One of the less successful rewilding experiments is the fictional reintroduction of DNA-manufactured dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park. Yet a remake is underway at Westminster, as the likely Liz Truss-led government plots a return of political dinosaurs.
Team Truss has made clear that her front bench will feature the revival of two figures regarded as standard bearers of the Right of the party — John Redwood and the former leader and welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. For those of us who have written on politics for eons, this is, as they say, déjà-vu. Redwood was a formidable, if chilly, intellectual voice on the economic Right-wing who contested the leadership in 1995. “IDS” ran the party in the early 2000s, until fears about his unelectability forced him out. Still, Westminster careers can be a long-running franchise.
But from Truss’s point of view it makes sense. If she wins a strong mandate from the party base on September 5, she will aim for a less push-me pull-you mixed message on spending than which held sway under the tense duumvirate of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Tonight’s hustings featuring the two candidates vying for Midlands party votes in Birmingham will also be a road test of how far Truss will dare lay out her case in detail. Sunak followers say she no longer promises an emergency budget in autumn and details of the scale of tax cuts have remained shrouded in fog.
The summons to veterans sends a deeper message of Thatcherite ancestor worship and a different kind of calculation from Truss as to how her risky pitch for re-election will work. Neither Redwood nor Duncan Smith were markedly successful at “retail politics” outside their respective Tory core votes — the former was a cerebral “Vulcan” figure, of whom it was said that he “could start a fight in an empty bar”. I discovered this to be more than a metaphor when I was with him on a BBC Any Questions panel, only to find Redwood so keen to continue the tussle afterwards that we did indeed have a (verbal) fight in an empty bar.
For all the mockery of the old Right, however, Redwood is a “numbers brain” who will keep Treasury officials busy. Duncan Smith is a different kettle of fish — more instinctive than cerebral, and one of the voices on the Right who was most seriously interested in welfare reform.
Today, the argument will turn on how to limit the damage of recession. Truss may seem reckless but she is not without calculation. She does need to adapt some campaign pledges. There is a need for an extensive support package to stave off a disastrous winter energy crisis.
Besides the human dimension, this is not a recipe for electoral victory. So Truss will need cover for some compromises — notably on a “handout” to offset the hit to household bills. One official close to the preparations for the transition in Number 10 notes that “optimistically, there is £10 billion to be gained in her proposed savings on slashing the civil service and more speculative savings.” But economic gravity cannot be defied for long. So the Tories’ new Queen Liz will need a borrowing splurge.
To pull this off without encouraging the kind of revolt by MPs which ate up Theresa May when she failed to deliver on a Brexit plan will be a high-wire act. Truss needs to bind in old and newer figures on the Right as her praetorian guard, in anticipation of internal resistance from Sunak supporters. Whether this fissile mix works out is less certain. But it has helped power a determined new leader to the top. Now a new Jurassic era is in sight — all roar, but in the distance is the rumbling threat of electoral extinction.
