A worrying week, pivotal in British history, as the Tories move away from the market

The opening phase of this weird election could not have gone better for Theresa May’s team. Even if the remarkable popularity that she has built with voters is a mile wide but only an inch deep, she has nonetheless emerged as someone that almost half the country trusts, among an electorate we have become used to thinking of as splintered. There is clearly a dip coming soon, as an economy laden with excessive personal debt struggles to cope with wage squeezes, against a backdrop of public services ready to go bang.

In that respect, the reckoning, it seems, will come after voting on June 8th, not before.

Now is Theresa time. Political professionals are awestruck and even astonished by what they hear. Voters leaning in her direction often can’t explain their endorsement beyond an instinct that she is somehow right for this tricky moment. They tell researchers undertaking focus groups and journalists vox-popping that May seems sensible, grow-up, serious, reasonable and determined to do her best, particularly on Brexit. That is – for now – the electoral equivalent of a so-called “killer app.” For the Tory campaign, the last few weeks have been about learning how to use this new “application” and discovering how to work with a leader who is genuinely popular, who can reach into unfamiliar territory.

That was the story of Act One, the dramatic preamble, and now the Tories are moving straight into Act Two. It opened with the farcical leaking of Labour’s ludicrous manifesto and the dreadful Unite boss Len McCluskey falling down the stairs.

Labour’s spendthrift offer in its leaked manifesto is such an insult to the intelligence of the electorate that I do not propose to examine it in detail here. Life it too short. You’ve had a long week. Jeremy Corbyn will never be Prime Minister.

What is infuriating, however, is the way in which the Corbyn crowd have absolutely no shame about their ineptitude and vandalism. On television they appear pious and pompous despite being exposed as a bunch of utter muppets. Speaking of which, we turn to shadow cabinet dweller Barry Gardiner, a Haileybury-educated Socialist who sadly lacks the poise of another of another of that school’s alumni, Clement Attlee. Gardiner’s sanctimonious tone in his frequent media appearances in recent days takes the biscuit.

Respect would be due to that rotten gang if just one of them would admit that they were over-confident, messed up when they picked Corbyn, didn’t know what they were doing, and have wrecked one of the UK’s two great parties. Instead, they have botched together a manifesto that is a list of endless freebies and tax rises that no doubt even now are being costed and turned into posters by the Tories.

As my colleague Philip Collins in The Times put it, brilliantly:

“There will be sectoral pay bargaining to give unionised labour more power. There will even be a Ministry of Labour. Might as well have a Ministry of Magic to provide all the money once the various levies on business end up destroying the very employment that the ministry is set up to protect.”

Labour’s deepening mid-campaign crisis opens the way for the next Tory phase, which might best be termed as “Theresa on the attack.”

When a leader has earned popularity and a degree of trust from voters it can be deployed for maximum advantage, like carefully-hoarded capital used for a corporate raid at the right moment.

May’s attack on Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott was ferocious and well-delivered. She said: “We have learnt from the shambolic leak of his manifesto that at the heart of his plan is a desire to go back to the disastrous socialist policies of the 1970s. Labour voters are appalled because they see a leader who can’t lead, a shadow chancellor who can’t be trusted and people like Diane Abbott who can’t add up.”

The Prime Minister even tried a joke, saying: “Labour has taken us back 40 years – or maybe 400 years if you’re Diane Abbott.”

That is a reference to Diane Abbott’s recent attempts – which went viral and connected with voters – to explain how many new police Labour proposes to employ and at what cost.

The Tories, then, are moving in for the kill and the Prime Minister looks destined for a historic triumph that crushes Corbyn and establishes anti-Socialist hegemony ahead of Brexit. Socialism is a terrible idea. Driving it out entirely – of Labour too, hopefully – would be a tremendous development.

Why then the headline at the top of my weekly newsletter about this having been a pivotal and worrying week in British history?

In their eagerness to push into Labour territory, the Mayites are taking the Tories to a profoundly dangerous place, meaning dangerous for the country’s economy and those of us – anyone living in the UK – who depend on it. The climate under May is increasingly anti-market and interventionist. The victories won in the long battles fought in the 1970s and 1980s for market mechanisms and for the restorative power of entrepreneurialism are at risk of being squandered.

This week, the Tories announced that they would cap energy prices on the standard tariff, a popular move that sets a worrying precedent. Price-fixing as a mindset once started inhibits investment, creates perverse distortions and leads ultimately to crony-capitalism. The Tory manifesto being prepared in great secrecy is destined, unless the mood music is wrong, to push further in the statist direction than any Tory leader since Ted Heath’s time. If it is as trailed, then this represents a historic turning point, away from markets, that will if pursued make the country poorer.

Of course parts of big business have not excelled themselves since the financial crisis and warnings on pay and corporate excess have too often been ignored. But what is needed is a rethink and a revivifying of capitalism and economic policy for the post-Brexit era, not a retro shift back to 1970s thinking, either the Labour or Tory version. There turned out to be little difference in the end.

Incidentally, the Mayites in charge are a tiny group at the top that includes joint chief of staff Nick Timothy and Gavin Williamson, the Tory chief whip not so far famed for his imagination but sitting at the apex of a troublingly centralised power structure.

There is a lot more unease about these developments among the Tory tribe, under the surface, than is apparent publicly now at the height of May’s popularity. One of the strangest aspects of this bizarre election contest is the way in which conservatives, or non-conservatives who advocate markets and freedom, have retreated into having whispered “samizdat” conversations about what might be termed the Milibandisation of the Tory party under May. After June 8th, if not before, those who believe in the power of markets as the engine of prosperity will have to start speaking up.