The slogan for this week’s Conservative conference is “Getting Britain Moving”. Good to their word, the government has already generated some highly dramatic movements – the pound plunging, mortgage rates surging and the morale of Conservative MPs crashing as their party’s poll rating drops to a multi-decade low. One veteran Tory MP reports that a younger colleague “rang me and said: ‘What should we do?’ I replied: ‘Prepare for opposition.’”
The financial earthquakes triggered by the Truss regime have been accompanied by what feels like a major shift in the tectonic plates of politics. At their party’s conference in Liverpool, Labour people spoke with growing conviction that they can win the next election, something none of them believed back in 2019. Among Tories, there is not only a fatalistic expectation that they are heading towards the exit, there is mounting dread of a defeat of landslide proportions, something none among them thought possible when they were handed a chunky parliamentary majority less than three years ago. You can still find Tories who think they can glimpse a path to recovery, but the optimists have shrivelled in number since Kamikaze Kwarteng and Calamity Liz arrived in Downing Street to unleash their special brand of havoc. There are even some Tories who speak of their own party in the way that they used to talk about Labour when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn: too dangerous to be anywhere near power.
