But the next setback might be the one that ends Starmer’s leadership. As for his successor, the Westminster gossip mill continues to turn. Who will step up? Given the dissatisfaction with Starmer’s roboticism, there is a sense in the party that what is required is a leader with personality: someone Labour can lean into, liking, rather than begrudgingly supporting. Andy Burnham fits the bill, what with his Fred-Perry-and-an-accent embodiment of the professional Northerner. But Burnham’s hope of running in the Gorton and Denton by-election was thwarted by Labour’s National Executive Committee, a decision that will keep him out of Parliament for the time being. Meanwhile, Wes Streeting is too close to Mandelson, and too disliked in the party, for his obvious ambitions to be realized. Ed Miliband, though popular within the party, has ruled himself out. That leaves just one credible candidate, someone rarely accused of roboticism.

Angela Rayner, the former Deputy Prime Minister, has her own political struggles. She is still under investigation for her tax affairs, for instance. Even before she lost her job over the matter, she was unpopular with much of the public. But we live in an era of bloc politics. The old duopoly is broken. Left and Right are not fighting over voters in the middle; instead, Reform and the Conservatives are competing to be the main party of the Right, while Labour faces competition from Greens, independents and Your Party for the votes of the left. In the chaos, apparently divisive characters can take advantage by uniting their bloc — if not the country.

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Could Rayner take such a path? So far, she has ably navigated Labour’s modern factionalism, promoted by both Corbyn, of whom she was later critical, and Starmer. She has praised Blair yet earned the plaudits of John McDonnell. As such, she is well placed for a crack at the leadership, and is said to have attracted lots of donor cash. Her polarizing nature would normally be a weakness, but now it might offer the Labour Party something that it currently lacks: a sense of identity. Rayner has a strong accent, a blunt way of speaking, and an eye-catching sense of style. Unafraid to be pictured with a fag and a pint, she can be to Labour stereotypes what Ken Clarke’s cigars and whisky was to the Tories. Rayner once dubbed herself “John Prescott in a skirt” — embracing the idea of herself as a union bruiser and standard-bearer of the old Left. When Starmer eventually falls, she could be the one who fires up the enthusiasm of the Labour base.

It is, after all, hard to think of a character more explicitly Labour than Rayner. She left school as a pregnant 16-year-old, yet would one day reach the top table of British politics. It is a mythos that delights Labour Party members, and one that is entwined with the party’s history. Rayner credits the Tony Blair government with the state help — childcare and training — that got her into work and enabled her to support herself and her children. From there, she moved into the unions, rising through the ranks as she established her political career. In a party where aspiring candidates talk of their grandparents’ factory jobs in their attempts to project authenticity, Angela Rayner is the real thing. That authenticity is both her chief asset and one of her biggest liabilities. Allies see her as forthright; her opponents dismiss her as “chippy” and “uppity”. Rayner herself has dismissed Tories as “scum”, a comment she took a month to apologize for.

It is a jibe that could help Rayner in a leadership contest rather than hinder her. In such a contest, she would be appealing first for the support of MPs, who whittle down the candidates, and then for the votes of members — who tend to be to the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party. It will be in Rayner’s favor that she has generally shied away from ideological and intellectual fights within the Labour Party. Instead, she has portrayed herself as a pragmatist. Internal purity tests come second. As she put it in 2017: “Ideology never put food on my table.”

Still, it has been half a century since Labour held a contested leadership election while in power, and it is difficult to predict how the party will behave. Pragmatism suggests swinging behind the most electable candidate, but there is always a chance that members will pull behind someone who flatters their own prejudices and can’t actually govern. The Tories’ experiment with Liz Truss should serve as a warning to Labour.

If Labour members can bring themselves to think of electability as well as Left-wing appeal, they will have to countenance the possibility that Rayner might turn out to be a hindrance. Under her leadership, Labour are likely to lose moderate voters who perceive her as radical, even as those on the Right turn out in strength against her. In a polity where median voters matter, that is a fatal dynamic.

