It’s easy to miss, when you have a prime minister who doesn’t look quite up to the job, how much damage they can do. I made this mistake with Theresa May and Brexit. How could she pull off such a seismic thing, requiring so much persuasion, when she couldn’t even convincingly say hello to a small group of people? Surely all we had to do was wait and the whole thing would implode? I was right in so far as she couldn’t make Brexit happen, but failed to predict how much worse the project would be by the time she had finished trying.
In the spirit of not underestimating Liz Truss, then, let’s take a look at her team: her chief of staff is Mark Fullbrook, interviewed by the FBI about work he did for a Venezuelan-Italian banker accused of bribing the governor of Puerto Rico. (In the interests of fairness, we should spell out that he was spoken to as a potential witness, not a suspect.) A Lynton Crosby acolyte and very longtime Conservative campaigner, Fullbrook is known to have nice manners because that is a thing in Downing Street now. If you don’t scream at people the whole time, you’re the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
There are two policy guys called James Harries and Jamie Hope, both so young that it’s considered impolite to ask where they came from as the answer would be “school”. Special adviser Sophie Jarvis is ex-Adam Smith Institute, director of strategy Iain Carter worked with Crosby and Fullbrook, another spad, Jason Stein, worked for Prince Andrew, and the chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, used to run the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group. Vote Leave, the rightwing gossip site Guido Fawkes and the Centre for Policy Studies supply the rest of the background to this vividly zealous, ideologically homogeneous set, whose mantra is: shrink the state.
Policy wonks and more left-leaning thinktanks spend a lot of time analysing what state-shrinking looks like across a range of scenarios: in social security terms, it means this many children without school uniform, in the NHS it means these staff shortages, those waiting lists, in infrastructure terms it means: “Let’s hope the French and Chinese can fund it, and who cares if they then own it?”, in levelling up terms it means: “Ha, did any of you actually swallow that nonsense?”
But that domino picture of decline, one disaster knocking into another, is just the fun-to-watch outcome. The first and last beneficiaries of shrinking the state and worshipping the market are the super-rich: not the middle-classes, not the small and medium-sized businesses, not the hard-grafting wealth creators, but those of high net worth.
This is modern Conservatism – it works flat out in the interests of a class to which only a handful of its key players belong. The party’s main donors now are hedge-funders and property developers, so you could find an explanation there: of course the Tories have to prioritise the HNWs otherwise where are they going to find a spare 10 grand – down the back of the constituency office sofa? But that reasoning doesn’t quite get there for me, or at least, not all the way: what would propel a person, who is probably paid quite modestly by super-rich standards, to endlessly push the cause of their wealthy overlords? Are they thinking, “One day, I, too, will have an estate like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s, or a £180 mug like Rishi Sunak – I just have to go back in time and be high-born, or marry a billionaire”?
I meet the thinktankers periodically on current affairs shows, mainly from the Institute of Economic Affairs, and sometimes think their worldview has a religious quality: “Those rich people are simply better than us; they exist in a state of grace. Why question it, when it’s so obvious?” It would be easier to counter if they said it out loud but they never talk about “rich people”, only “markets”.
And when they say “state”, of course, they mean us. They plan to shrink us, our opportunities, our lives. Don’t underestimate them. You don’t have to be competent, still less logical, to make a hell of a mess.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
