Sunak succession is good news

Spoiler alert, I am not in this newsletter, or in future newsletters for Reaction subscribers, going to agree with every aspect of what Rishi Sunak proposes to do as Britain’s Prime Minister. As Chancellor he made several serious mistakes, continuing the Covid crisis funding for too long and blowing a hole in the public finances much bigger than anything Liz Truss managed in her short premiership. Sunak relied too much on tax rises. There’s a strand of his most dogged supporters who are arrogant, and that will not go well in a country with a free press. Critics say that on the war in Ukraine, and defence more broadly, Sunak is too much the “finance guy”, who sees security as an accounting challenge rather than an existential question. He denies this. We’ll see.

Yet these concerns are quibbles, in the context of the domestic emergency facing Britain and the international emergency faced by the West. Pragmatic, calm leadership is essential.

This time last week, there was a possibility Boris Johnson might return as Prime Minister. This was a lunatic endeavour. Compounding his unsuitability for office, Johnson is still under investigation for misleading the House of Commons. He may yet be ejected from the cockpit of national life in a recall by-election if he is found guilty. Reimposing this scoundrel on Britain would have been reckless beyond belief, an anti-British act of national sabotage.

This time two weeks ago, Liz Truss was Prime Minister. The experiment had gone badly wrong, for reasons that will be picked over by historians for decades as a test case embodying failed statecraft and inattention to the lessons of history. It is a dizzying story of madcap missteps, a fever dream akin to Gordon Brown’s hilarious “election that never was” imbroglio in autumn 2007, although this time her mistakes had far more serious consequences.

Instead, Rishi Sunak is in post. The return of Johnson was averted and the Truss experiment is over. There is now the possibility of the restoration of some order and sanity to government. Sunak pays attention and is intellectually curious. He can run meetings diligently, reads his papers properly and asks for more paper from officials.

His elevation not only gives Britain its first Prime Minister of Indian immigrant heritage, it is a testament to the power of public service. Many of Sunak’s generation, who might in a previous era have gone into public life, now understandably avoid the intrusion and disruption. After making money, he chose politics and then didn’t walk away in September resigning his seat in a huff, upon losing the leadership contest to Liz Truss, as others might have done. The former Chancellor stayed and was available when the moment of crisis came for Truss, even sooner than expected. 

Let’s hope this restores a pattern. Staying the course used to be standard form when a senior politician suffered a reverse. Labour’s Jim Callaghan didn’t quit in 1967 after devaluation cost him the post of Chancellor. Nine years later he became PM. Churchill didn’t flounce out of the Commons in 1929 when his cabinet career collapsed as a result of his mistakes. Staying as an MP meant he was there in the second half of the 1930s and then in 1940. 

To measure up against any of the greats, to achieve even mid-league table status, Sunak will next have to complete a series of seemingly impossible tasks.

On 17 November, the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (another person who deserves credit for staying and being available after setbacks) will unveil a full fiscal statement, outlining the government’s plans. Everything points to higher taxes, rather than public spending constraint because the public doesn’t want anything meaningful cut or even reformed in any way that presents hard choices. Those of us across the spectrum who advocate public sector reform, and an efficient, less-intrusive state, will have to find new ways of making arguments that land effectively. It’ll take years.

More immediately, there are many arguments that can be had about the fiscal position in which the country finds itself. Truss was right to identify a lack of growth and dynamism as being a problem. Identifying the problem is easier than fixing it. In the market emergency of September and early October, it is true that Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, briefly the Chancellor, foolishly made the UK an outlier at a dangerous moment when interest rates were rising in an era of war and energy crises.

As my colleague Maggie Pagano, the editor of Reaction, wrote this week, there are also questions for the Bank of England to answer. Why was the pension sector, heavily regulated and monitored by The Pension Regulator and the Bank of England, who cooperate closely according to their 2014 memorandum of understanding, so vulnerable to rising rates and market uncertainty? The derivatives structures they used and enthusiasm for bond-buying was permitted by the BoE, right up until the moment of near disaster. The Bank’s share of culpability was obscured conveniently by the panic at Westminster. Critics say the Bank effectively removed a Prime Minister.

Somehow, Sunak will have to find a path through the wreckage, restoring trust in British institutions. A mild winter would help on the energy front and if growth surprises a little on the upside it will take the strain off the public finances and living standards. Perhaps he gets to be a lucky leader.

There is also the tricky business of ensuring defence, security and intelligence have the resources and backing they need.

There is much unhappiness about the reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, which was the result of a deal when he needed her twenty or so supporters in the chaos last Saturday. I could be wrong, and perhaps it will resonate with the public, but this can probably be filed under the heading of “politician on the verge of the premiership scrambles a grubby deal to prevent Johnson winning.”

These and other problems will make the first six months of his premiership extremely tough, and that is even before one gets to the difficult question of him rebuilding a little trust in the trashed Tory brand and facing the electorate.

Even so. The Sunak succession is a relief. It represents the restoration of some pragmatic statecraft.