But for Labour, the dilemma is that we are arguably no longer in that political zone. With the days of the Labour-Conservative duopoly apparently over, winning might now entail a new strategy. First, you have to unite your side behind you, competing with popular parties on your own side, then you have to outnumber the other bloc. That strategy would appear to call for a divisive candidate.

After all, this is the age of divisive politicians. Boris Johnson had many detractors, but the vigor he brought to the Tory party helped them reach voters they had not reached before. Nigel Farage is leading in the polls despite negative favorability ratings, even worse than Rayner’s. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is the epitome of decisiveness, inspiring devotion and hatred — with the former enough to win elections. Having a lot of the population dislike you doesn’t preclude political success, provided your side is enthusiastic enough. Rayner might fit the same mold. Tough-talking, unafraid of a scrap and uninterested in cross-party coziness, she could invigorate the base at the cost of the middle.

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The proposal for Rayner’s leadership bid is becoming clearer: she is the high-risk option. While her politics might be pragmatic and hard to discern, her image is not. If Labour were to choose her, it could consolidate the Left-wing bloc by emphasizing her class credentials and presenting a platform that delivers victories for the people she cares about. In that respect, a Rayner premiership could be the antidote to Starmer’s emptiness, offering a more straightforward, principled politics that offends many but seeks to win back the disillusioned left. Voters tell pollsters they see Starmer as a “jellyfish” and a “doormat”. Few would say that about Ange. In power, she would be reviled by the Right, and would relish winding them up.

But the most important question remains whether Rayner can govern. Starmer has been hampered by his lack of personality, but has also struggled to address the multiple crises that Britain currently faces. It is unclear what Rayner would actually do differently, beyond having a bit more spirit. Her time as Housing Secretary was underwhelming, with the government struggling to make inroads on the housing crisis. She has no real record on economic policy — the most pressing challenge for the government — or foreign affairs. Her union background could easily lead to more policies that protect workers, but it could also make it harder and more costly to hire people in the first place. Above all, Rayner has had barely a year’s experience as a minister. There is every chance that, in the top job, she would simply be out of her depth. A highly partisan program could easily implode, especially if it swings towards rapid tax rises on a stuttering economy.

There is also a chance that she could be a Lefty Thatcher: striking, principled, and loved — by her side, at least — for her pugnacity. But the last time a party went looking for a Maggie, they ended up with a Truss. A proudly partisan Rayner could hit the same trajectory: beloved by her base, but badly exposed in the highest office.

Rayner maintains she has acted properly, making the right declarations to the right people at the right time. If that proves incorrect, she will have to be sacrificed to maintain Starmer’s claims to be the party of propriety. Even then, Labour will likely take some political flack and its Left will be enraged at her internal exile.

But even if she is vindicated, that will offer little respite. In politics, behaviour is often only incidental to the scale of the scandal. Boris Johnson showed us how, with a fair wind and an almost inhuman rejection of contrition, you can just plough on. William Wragg, despite resigning the Tory whip, has managed to spin being a fool and betraying his colleagues into a call for sympathy. Others have found being “technically innocent” insufficient to avoid public opprobrium: Sir Peter Viggers took the most public fall for the expenses scandal despite the fact the claim for his infamous duck house was never actually approved. Even if Rayner is exonerated, the stench of scandal could be just enough to stick around. Indeed, the issue contains all the ingredients for making political hay: the fairness of taxation, the private lives of politicians, and house prices.

It helps that this scandal is easy to understand. Where an MP has complex financial affairs, it can be impenetrable from the outside. Rayner’s predicament lacks that advantage. Her situation is simple: either she made wrong declarations about her primary residence or not. Even though the sums involved are small (experts have said the tax advantage might be £1,500 at most), the principle matters — and is easier for a voter to understand than, say, Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs. In politics, it’s rarely about the money, but the message.

This is all the more important when it comes to housing. The price of property is in some ways our national obsession. Daytime TV encourages people to rubberneck on those who are downsizing, trading up, moving to the country, or the sun and everything in between. News reports anxiously note whether property prices are up or down, while policy debates increasingly focus on the unaffordability of housing. It’s an issue not just of political salience, but of cultural import too.

