Tories losing control
This is the weekly newsletter from editor Iain Martin for Reaction members.
With a “significant” birthday falling this weekend I decided to give myself a present, by not going to Tory party conference in Manchester and opting to stay here with my family instead. I didn’t go to the Labour conference in Brighton last week either, so there is no bias involved. This is a two for the price of one gift.
Perhaps it sounds odd for a political journalist to take pleasure in not going to the annual jamboree when Britain’s main parties gather for speeches and infighting. This year is a strange hybrid event though, held partly in person and partly online. Next year it should be back to normal, and I’ll be there.
Some of my favourite journalistic moments have happened at party conferences. When I first attended in the 1990s, gossiping and drinking with veteran journalists who could remember the dramatic conferences of the 1970s and 1980s, New Labour was being born. It was thrilling, if slightly chilling when Blair started to go into messianic mode.
If anyone – a colleague, an MP, an eccentric, an excitable person at the Scottish Labour drinks reception, an inebriated compatriot at the Scotch Whisky Association early evening “tasting” event – had said at that post-landslide conference in 1997 that politics would turn out by now as it has we would have phoned for an ambulance. Imagine the conversation at the bar of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, at Labour conference in 1997.
Crazy person: “Just you wait and see what happens twenty four years from now.”
Me: “What? Who’s Prime Minister in 2021?
Crazy Person: “Boris.”
Me: “Boris who? Boris Karloff?”
Crazy Person: “Boris Johnson.”
Me: “Boris Johnson! The Brussels bendy banana anti-EU guy with the wild hair from the Telegraph is Prime Minister in 2021? No, I can just about believe that they might make him Spectator editor in a few years time. But the Tories wouldn’t go and make the guy the actual Prime Minister, would they? The country couldn’t possibly ever be in so much trouble by 2021 that they make the leader Boris Karloff…”
Crazy Person: “Johnson”
Me: “Sorry, Boris Johnson. This really is bananas. How could someone who hates the EU so much ever be Prime Minister?”
Crazy Person: “We leave the EU.”
Me: “Be serious. That’s impossible, the British political class will never ever offer the punters a chance to leave. Next you’re going to tell me that Donald Trump becomes American President at some point.”
Crazy Person: “Yep, that happens too. “
Me: “And what about New Labour? They’ve turned politics upside down and inside out. It’s a phenomenon. Look at them celebrating tonight. You expect me to believe that all this (gestures at John Reid on the dance floor with Cherie Blair, dancing to Pulp’s Disco 2000) is somehow going to be swept away. For that to happen there would have to be a war or something. No, New Labour is in office until at least 2021.”
Crazy Person: “Nope. Gone. Scotland, wiped out, the Iraq war started that. Then Red Wall complete collapso. Blair’s seat Sedgefield has a Tory MP by 2021. And the best bit is that the winner of the Labour leadership contest in 2015 is… Jeremy…”
Me: “Hunt?”
Crazy Person: “Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn.”
Me (dialling 999 on my whisky-stained Nokia 3110): “Could you send an ambulance to the bar of the Grand Hotel, Brighton please?”
You can see how outlandish this vision of national life now would have sounded in 1997. Some of us did think the Tories might be back in some modernised form, eventually. It’s the Tories, of course they’ll be back, look at 200 years of history, I remember Brian Wilson MP telling me as we walked from Parliament to have a curry in late 1997. We ran into a young and all round sensible classic Labour person Pat McFadden on the way. Pat would play a critical role working for Blair.
I mentioned Brian Wilson, a former Labour MP and Scottish Blairite devo-sceptic, in my column for The Times this week. He made a valiant attempt as energy minister under Blair to warn everyone that unless we prepared properly for energy security, by going nuclear and balancing it with renewables and gas, then there would be shortages eventually. He was right, I fear.
The word from Number 10 this week is that there is nothing to worry about with these ongoing petrol shortages at the pumps, or with the low reserves of gas going into the winter, or global supply chain problems hitting imports and growth. Treat their reassurances with a sensible amount of scepticism.
This is such a strange, paradoxical conference the Tories are about to have. On one level, Johnson the magician is dominant, with a majority of 80 and no serious challenge from Labour. On another level, above the increasingly parochial level of Westminster and domestic affairs, geopolitics is shifting. Global supply chains are breaking; energy security is back as a concern; grand power politics is properly in play; developments in China, where there are power cuts, have to be monitored daily. The Tories are about to be buffeted by international forces beyond their control and possibly their understanding. Having taken back control in 2019, they’re now losing control.
A Reaction reader tells me that the concern about all this looming chaos is overdone. This is nothing like the 1970s, and nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, he says. That’s not how the brain works in a crisis, though. Voters don’t compare historical events with precision and calmly put it into perspective. Shortages this winter, if they worsen, will be happening in real time and experienced not as a nostalgia-tinged function of collective folk memory, not as bad as 1978, but as stress inducing genuine hardship, particularly for the poor and vulnerable.
Boris is dominant right now. So was Blair, once. In 1999 Blair gave his “forces of conservatism” speech in Bournemouth, true blue territory. It was possibly the most deranged of his conference speeches I sat through.
“From now on people will vote Labour with their head as well as their heart,” he said. “The political landscape of Britain has changed forever.”
No they won’t. No, it hadn’t. Blair was hailing his own success and confusing it with a permanent change in human affairs, a mistake.
Blair was Prime Minister for another eight years, Boris might point out, through 9/11 and well beyond. Sure, but in the field of economics, and energy markets, with globalisation going into reverse, Tony Blair never faced anything as dangerous and disruptive as the potential crisis coming down the tracks towards Boris Johnson this winter.
What I’m reading
George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, by Andrew Roberts is published next week. I’m getting stuck into an advance copy and this book is beautifully done. George III is a character even more well-known to an American audience now since the success of the musical Hamilton. The book will be a big hit over there and over here, I suspect. On Monday I’m delighted to be hosting a launch dinner in London, generously backed by supporters of the Reaction Young Journalists Programme, helping to train the next generation of journalists. It’s a race against time for the copies to arrive on Monday. The publishers are doing their best, battling labour shortages and a lack of fuel that is delaying deliveries. Let’s see if the books arrive.
Have a good weekend. I’m off to be 50.
Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
Reaction