The Tories are in denial: without the right leader, they face oblivion
The last time the Conservative conference was held in Birmingham, two years ago, Liz Truss was prime minister, which serves to remind us of the importance of picking the right leader. Funnily enough, her fringe meeting on Monday was one of the best attended, with more than 300 people crammed into one of the theatres within the city’s cavernous ICC and as many left outside unable to get in.
Since she has been demonised as the principal cause of the party’s disaster on July 4 this was a surprisingly high turnout. Moreover, they had come not to bury Liz but to praise her. There is a growing sense among members (who installed her in No 10, we should remember) that her diagnosis of the country’s ills and her prescription for its recovery was right all along.
She emphasised the importance of a dash for growth and that is precisely what Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is now saying. Without growth there is no prosperity, no improvement in public services and the gradual erosion of the country’s capacity to improve. A general decline sets in and accelerates as politicians continue to shy away from the decisions that have to be made. But while Ms Truss had the right approach she botched the implementation, compromising the government’s reputation for fiscal probity and wrecking the Tory party’s vaunted competence and good sense, possibly for good.
Not that she was having any of this, of course. At a Telegraph event hosted by our very own Tim Stanley, she maintained that she would have done better at the election than Rishi Sunak had she not been forced out of office. She reminded her audience that when she left Downing Street after 49 days, the shortest tenure on record, the Reform Party was on 3 per cent of the vote. On election day it secured more than 14 per cent and cost Ms Truss her own seat in Norfolk, which she lost by just 600 votes to Labour. The Reform candidate won 10,000.
Many of the nostrums that she is advancing for the self-imposed task of “saving the West” are familiar Reform tropes. We are, she said, already a Socialist country, and have been for years. Labour will merely exacerbate the trend. Energy costs were the highest in the world, hitting the cost of living, holding back growth and deterring investors. She would have given the go ahead to fracking. The establishment – the Treasury, the Bank of England, the Civil Service in general – wielded the real power, not politicians, yet where was the scrutiny of the people who run these institutions? After all, it was their fault, not hers, that the mini-Budget two years ago went so badly wrong.
You might consider this to be self-delusion on an ocean-going scale from someone forced from office by her own colleagues. But if her analysis is largely correct it cannot just be ignored by those trying to succeed Rishi Sunak as party leader.
We have been here before. After Boris Johnson was turfed out, the same arguments were being had about how the Tories had to change, why they had not only failed to reduce immigration but presided over its increase, why taxes were at a record level and why the state was bigger than ever (though that was partly because of Covid measures).
Here in Birmingham the Tories are going through the same process all over again and doing so with remarkably good cheer after undergoing the worst shellacking at the polls in 200 years. The mood is upbeat, helped by the pig’s ear Labour has made of its first few weeks in power and buoyed by several good local election results recently, where they rather than Reform were the beneficiaries of a backlash against the Government.
But you can’t help but feel they have not yet come to terms with the scale of what has happened to them or are fully cognisant of the threat Reform poses.
Grief is said to have five phases, the first of which is denial. The Tories are still at stage one and have not moved on to anger, let alone acceptance. The debates between the four leadership candidates are too narrowly focused on analysing the past rather than looking to the future. Opposition is an opportunity for much bigger thinking than we have seen so far.
Labour will fail because more state control is simply no longer the answer to the problems of the 21st century. Before the 2010 election the Tories were keen on redefining the limits of state action and turning over more public services to the private and voluntary sectors.
For a while they were keen to pursue the approach adopted in Canada in the mid-1990s when their budget deficit spiralled out of control. That involved a comprehensive re-evaluation of the functions that government should be undertaking and the jettisoning of anything non-essential. They reduced federal spending by almost 10 per cent in two years, leaving room for tax cuts, which helped boost economic growth.
We are in an unsustainable fiscal position, burdened by unaccountable, inefficient and vastly costly public services, like the NHS and run by a bureaucracy resistant to innovation. This has to change or we will go bankrupt.
For all its talk, Labour has retreated to its old ways that failed last time: the high-spending, all-controlling, heavy-handed state. Those ideas had been defeated under Thatcher and should have been buried forever by 14 years of Tory-led government. The fact that they weren’t goes a long way to explaining the party’s historic defeat.
Now they are having to make the case for small government all over again in far more difficult circumstances and none of the four leadership candidates seems to grasp the scale of this task.
Maybe we will hear something tomorrow when they each appear on the conference platform to make their pitch for the job. Is anyone prepared to acknowledge that entirely new models for the delivery of health and social care, welfare payments and pensions, energy security, planning and the rest will be needed in the coming decades and that thinking how they might work needs to start now.
Just carrying on tinkering at the edges without drastic reform is no longer an option. Taxes will remain high and the debt will spiral to the point where no one will lend to us anymore.
On the fringes here in Birmingham are all sorts of gatherings looking to the long-term future, not just the next four years. There is no shortage of ideas. The Tories need to pick a leader who is able to understand and implement them.