Thus for Rayner’s critics, there is an edge here. Owning multiple properties is a signifier. Regardless of how you came by them, or even their exact values, that you have to worry about such a thing as the location of your primary residence means something. While we talk about the divide between the have-homes and the have-nots, the multiple property owners feel a class apart from everyone else.

This is where Rayner hits a snag. For decades, rising house prices have been seen as a boon, an increase of wealth to which one is almost naturally entitled. The tax system, which sees your home as tax-exempt, encourages this. To own one home — of any value — is simply good fortune. It’s something you’ve worked for and which the state could never claim a share of. Even inheritance tax treats main homes differently, with generous exemptions that don’t apply to other assets. Yet a second feels speculative, luxurious, and worthy of taxation. It’s absurd, but owning a one-million-pound home feels less rich than having two at a fraction of the value.

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This attitude is informed and determined by the housing crisis. A lack of supply has given Britain a uniquely miserly approach to housing. The country has one of the lowest amounts of second homeowners in the Western world. There is no culture of keeping the family home in the old village ticking over, as our Mediterranean cousins might, or the forest-bound holiday homes of Scandinavia. Instead, second-home owners are derided. Either they are exploitative landlords, or wealthy blow-ins taking over countryside villages and seaside towns.

For MPs, second homes are an even bigger vulnerability. Our political culture has never recovered from the expenses scandal. Nearly a decade and a half later, it still rankles with the electorate regardless of changes to the system. Across social media and vox pops, it is the go-to complaint against those we send to Westminster. Second homes are at the apex of that, widely regarded as a wheeze that enriches those who get elected.

The facts are different now. MPs are given a modest allowance, and can no longer pass mortgage interest onto the taxpayer, effectively gaining an appreciating asset for no real cost. For those elected after 2010, maintaining a home in London and the constituency is a burden rather than an opportunity for enrichment. Some have ended up living in canal boats due to the unaffordability of multi-home life. Little of that, however, has cut through.

Instead, the public memory is of those who enjoyed the pre-scandal high life. They were able to “flip” their homes, changing the designation between primary and secondary residences whenever it suited them. This often led to the taxpayers footing the more expensive mortgage before the designation switched back to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) purposes. Some made thousands and banked five-figure tax benefits. No current MP is so lucky, but the public memory lingers. For that, Rayner could hardly have chosen a worse position to be mired in.

And yet, this applies to the Tories too, whose efforts to ensnare Rayner may still come to nothing. Many voters have already switched off. It’s hard to launch aggressive comms moves when your brand is already tarnished — just look at how the many attempts to push “Sir Beer Korma” floundered. If no smoking gun of deceit is found, Rayner will likely ride through the crisis and Sir Keir will avoid having to once again take on his Left flank.

That this is what the Right thinks will land a blow is, however, telling. Partygate was damning for Johnson in a way no other scandal was because it touched a national nerve. Almost everyone had endured lockdown to the best of their ability because they felt it was worth the sacrifice. Flaunting it was an affront to the national conscience. There’s every reason to believe a housing scandal might be the best mirror of this.

Of course, this latest scandal smacks of desperation on behalf of a Conservative Party doing anything to cling on. But sometimes, in politics as in life, the throes of desperation create collateral. The Tories are going down, and they might as well try and take Rayner with them.

Though Starmer appears to be doing well, his lead is soft, with less than a quarter of voters rating him as “good”. This is partly because his success is born of Tory failure rather than any great love for Labour and its policies: there is not much difference between his popularity ratings and Rishi Sunak’s, and only around 40% of voters think the Labour Party has the nation’s best interests at heart.

This may not matter if Starmer only has to fight the Conservatives, but as he shores up the centre, he is at risk of leaving the party’s Left flank vulnerable to the sort of populist insurgency the Tories have been dealing with for a decade. Labour is headed to power, like the Tories 10 or so years ago, with a centrist vision that leaves their more demanding supporters wanting more.

