Who will Johnson pick as Chancellor to replace Rishi Sunak?

Even if you don’t agree with every aspect of Rishi Sunak’s policies, and I certainly don’t, it’s possible to find the storm over his and his wife’s tax affairs quite depressing. There’s a long-running debate in this country about why more people don’t abandon successful high paid careers to commit to public service. Looking at the hysterical monstering of the Sunaks – She’s not even British, wants to move back to India, look at all that foreign loot etc – and you have part of the answer.

Rubbish! Goes up the cry from Sunak’s critics. Don’t be a softie. He knew what what he was signing up for when he found a safe seat and set his sights on reaching the top. Politics is a contact sport, more ruthless than anything other than warfare, and now he’s finding out how the world really works.

His Tory opponents have pounced. Several leading Tories have in recent days told me that what they really dislike about the Sunak situation is that in his globalism and tastes he reminds them of out of touch Nick Clegg and George Osborne.

“Clegg,” says a minister. “Grand personage lowers himself to sort out the lower orders. Pious ponficator. Then ruins the Lib Dems before going off to Facebook. Now in charge of controlling free speech and political communication at Californication Meta bollocks.”

Bit harsh?

“No. Pompous ratbag. At least David Cameron is driving vans to Poland.”

One can but hope, says a Tory advisor, that Nick Clegg is as successful in reading the Metaverse as he was with the Lib Dems.

“It’s the ‘it’s all a game’ crowd,” says another minister. “Like f***ing Osborne. Sunak’s the same.”

I’m not sure that’s true, or that it’s that simple with Osborne either. Rishi Sunak could have done all manner of other things, such as staying in finance, and yet he chose politics. He’s decent, hardworking and well-motivated, even if he misguidedly raised national insurance, doesn’t understand defence in a war era, and left himself exposed to that monstering by making a series of decisions on his family tax affairs that were always going to cause trouble when they emerged, as they have now done.

For Team Boris the apparent ruination of Rishi is, on one level, a big win, a cause for celebration that completes Boris’s two month turnaround from a perilous position when it looked as though he might fall over Partygate. It seemed to me at the time that “Bojo” was “buggered”, although Sunak failed to strike and will live to regret it. Now, Boris the serial escape artist has got away with it – again, for now – and his leadership rival is reduced to the level of standard cabinet minister with little leverage.

But what to do with the Chancellor and the Chancellorship? A weak Chancellor is not going to make national policy any more effective, which is what should be worrying everyone as inflation takes off.

Sunak may decide he’s had enough. The rumours are swirling he will walk soon. By the time you read this he may have done so, in which case I’ll update.

If he does go now or in the next few months that creates a new dilemma for the Prime Minister. Not only is he making a habit of mislaying Chancellors, he has to be careful to get the replacement right from the perspective of his own survival.

The front-runner would be Sajid Javid, the former occupant of Number 11 who resigned just before the pandemic in early 2020 rather than accept the  shenanigans and impositions organised by Dominic “babyface” Cummings and assorted other hoodlums.

Moving him back into Number 11 and out of health would make Javid a leadership contender again. Health is an impossible job when the British will never accept reform of the command and control NHS, preferring to retain the right to moan about its underfunding while paying ever higher taxes, and periodically clapping or banging pots and pans on the doorstep to signal support and virtue.

A similar potential problem is created if fast-rising Nadhim Zahawi becomes Chancellor. There’s a nascent leadership campaign there. Johnson might calculate a new rival would be undone by the cost of living crisis, though if he thinks he gets to blame what’s coming in the second half of this year, in terms of public pain and anger, on his next door neighbour, a wounded Sunak or a new Chancellor, then he is going to be disappointed.

And then there’s Steve “interesting” Barclay, the Number 10 chief of staff, senior minister and quite the operator. Theoretically, Barclay is a Boris ultra-loyalist, part of the team of fixers hastily assembled during the Partygate crisis to bring order to Number 10. He is ambitious and was treated badly by Boris, initially not taken seriously enough when the first jobs were being handed out in 2019. Bet he hasn’t forgotten that. Barclay could emerge in a future leadership as a John Major style compromise candidate.

With that in mind, his ministerial colleagues debate who Barclay is really working for. Is it Team Boris or has he really been on Team Sunak all along?

I’ll solve the mystery. Steve Barclay is working for Steve Barclay. This is politics.

Macron’s margin of terror

All that time President Macron spends on the telephone to President Putin would have been better spent campaigning in the French election, it seems. Macron wanted to look as though he was above the fray, a sure fire winner engaged in important international diplomacy. Unfortunately for the incumbent it hasn’t quite worked out like that.

Ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting, several polls have shown Le Pen narrowing the potential gap in the final round to a few points, or within might be termed the “margin of terror.”

On Sunday, with prices rocketing, the French will pick from a rum collection of candidates challenging Macron. The choice makes the Trumpist Republican party and the increasingly off the reservation left-wing Dems look like Abraham Lincoln v Harry Truman.

The result? Take your pick of informed opinions flying around this weekend, ranging from “Macron is the front-runner, he’ll win comfortably in the end” to “OMG, earthquake coming.”

President Hillary Clinton can confirm how these things go spectacularly wrong.

I don’t know, and no-one does. What I do know is that in the opinion polling there’s a very interesting and worrying story that I haven’t yet seen explained fully.

There’s a revolt of the French young going on. In a two horse run off between Macron and Le Pen she wins among younger voters, by a lot. The younger you are in France the more likely you are to back her authoritarian, far-right, Kremlin-friendly hucksterism. Even some of those voting far left would rather go for Le Pen in a run off, so much do they hate the globalist too clever by half smarty-pants Macron.

Now, this age divide may rescue Macron. Above the age of 50, he’s in the lead. Older voters, the boomer generation, are more likely to turn out.

But those younger voters have clearly had enough of everything. Trouble ahead, even if Macron becomes the first French President since Chirac twenty years ago to win a second term.

The Defence of Europe conference

Subscribers may have seen that we’re co-hosting a conference – The Defence of Europe – with King’s College London on 9 May at Bush House. It’s in response to the war and will feature leading policymakers, academics and commentators.

Spaces are limited and I can’t guarantee tickets to everyone who applies, but I’m very keen for as many Reaction subscribers as possible to get a chance to be there.

Email: 

registration@thedefenceofeurope.com

Please mark it “Reaction Subscriber” .

David Loyn on Afghanistan

Next up in the Authors in Conversation series we’re doing on Reaction is the great David Loyn, author of The Long War, the story of the Afghanistan conflict. It’s a superb book that makes chastening reading. Our interview is out tomorrow on YouTube.

What I’m reading next

I’m writing this on a long train journey through England on a weekend of “engineering works”. Appropriately enough I’ve just started reading Jason Cowley’s new book: Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England. I’ll get back to it after this, assuming Sunak doesn’t resign.

I could read Jason Cowley writing anything on England “until the print falls off”, as the old Fleet Street saying goes.

One day I’m going to write one of these types of books. My last two were on banks exploding and financial history. At some point I’m going to put together a book that involves me going for a pint in Paisley and in the pub reading something by my hero John Byrne, then walking with my family on a beach on the Isle of Colonsay. Next, we’ll go walking around Glasgow’s West End musing on what might be for dinner (scallops) and wondering whether down in the dumps Glasgow can one day ever be better than annoyingly resurgent Edinburgh, all the while listening to Scottish music and complaining about the weather. The resulting book – working title What is the Point? – will be an attempt to explain what it all means.

Have a good weekend.