Abolition of women is Labour’s unexploded electoral bomb

Labour’s lead in the polls is commanding. Last week I suggested an incoming Labour government will mine the meritocratic white heat of technology rhetoric of Harold Wilson and borrow from the patriotic aesthetics of modernist mid-1960s Britain. The electorate is weary of Tory chaos and there will be a widespread acceptance, I think, of higher taxes to pay for masses more infrastructure, some of which will work and some which will cost a lot of money and not work. While I’m for low taxes and entrepreneurial aspiration, the Truss fiasco blew all that up.

So, Labour is on course for power. The party’s revival could strengthen the Union, and ensure its survival by making the separatist SNP irrelevant if Keir Starmer resists the temptation to let Gordon Brown have yet another go at “improving” the constitution.

Labour needs to look out, though.

Reading Janice Turner in The Times on Saturday morning, it hit me that the extreme end of the trans movement is a serious threat to Labour prospects if Sunak does well and the gap between the two major parties narrows. The actor Eddie Izzard is attempting to stand for Labour in a Sheffield seat. He explained recently that he moves between “boy and girl” when he dresses, based on how he feels. Slip off his heels, and he’s in high earning Hollywood actor male mode.

To say the least, this is is a casual and presumptuous way to talk about these matters when sex-based rights are at stake, relating to single sex spaces, maternity services or women’s prisons. A Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, now faces calls for deselection. Trans campaigners hate that she said Izzard is not biologically a woman. He isn’t. If you want an embarrassing pause and a non-answer when interviewing a member of the Labour shadow cabinet, ask them what a woman is.

Izzard’s involvement is a warning light for Labour. The comedian has already been political kryptonite to the pro-European cause and voting reform. When he’s on your side it’s a sell signal, a sign you’re going to lose.

This will baffle trans campaigners. If you’re blithely ultra-liberal or perhaps young and seeking to identify with causes that make you feel as though you’re part of the social justice arc of history, the trans movement at its most noisy makes perfect sense. Other demands for social reform were opposed, weren’t they? This is just the same again? Stuffy people, old straights, have trouble adjusting to change.

No, what’s different this time is that the demands for change cut across hard-fought rights secured not that long ago by half the population – that is women. 

In Scotland this week, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon got into severe difficulties when attempting to introduce changes on gender recognition. For now, the law requires medical consultation before transition. All that will be scrapped in favour of legal self-recognition. Brave campaigners led by J.K. Rowling are resisting. 

It should be feasible to accommodate all this within the law, respectfully. A small number of people do want to change gender and should be accommodated, as long as there is proper medical care. Worryingly, the number of those wanting to do so is increasing as schools and medical services are often reluctant to suggest there might be other factors at play when people are going through the difficult business of growing up.

Labour has said it wants to “modernise” the process of gender recognition. What does this mean? Does Starmer seek to replicate Sturgeon’s reckless reforms?

This might be thought of as a low salience subject. Mortgages, the economy, inflation, energy and the NHS and social care will likely dominate the next election. Most voters are unfamiliar with the details, although I notice on Twitter it’s always mansplaining ultra-liberal men explaining why this will never take off as an issue. I wonder. We’ve seen in the last decade the potential for subjects once considered fringe to disrupt and reorder politics.

Parties standing candidates don’t need to win any seats to cause havoc. They simply need to take 5-10% of the vote to introduce doubt, shave the majorities of incumbents or hand victory to another party in a close contest.

To Sunak’s right, on that basis populist forces are organising around Nigel Farage seeking to form a new movement to resist higher immigration.

It is not hard to envisage something similar happening, targeted at Labour and the SNP, on women’s rights between now and the next election. The growing movement in favour of women’s status and rights features some of the country’s greatest communicators, academics and organisers. They are cross-party, and of no party, and able to access considerable funds.

Imagine a national campaign next year, with adverts and digital know how, asking MPs to sign a pledge rejecting the extreme trans ideology and committing to keep the law broadly as is, with a full public inquiry into medical care following the shocking scandals at the Tavistock clinic in London. Sign the pledge, otherwise the women’s rights campaign will run a candidate in those seats.

Labour is exposed here.

What I’m listening to

Revolver, by the Beatles on a loop. Having worn out my vinyl copy, bought as a present by generous classmates in October 1985, when aged 14 I left school in Hertfordshire and moved home to Paisley, I’ve got through several CDs of the 1966 classic. It’s always difficult to pick a favourite album when personal taste waxes and wanes with age. But if forced to choose I’d still pick Revolver, joint with Exile on Mainstreet by the Stones, or perhaps Hats by The Blue Nile, or Prince and Sign ‘O’ the Times, or one of several Miles Davis albums, or the von Karajan recording of Four Last Songs with Gundula Janowitz, or Surf’s Upby the Beach Boys, or Teenage Fanclub and their Songs From Northern Britain.

Anyway, Revolver is the constant top favourite, always in there, as fresh a work of art as the day it was released. Surely it could not be improved? Yes it could and yes it has, in the remix released on Thursday. Giles Martin, son of producer George Martin, undertook the work, taking apart the original recording and with the aid of technology reassembling it.

The result is astonishing – pristine, punchy, perfect.