The Duke of Wellington, surveying his troops, said he didn’t know what effect the spectacle would have on the enemy, “but, by God, they frighten me”. What’s left of the serious elements of the Conservative party are frightened as they view the battlefield ahead – and they don’t expect to win a Waterloo.
“If the Tories lose the next election, they may well be out of power for a generation,” warns the Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth. The progressive forces of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens would bring in electoral reform and voting at 16. Even under a single transferable vote system, according to Forsyth, the Tories would only have won twice since the second world war, and not even Margaret Thatcher could have governed on her own.
That frightener is designed to dragoon Tory party members into Rishi Sunak’s camp, as the safer pair of hands. For outsiders, the pleasure of this campaign is watching the best lines of attack come from the contestants. Safe, hisses Liz Truss – or more of the same, business-as-usual, failed economics that led us here?
The Sunak camp responds by blowing up her plan for a gigantic £30bn tax cut on day one (the mysterious alchemy of which would generate golden growth), axing green levies from energy bills and, above all, “deregulation” (unspecified).
The only economist she could quote as a backer when questioned on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was far-right maverick Patrick Minford, once an adviser to Margaret Thatcher. In the heat of Brexit rows in 2018, when Theresa May was in the throes of struggling with her party over her EU plan, I asked him to spell out Brexit’s benefits.
As leader of the then Economists for Brexit, he claimed that Brexit would bring in 6.8% growth, or £135bn. (So far, it’s a 4% drop in GDP.) Abolishing all tariffs, he said, would cut 20% off food prices, while throwing Britain open to world free trade’s cheapest goods. Removing all regulatory barriers would cut another 20% off prices. What of food quality? As long as it was labelled, let consumers decide on safety. What of bankrupting UK farming? Big farmers will switch to biotech and GM; inefficient small ones will go to the wall. What of manufacturing killed by off by floods of cheap imports? Doesn’t matter, let cheaper countries do “metal bashing”, he said. It would mean, he said, “reallocation of labour” just like those “reallocations” under Thatcher in the 1980s that never happened, instead abandoning “left behind” communities in their deserted shipyards, steel works and mines. Yes, it would mean another “shock” like those, but clearing out overprotection from global competition would bring a huge economic boost in lower prices. Short-term pain means long-term gain: a second coming of Thatcher’s 1980s. He was an adviser who most strongly advocated the poll tax to Margaret Thatcher, whereby a duke paid the same flat-rate local tax as a dustman, and which caused her downfall.
In her imitation of Thatcher, that’s the advice Truss has opted for, so it’s clear why she has given “levelling up” short shrift. If she is moulding her ideas on Minford’s – and she quoted his Express article today – then she is indeed a revolutionary. As she said on Radio 4: “We need someone with the toughness, the grit,” who is prepared to “take on the Whitehall machine and drive through change”. Sunak was “the continuity economic candidate” who had taken the UK in the “wrong direction”. He, along with the entire Treasury economic establishment, was “peddling a particular type of economic policy for the last 20 years” that had not delivered. Others might agree – but from radically different perspectives. Citing Minford, Truss justified far higher borrowing, and that should warm the cockles of Labour’s heart. The one attack that Prime Minister Truss couldn’t launch against Labour at an election would be fiscal laxity.
Weeks more of this campaign will yield nothing but joy for Labour as the candidates tour hustings from Exeter to Darlington, Belfast to Norwich, tearing lumps of flesh off each other. As their opposing economics mean they could never sit in one another’s cabinet, there’s nothing to stop them fighting to the political death. Everyone knows if Sunak loses, he’s jetting off with his green card, but his heavy shelling will have damaged Truss. Her own shower of quotes about economic failure will come back to haunt her, as will Michael Gove’s useful intervention on how the government is “simply not functioning” on providing basic services.
Truss’s previous life as a Lib Dem and a remainer is getting a vigorous airing – and who knows, perhaps she really is a red mole, sent in to destroy the Tory party from within. But the party has done that pretty well itself during the Boris Johnson disgrace years, without her revolutionary intervention.
Look around, and whoever moves into the gold wallpaper suite will inherit all the social and economic failings of the austerity-stricken era they both voted for. Look ahead, and nothing but worsening public services, deeper hardship for family budgets and a darkening relationship with the EU beckons.
Whoever wins, here’s their dilemma. Do they seize any hint of a polling bounce to scuttle for an election now, concluding things can only get worse? Or knowing they look sure to lose whenever it comes, do they cling on through a couple of miserable years at the helm, sliding towards almost certain electoral doom?
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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