Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)The Conservative Party is now treating the office of Prime Minister like a game of pinata at a children’s party. One child after another comes up to the package and smashes it with a stick. Eventually, every child gets a go. Little more than a month after the party made the error of choosing Liz Truss to be its latest leader, the Prime Minister is in serious trouble. She may survive the time it takes to write this column and maybe even the time it takes to read it. But her colleagues have given up on her.
The only barrier to the Conservative Party getting rid of its fourth Prime Minister in six years is that the identity of the fifth is not obvious. The MPs do not trust the party members who have returned the wrong answer twice in a row now, preferring Boris Johnson over Jeremy Hunt and Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak. Brexit has made Tory politics nasty and tribal. It is a terrible weakness of the Truss Cabinet that it is staffed almost exclusively by low-quality Brexiteers yet that toxic division might also be her friend.
Regardless of what they do in fact do, it is evident that the Tories really ought to act against the Prime Minister. The highest office in British politics is an altitude like no other and Truss has struggled for air. After the cavalier couldn’t-care-less of Boris Johnson, she and Kwasi Kwarteng have added an ideological calamity. The combination will surely be fatal and there will not be a Conservative Prime Minister after the next general election.
The question that faces Tory MPs today, then, is: what can we possibly do to mitigate this terrible mess? It is important to accept that the situation is probably irretrievable. Whoever takes office now is a caretaker manager in the sense that he or she is unlikely to win the election. The other parties are so fed up with the Tories that, unless they win an overall majority, there is no prospect of them being kept in power.
The task is to mitigate the defeat, to keep it within manageable proportions, to keep the party competitive.
The first challenge is to alight on a successor. The best option then is the new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, whose virtues — solidity, conservatism, tranquillity — are the opposite of the traits that have landed the Tory party in the soup. Hunt would be a harder opponent for Keir Starmer than is generally acknowledged, not least because he is a bit like him. Even a belated return to fiscal conservatism and quiet governance would have a chance of clawing back a little support.
The new leader would then have to delay holding a general election for as long as possible. There has been a lot of loose off-the-record talk to the effect that a new Prime Minister would feel compelled to go to the country at once. There is no doubt that, from a neutral third-party point of view, an election is very much to be desired. The Conservative Party has been in power too long and it is time to say goodbye. But there is, in point of fact, no requirement for a new leader to stage a quick election and, with the Tories more than 20 points down in the opinion polls, it would be catastrophically foolish to do so.
The new Prime Minister’s first speech should make the date of the election plain: no time soon. Then he or she needs to put a caretaker team in place and it needs to be surprising. There needs to be a moment equivalent to when Gordon Brown brought Peter Mandelson back into the Cabinet in October 2008.
The new Chancellor should be William Hague or a hastily ennobled George Osborne. Bring back Theresa May as Home Secretary. She looks like a dangerous liberal in light of what has since followed.
Appoint the cleverest people to the Cabinet irrespective of their Brexit vote. Bring Michael Gove back to Justice, to resume the plans he had until he was replaced there by Truss.
Then the new Prime Minister will need to set out a validated forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility, together with headline plans for public spending for two years. Without economic calm, the Tories will be wiped off the face of the political map.
It is all desperate stuff, of course it is. The situation is indeed desperate.
But there is a time-honoured formula for good government — the best people available carrying out a moderate programme. The Conservatives have forgotten how to do it, and it is their only hope of losing with good grace rather than in a landslide.