And so, a populist insurgency today is far more likely to take place on the Left than the Right. This isn’t too surprising: in the current political climate, a party made up of largely disgruntled Tories would struggle to establish a new brand, would still be tainted by an association with the current administration’s failings, and would struggle to pick votes from the Left, where about half the electorate now sits. Equally, it would not enjoy the policy influence that Ukip had in its heyday, when along with the Brexit Party it could knock off five or so points from the Tories’ polling.

Through the 2010s, this meant the difference between being in Downing Street or in opposition. As a result, the Tories were forced to keep them sweet by offering concessions, most obviously the EU referendum. But this kind of strategy would not work today. Given their dire performance in the polls, the Tories are likely to be defeated in the next election regardless of whether they lose votes to the Right. So, even if they do make concessions to an insurgent party, they will be in no position to enact them. Moreover, the Tories will be wary of any Right-wing coalition that might scare off moderate voters in the Lib Dem marginal seats in the south and east of England. In other words, now is evidently not the time for another Right-wing insurgency.

The situation on the Left, however, is very different. To form a government, Labour needs to win big and win across the country: an almost unprecedented electoral task. A Leftist party — perhaps drawn from a few disgruntled MPs, outrider commentators and a celebrity or two — picking up between 5-10% of the vote could cause a huge amount of damage without even winning any seats, especially if it gave the Tories the upper hand in some of the tightest marginals. In this instance, Starmer would be forced onto a civil war footing.

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Moreover, there is a clear ideological gap for the Leftist insurgency to occupy. Starmer’s weakness is that on crime, on culture, on social issues and even on economics he is cautious about leaning into populist ideas. Not wanting to scare potential supporters, he talks little of nationalisation, seems sometimes beholden to identity politics and is squeamish about things such as reducing immigration to protect workers. But when it comes to economics, a large proportion of voters sit to the Left of Labour, especially Starmer’s version of it.

If one dares to look beyond Rachel Reeves’s sensible economic credentials, there is real scope for more radical economic policies to capture the public imagination, from ramping up tax rates to imposing rent controls. There is currently mass support for the nationalisation of energy — something that Labour has been careful to step back from — as well as for nationalising trains and water supply. A clear majority of British voters don’t think the rich pay enough tax, and so a cost-of-living response that embraces some form of Universal Basic Income or increases taxes on the very richest would also go down well. Starmer, who knows he must appeal to the middle ground, won’t dare to go down this path — but a firebrand might.

All of which might start to sound a little like Corbynism rehashed, but the difference is that any successful Left-wing populist movement would have to be rooted in a patriotic vision that reflects the views of the British people. It could not be on the side of Stop the War or identity politics but would fly the flag and sing the national anthem. The new party would also embrace the Leftish vision of leaving the EU that appealed to many Brexiteers in left-behind regions: strengthening worker protections, for example, would be a popular policy with even Tory voters opposed to things such as zero-hours contracts and fire and rehire. It could also take a tough, Left-wing stance on crime and immigration, wresting these from the Right by portraying them as issues which protect the poorest.

Could the British Left learn from their European counterparts? Across the Continent, insurgent Leftists have recently achieved success by capitalising on the failure of both Right and Left and focusing instead on populist demands. Support for the centre-Left party Syriza surged in Greece after the financial crisis thanks to their anti-neoliberal, anti-globalist rhetoric; in Spain, while Podemos emerged as an anti-establishment option with Left-wing economics. Though these parties have now started to wane — Syriza trailed nearly 23 points behind the conservative New Democracy party in the country’s elections — this is no reason to discount their initial success (if anything, it’s a lesson in what happens once they start to stray from their initial pledges). A British Left-populist party could follow their example, first by developing a popular alternative to the old-Left establishment, and then by broadening their appeal towards “big-tent” populism.

