What will be an appropriate epitaph to inscribe on the tombstone of this Conservative government? Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, came up with a compelling contender when he wrote: “I’ve never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.” His verdict, which would have stayed undisclosed had it not been revealed by the Covid inquiry, related to the atrociously bungled handling of the pandemic, but it could serve as an overarching judgment on these 13 years and counting of Conservative rule.
Four successive Tory prime ministers have been and gone, each arriving at Number 10 brandishing promises to deliver a better Britain, each departing a humiliated failure and leaving Britain in a worse place than they found it. Now, in another zoom around the Tory doom loop, a fifth prime minister is struggling to keep his head above water in a raging tempest of division and chaos self-generated by the Conservatives. As Rishi Sunak foolishly makes his Rwanda plan a defining test of his premiership, there is feverish chatter among Tory MPs about triggering a ballot to try to eject yet another leader. The party chairman warns his colleagues that it would be “insanity” to oust Mr Sunak. That’s risky talk. Insanity is one thing that the Conservatives have consistently excelled at.
Governing, not so much. A basic ability to run stuff ought to be the bare minimum that voters are entitled to expect of the people in power. Yet the dominant theme of these years has been a persistent and abject inability to deliver stable and effective government. This is the thread that connects austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, Partygate, the brief but ruinous reign of Liz Truss, the HS2 debacle, NHS waiting lists at unprecedented levels, collapsing school buildings, the shortage of places to live, taxes heading to a record peacetime high, more austerity and the explosive Tory crisis over migration. Research recently unveiled by Professor Jane Green, a political scientist at Oxford, suggests that the disintegration of support for the Tories is much less down to ideology than it is about a collapse of trust in their competence.
One test of competency is how ministers deal with crises they did not anticipate. Obituaries of Alistair Darling rightly commended the former chancellor for the calm and decisive way in which he, in concert with Gordon Brown and officials, responded to the highly perilous global financial crisis in 2008. Compare and contrast with the flailing hysteria that raged inside the Johnson government when it was surprised by the pandemic. Confronted with a novel and deadly disease, any government would have struggled to get everything right. But you’d have to visit a hell of a lot of alternative universes before you found a government that got so much so wrong as the one presided over by Mr Johnson. Evidence taken by the Covid inquiry is filling out a grisly picture of a diabolically dysfunctional and rancorously riven administration whose denizens were busier fighting each other than they were the virus. Matt Hancock, the pandemic health secretary until he was forced to quit for breaking his own Covid rules, made a significant admission to the inquiry when he conceded that the late introduction of the first lockdown cost tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved with more professional leadership.
When Mr Johnson was confronted with his serial inadequacies, the disgraced former prime minister responded with a generally uncontrite and characteristically denialist performance. The inquiry did extract the admission that he was woefully slow to recognise the threat posed by Covid. He was unable to refute all the previous testimony that he regularly pressed for a “let the virus rip” strategy on the grounds it mainly killed older people who had “had a good innings” and were going to “die anyway soon”. Next on the stand will be Mr Sunak. The pandemic chancellor will have to account for why he didn’t bother to take scientific advice before introducing his plague-spreading “eat out to help out the virus” scheme. We know what the experts thought of that, because it earned him the soubriquet “Dr Death” from Dame Angela McLean, who has since become the government’s chief scientific adviser.
It is rotten timing for the Tory leader that he will be interrogated about his mistakes during the pandemic in the same week that he will be trying to persuade parliament to approve his latest plan for deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda. On Planet Tory, the struggle over the Rwanda legislation is being waged as if it is existential. Seen from Planet Earth, this is another and especially startling example of their incompetence. The government has already squandered a lot of cash on a scheme that James Cleverly, the home secretary who is charged with getting it through the Commons, regards as “batshit” crazy. He and two previous home secretaries are the only people the government has managed to put on a plane to Kigali. Their sole achievement has been to expel from the UK bagloads of taxpayers’ money without anything to show for it. It was revealed at the end of last week that the amount of cash disgorged to the Rwandan government has escalated to £240m with a further £50m promised regardless of whether any deportation flights go ahead. If they ever actually happen, the Home Office estimates there will be an additional bill of £169,000 per person removed. One member of the cabinet has remarked to me that it would be less costly to the taxpayer for the government to put them up in the London Ritz for a year and give them a champagne dinner every night.
Fathoming why a government would persist with such madness confronts us with a chicken-and-egg problem. Are the Tories too devoured by their internal infighting to do any sane governing? Or is their inability to deliver anything the cause of their repeated descents into ferocious recrimination?
It is a rare government that does not commit any blunders and past ones have perpetrated some shockers as well. What marks this one out when you survey the 13-year span of Tory rule is the gobsmacking quantity of their fumbles, foul-ups, flops and fiascos. If you are short of a party game over Christmas, there is a kind of grim entertainment to be had from ranking their screw-ups in order of severity, starting with the many calamities and ascending to the full-fat catastrophes at the top. For many people’s money, David Cameron will take the palm for calling the Brexit referendum in the glib belief that he’d secure the UK in the EU for a generation, botching the prenegotiation, timing the vote for the moment when he was most likely to lose it, and destroying his premiership by delivering precisely the opposite result to the one he intended. Theresa May is also up there for triggering the departure process before she’d thought through what she hoped to achieve and then presiding over three years of paralysis because she couldn’t produce a Brexit deal that could command a parliamentary majority.
And we’re just getting started. An audit of 13 years of Tory incompetence is being prepared by Sir Ivor Crewe for an updated edition of The Blunders of Our Governments, the book he wrote with the late Anthony King. The Crewe catalogue includes some awful howlers that deserve to be remembered, but may have been forgotten because they’ve been followed by so many more. One is Andrew Lansley’s dire NHS reorganisation in the Cameron era which was very costly, highly disruptive, did nothing to improve the performance of the health service and was subsequently disowned and unravelled. Another is Chris Grayling’s dreadful privatisation of the probation service, reversed three years after it was launched, but not before it had destroyed the national rehabilitation system and bankrupted the private providers. Further pandemic blunders include discharging Covid-infected elderly into unprotected care homes and the procurement process for securing personal protective equipment in which huge sums were lost to waste and fraud. I suggest to Sir Ivor that Rwanda is a folly ridiculous enough to merit its addition to the roll call of infamy.
Every day makes it look more certain that Tory government is destined for the grave. It will be buried under the crushing weight of their sheer, blithering and boundless incompetence.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
