Why Sunak appointed Shapps
This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
It had been bugging me all day during the mini-reshuffle on Thursday. Why did Rishi Sunak make Grant Shapps the new defence secretary to replace Ben Wallace? There was widespread bafflement at Westminster and in the MoD. Shapps has never expressed interest in defence or geopolitics. He’s a skilled communications guy, the minister for the BBC’s Today programme, that is the person who will go out and broadcast in defence of the government, no matter how ridiculous or perilous the situation.
Until the day before the appointment was made, there were those in the MoD in Whitehall convinced the new Secretary of State for defence would be Jeremy Quin MP, or John Glen MP, both Sunak loyalist ministers. Glen, it is said, was promised and unpromised the job.
And Shapps beat them both, and other contenders.
Why?
On Thursday evening I was taken for dinner by old friends. It was obvious, one of them, pointed out. How could I have become so discombobulated in the madness of British politics in the last 18 months – during which Shapps had five cabinet posts – that I had forgotten how much Sunak owed Shapps?
It seems Grant Shapps wanted a proper, major cabinet post, one of the grandest, especially with the election coming when afterwards he may never get another chance.
Sunak really owes Shapps for last autumn. It was Shapps, my friend reminded me, who ran the detailed spreadsheet of numbers during Tory party conference when Truss was tottering, and Sunak’s team was (rightly) trying to force her to quit after the mini-budget fandango so he could take over.
Michael Gove, also outside the cabinet, was the other key anti-Truss organiser at party conference, according to the Truss team at the time.
Truss had snubbed Shapps and not given him a job when she became PM. This was a foolish move, a failure of party management. On the backbenches Shapps put his organisational skills to use and ran the numbers on which MPs were for the removal of Truss and who could be persuaded to back Sunak or Boris Johnson. This was very useful to Sunak and his key advisers at a moment of high drama when information was patchy and a lot of people were lying and double bluffing.
Shapps had been a Boris loyalist but then he switched decisively to Sunak and helped with the numbers, which were useful when Johnson tried and failed narrowly to regain the leadership last autumn. Boris didn’t quite have the numbers. Sunak did, and Shapps had a good list of what MPs thought and wanted.
So, as so often in politics, these things come down to patronage, deals and party management.
A well-placed Whitehall source thinks Sunak may also have been promoting Shapps to give him a shot at the leadership after the general election if Sunak is defeated and stands down. Not sure I buy that, but it is an interesting idea that will provoke a wide range of responses among Tories and non-Tories reading this.
Don’t put so much faith in GDP numbers
Well, that’s a bit embarrassing. The UK’s Office for National Statistics revised its growth figures last week and they suggest that Britain’s economy was not after all the international laggard in its recovery after the pandemic. It recovered far quicker than previously stated. The ONS has improved the way it measures economic activity and upgraded the size of the UK economy by 1.7 per cent in the last quarter of 2021.
This astonishing revision was greeted by Brexiteers as a vindication, while quite a few Remainers sounded, on social media at least, disappointed that the performance of the UK economy was not as bad as previously thought.
Economists have defended the ONS and pointed out it was difficult to get any meaningful measurements during the chaos of the pandemic. Other countries may revise their own numbers up or down.
There was much discussion about this on social media. Several economists and commentators told me that even with the upgrade it made no difference to the picture on Brexit. It had still been a terrible idea costing a chunk of GDP. Perhaps between 5% and 6.5% already, says one. No, 4% down still looks right, says another. You can bet on 0.25% to 0.5% per year since the referendum having been the hit, a markets expert told me.
Honestly, with a global pandemic in the middle of it causing the worst slump since the 18th century, then a war creating energy and food supply havoc, I’m sceptical anyone can say reliably what the numbers are.
I must say the episode strengthens my view that paying too much attention to GDP numbers either way, and the assessments of economists, is broadly a waste of time.
