There has been no vision for a crisis-ridden society coming out of the race to be the next Tory leader. One is desperately needed. Patients are dying in ambulances queueing outside hospitals that are too full to accept patients. Greenhouse gas emissions are to blame for deadly heatwaves, but the government can’t spell out how it would meet its promise to cut them. Voters since 2010 have given the Conservatives the benefit of the doubt. The polls, and recent byelections, strongly suggest that the public are no longer inclined to do so.
There is a palpable sense of the country being adrift. As the former Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove admitted earlier this week, under the Conservatives the core parts of government simply aren’t functioning any more. The new prime minister ought to be a clean break with the past. However, ballots of Conservative MPs have whittled the choice down to two contenders: the former chancellor Rishi Sunak and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss. Both represent a continuation of Boris Johnson’s politics rather than a repudiation of them. There’s no sign that either will reverse the policy of increasing government control over opponents in parliament, in elections, in the courts and on the streets.
