Ideology is a drug for Tory leaders. It can enhance their performance against internal rivals and they like to indulge socially. But dependency is a path to ruin.
Brexit started a pattern of problematic use. Hardline Euroscepticism was potent stuff. Theresa May thought she could handle it, but got hooked. Boris Johnson was hardly a high-functioning addict, but he was at least able to discern some political realities through the fog of intoxicating dogma.
Liz Truss’s leadership signals descent into the chronic phase, where craving for a hit overcomes all faculties of reason. The prime minister and her chancellor have already blown their stash of credibility on a binge of unfunded tax cuts. Then the debt collectors came – literally, in the form of soaring bond yields.
Like junkies caught shoplifting to feed their habit, the authors of the fiscal fiasco go through the motions of contrition, while trying to deflect blame. Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech to the Tory conference on Monday, hastily rewritten to accommodate a U-turn on cutting the 45p rate, was delivered with the fidgety distraction of a man waiting for his dealer.
But how to get the money? Preserving the top tax rate doesn’t plug the revenue gap created by all the other giveaways. Nor does it bring down the cost of government borrowing, which has risen because markets are not sold on the efficacy of Kwarteng’s snake-oil growth tonic.
Under pressure to balance the books, ministers rifle through the policy cabinet for something to sustain the ideological buzz. The hand inevitably alights on the bottle containing benefit cuts (or, as it is marked on the label, a decision not to peg welfare payments to rising inflation).
Conservatives with a clear-headed grasp of reality worry about the side-effects of driving vulnerable people deeper into penury, just as they fret about mortgage interest rates rising for people whose incomes can’t cover the repayments.
But if you mainline enough Trussonomics, those problems dissolve. The solution to not having enough money is to earn more. Just “go out there and get that new job,” says Conservative party chairman Jake Berry. Maybe it was a conscious tribute to Norman Tebbit, who, in his capacity as Margaret Thatcher’s employment secretary, told Tory conference in 1981 that the remedy to joblessness was getting on a bike and looking for work.
That is the strong spirit of self-reliance and contempt for a coddling state that Truss drinks neat. Her enthusiasm for bootleg Thatcherism has encouraged a great pouring out of policy moonshine on the fringes of the Birmingham conference.
Chris Philp, the chief secretary to the Treasury, told his audience that enterprises employing fewer than 500 people should be excused from all business regulations. He praised work that Jacob Rees-Mogg has been doing behind the scenes to incinerate onerous worker protections and the like. (Some of what the business secretary has been brewing makes even Truss wince. Mogg’s prospectus has been called “half-baked” and “unworkable” by anonymous Downing Street sources.)
Another Treasury minister, Andrew Griffith, declared his preference that inheritance tax be abolished, although he noted that this was not a government position. What is? The prime minister hardly consults the cabinet, which doesn’t pretend to be united.
Truss styles herself as an Iron Lady, but her steeliest commitments then melt in the heat of rebellion. Divisions caused by the summer’s bitter leadership contest are still fresh. Internecine grudges are more forgettable when election victory is feasible. When opinion polls point to certain defeat, old vendettas boil into a frenzy of recrimination.
Much of the potential for factional feuding was repressed in the early stages of Boris Johnson’s leadership. The most vocal pro-Europeans were purged from the parliamentary party. When it came to the 2019 general election, no Tory split was deeper than the shared view that Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be allowed into Downing Street.
Also, Johnson agreed with everyone about everything and appeared, for a time, to have a knack for persuading voters that he could deliver. Once it was obvious that he couldn’t, the brittle unity shattered. Truss represents just one jagged shard of Conservatism and has no interest in reassembling the whole.
It is significant that neither she nor Kwarteng have experience of opposition. Both became MPs in 2010. Their paths to power were beaten smooth by the previous generation of Tory “modernisers”. They benefited from the work that David Cameron put into decontaminating the “nasty party” brand, but they didn’t taste enough bitter defeat to learn a proper dread of the old toxin.
Ideological divisions from those wilderness years were submerged in the subsequent Brexit wars, but not very deep. No one doubts Michael Gove’s Eurosceptic credentials, but before he was a leaver he was a Cameroon. That is the tattered standard he now raises when rallying opposition to vote-repellent parts of Truss’s prospectus.
It is revealing that Rees-Mogg called Gove the “Tory party’s version of Peter Mandelson” at a conference fringe event on Monday. It was not meant as a compliment but was probably taken as one. The barb expressed a horror of Cameron’s legacy on the Conservative right that is symmetrical to leftwing abhorrence of Blairism.
For beleaguered Tory moderates, Truss’s victory in a ballot of party members is the mirror of what happened to Labour in 2015 – the wrong leader foisted on MPs who knew the winner wasn’t up to the job. As one former cabinet minister says of the clique now ensconced in No 10: “They are our Corbyn.”
Tories of that view are not just resigned to defeat at the next election, but see it as a necessary corrective. Having failed to avert the party’s slide to the bottom of ideological addiction, they need the voters to scare it straight. Rebel MPs can force the prime minister to sober up one policy at a time, but the Conservatives will not renounce the creed that carried Truss to power. For that it will take an electoral intervention – and a long stint of detox in opposition.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Will Trussonomics wreck the economy?
Join Randeep Ramesh and Aditya Chakrabortty discussing the economic crisis triggered by chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, in this livestreamed event on Monday 17 October 2022, 8-9pm BST. Book tickets at theguardian.com/guardianlive