The problem is that the old numbers became the basis for an entire narrative, a story about Britain supposedly collapsing into the sea, ruined by Brexit. It shaped the investment climate, depressed the City and influenced international views of the UK. It defined the national debate.
One of the world’s major investors explained to me recently that he could not understand the remorseless gloom here. Britain has enormous strengths, he says. It has problems too. The debt overhang is a concern with debt to GDP now above 100% for the first time since 1961. Although that number was stated before these new numbers supposedly made the economy bigger. So who the hell knows?
It wasn’t this way until after the Second World War. This fetishising of quarterly and annual GDP numbers, revised and unrevised endlessly, is relatively new. Rory Sutherland points out that as late as the 1960s, Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s massively successful Financial Secretary, prohibited the collection of all but the most rudimentary economic statistics. In his view, all the energy spent by economists and analysts on this stuff is a demoralising distraction from getting out of the way, encouraging people to do useful stuff, build businesses, trade and create wealth.
Laissez faire Cowperthwaite was not right about everything. He opposed spending on Hong Kong’s mass transit system. This was done after he left office in 1971 and turned out to be hugely successful. He still got a lot right. During his tenure Hong Kong grew rapidly and became highly prosperous.
The crackpot worshippers of romantic Rory Stewart
I want to convince you, Rory Stewart said, I can do this. The then Tory MP was in the middle of his run for the Tory leadership in June 2019. I’ve asked around and you are, he said, a reasonably serious person. This half compliment made me laugh out loud, but not him. It was such a Stewart thing to say. I want to persuade you, he said, that I should be Prime Minister.
We met for an interview in his Commons office, and he was interesting on Brexit. We disagreed, politely. I’ve enjoyed interviewing him since and have watched with fascination as his fame grows. Stewart is out of parliament and now has the most successful podcast in Britain. With co-host Alastair Campbell he sold out his event at the Royal Albert Hall in nine minutes. This is no small achievement. Politics generally is conducted at meetings where very few people turn up, but Stewart has made it, or himself, box office.
Now there is a new book – Politics on the Edge: A Memoir From Within – that will be a best-seller. While some of the early reviews are gushing, Janice Turner in the Times, in her interview this week, was far more sceptical. She nailed the weirdness of the phenomenon and the way Rory superfans worship him. There is a contradiction between his claim to be interested in listening and the way in which he never seems to ask any questions, especially of women.
The fans urge Stewart to return as Prime Minister, to “save us”, illustrating again that so much of modern culture and politics in the West can be understood best as a replacement for religion and abandoned Christian rituals.
The rise of the Rory movement is a manifestation of what has happened to some ultra-Remainers since Brexit. Almost a decade ago they were the empirical ultra-rationalists, nice people focused, as they saw it, on facts. Then, something they had never expected happened to people not used to losing. They lost. What followed the 2016 referendum has been maddening for them, although I don’t think many Brexiteers have enjoyed how the years since played out either.
To the horror and astonishment of ultra-Remainers, the holdouts, it got even worse. Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Stewart is particularly perceptive in his analysis of Johnson’s character flaws, although I’ve always wondered to what extent that is explained by jealousy that another showman took it all the way to Number 10. They are both romantics, though Johnson is, or was when he needed to be, much more cynical.
After ten years of the Brexit wars, Rory the Tory is hailed as a messiah by those who were once ultra-rationalist. Now they are followers of an impossible romantic, a mystic, someone who sees himself as a figure destined for glory, an heir to T.E. Lawrence, an adventurer who can converse with tribesmen, a soldier, a great man of history. Perhaps their support for the European Union was, underneath all that rationalism, really just a romantic impulse all along.
The cult of Stewart (read the comments when they defend him) has become so crackpot in its intensity that his followers advocate something wildly fantastical, in denial of constitutional practice and reality.
Rory Stewart cannot “return as PM”. The British system is, in UK terms at least and not in Scotland, based around the two main parties. This is what Johnson understood when he set out to conquer the Tory party and its activists. You need to take over one of the two main parties to become PM. It is the only way.
