentina. Then there is the final on Saturday, South Africa v New Zealand, and a third-place play-off the night before. So that’s only two games left of an outstanding tournament. Enjoy it while it lasts.

What I’m listening to

Hackney Diamonds, the new album by the Rolling Stones, over and over again. Sir Mick Jagger, 80, said he wanted to make a modern pop record, by which he means that the production should have a contemporary feel. It works. There are echoes of Taylor Swift at her best. The Stones have always combined their artistry in rock and roll, blues, country, soul and gospel with a pop sensibility. The result this time is a joyful cracker, their best album since Some Girls in 1978.

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