The Conservative and Labour parties are extraordinarily resilient, and will remain so as long as the voting system continues to be first past the post. Labour, which is about to benefit from the effects of the system, which exaggerates swings, has no interest in replacing it if it wins. A Labour Prime Minister doesn’t want to spend his or her time in office bartering with the Liberals or the representatives of the deluded Green party under proportional representation.
Stewart made his tilt at taking over the Tory party and failed. He was defeated by Boris Johnson, who in effect had better instincts for raw politics.
Any parallel with Churchill, and the possibility of Rory making a May 1940-style return which is mentioned by Stewart fans, is preposterous. The Tories aren’t going to select Stewart again for a parliamentary seat, never mind for leader.
Stewart could, I suppose, have a go at taking over the third party Liberal Democrats and hope his reign coincides with the moment every three or four decades they hold the balance of power at Westminster in a hung parliament, and then barter a change to the voting system, after which he is carried by acclaim to the seat of power.
Once a traditionalist on the constitution, he has shifted to the Lib Dem position on the electoral system. He now advocates proportional representation so small new parties, say one led by R Stewart, can break through. But new parties are very difficult to make a success and imagine leading the Liberal Democrats for a decade instead. What a horrible existence, especially when compared to doing what he’s doing now, being worshipped at the Royal Albert Hall.
“I’d love to do what I can to help Britain,” Stewart grandly told radio host James O’Brien, high priest of the embittered ultra-Remainer movement. It’s a typical Rory soundbite and I suspect Stewart knows his history well enough to know he had his chance and is not going to be given another one.
Concrete jungle
Since the British government announced on Friday that more than 100 schools will not be able to fully reopen for the new term because some ageing buildings are unsafe, I’ve read in the last 48 hours more than I ever needed to on the history of concrete. Don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat it all here.
There was Joseph Monier, the French gardener who first invented, or patented, steel-reinforced concrete in the 1860s. For thousands of years, humans have used concrete, a composite bonding aggregate, fluid, cement, and looked for new ways to make it stronger, more flexible and cheaper. In Sweden in the 1920s and then Germany, lightweight Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (AAC) became popular. After the Second World War, when Europe needed rebuilding, Britain and many other countries in Europe adopted RAAC, using it alongside AAC, as a cheap way of reinforcing concrete to be used in buildings, particularly as roof panels.
There is a problem. The life span of these products is not for ever. If RAAC panels are not well-maintained, and water gets in, they crumble. The roof could fall in.
RAAC is there in public buildings, courts, hospitals, and private sector office blocks.
Inevitably, when it was announced on Friday that some school buildings would be forced to close because they contained RAAC, there was condemnation of British policy and governance. How slapdash and quintessentially British to use the cheap stuff in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s? Aren’t we just terrible?
It’s actually a Europe-wide story. Britain’s government claims to be a leader in Europe in acknowledging and evaluating the problem. RAAC has also been used a lot in other parts of the world outside Europe where the booming demand for housing meant it was useful. Today, there’s still a search for cheaper construction materials that take less energy to produce, in the context of the race to net zero.
So, it’s a complex business and not just a British tale.
There is one respect in which it may come back to bite the Tories hard. Experts have been issuing warnings about RAAC and the need to replace decaying panels and blocks for more than a decade. Its use was abandoned in Britain in the mid-1990s, but did the cuts in capital spending on the government estate – on schools and so on – that came with George Osborne’s “austerity” programme after the financial crisis mean that not enough was done quickly to replace the crumbling panels?
Labour will test and probe on this. It’s easy to imagine a party political broadcast and poster campaign during the election condemning Tory stewardship of the public realm.
The Reaction podcast is back
The first episode in the new run of the Reaction podcast, hosted by me, is out. It’s an interview with Daniel Finkelstein, author of Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, his extraordinary family history. You can listen here.
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