Of course, electoral success would be harder to replicate here because of our first-past-the-post system — but it’s far from impossible. At the very least, a new party could introduce itself to voters in next year’s general elections, and seek to capitalise on their results in 2025’s locals. There are lots on the Left who seem alienated from Starmer’s centrism, especially those who espoused a sort of soft Corbynism. None yet seem committed to forming a new party, but it might serve them better in the short term than trying to wrestle the levers of Labour from him.

Forming a Left-wing populist party would not be easy. It would face the same hurdles as any other new party — finding the funds, the supporters and the platform to get off the ground. Equally, it would have to find a way to delicately navigate policy traps that the Left has long struggled with, particularly surrounding the issues of immigration and social liberalism. But that doesn’t make it impossible.

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Farage and the various parties he led achieved their goal on Brexit because they parasitically latched onto the power of the Tories. Now that host is exhausted, but there is space for a Leftist visionary to take advantage of the rising Labour party. After all, the Conservatives won in 2019 by targeting Leftish voters who had grown tired of Labour, galvanising them both around Brexit and a more interventionist economy. This fell flat in government, but showed how populism could reach new electoral coalitions — especially in disenchanted regions. Arguably, the SNP and Plaid Cymru have already succeeded in advancing some form of Left-wing populism, albeit framed around civic nationalism.

In a time of great political flux, where the main parties have been untethered from popular opinion, the opportunity for radical Left-wing thought has always existed. So far, it is unclear who will seize it, but that doesn’t mean the conditions aren’t ripe for an insurgency. Politics can often act as a pendulum, and while Labour delights in the decline of Britain’s Right, they would do well to keep an eye on the rebirth of the Left.

The Tory Tribune of the Plebs is there to talk “common sense”; to say those things which connect with a section of the electorate most politicians would like to ignore. Teddy Taylor was one. An MP first in Glasgow and then Southend, he would use his prominence in parliament to call for the return of the birch. Geoffrey Dickens was another, a former boxer who campaigned to ban teddy bears and suggested homosexuality be criminalised to stop the spread of Aids. Both also, naturally, tried to bring back hanging. Theirs is a blokey, nuance-free politics, whereby villains get what they deserve, the sick filth is banned, and honest people live in peace. Lee Anderson has established himself as their heir.

Anderson is never short of things to say. He calls himself “30p Lee” for his pronouncements on how easy it should be for poorer households to live on a budget. He’s hawkish on crime and immigration, and an advanced fighter in every aspect of the culture war — even boycotting England for “taking the knee”. Perhaps inevitably, an interview emerged last week where he endorsed the death penalty. Since his election in 2019, the MP for Ashfield has established himself as the most well-known of the Red Wall MPs. Across social media, he is loathed by his opponents as well as the more liberal, cosmopolitan wing of the Conservatives. He probably doesn’t care that much, buoyed by the supporters who seem to adore him. Some call him the most controversial man in parliament, others a genuine voice of the people. Either way, he’s made his mark.

Anderson, like Taylor, Dickens and others before him, is pugnacious and uncaring for niceties. Unlike them, however, he has been able to harness social media to boost his profile even further. Whereas the firebrands of the Seventies and Eighties had to wait for a journalist to call them, Anderson has shown he can make himself the party’s main character in just a tweet. Twitter has boosted his profile and advanced his political career — crowned last week by his promotion to Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Not bad, for someone who was a Labour councillor until 2018.

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There is, of course, a a cynical edge to all this. Once, MPs commanded attention on the streets and in the broadsheets, either as a fighter in their constituency or an intellectual, policy-minded-grandee. Today, however, it’s all in the retweets and social media. The most well-known MPs, certainly beyond the front benches, have a carefully curated online presence. Dehenna Davison TikToks herself into being the “cool” Tory MP. Stella Creasy lip-syncs on Instagram after voting to ban protests around abortion clinics. Anderson’s a social media star in the same vein — curating a larger-than-life version of himself to stand out among his colleagues. It’s not that he doesn’t believe what he says, but he chooses to express it in the most performative way possible.

This does have its uses: Anderson occupies a useful niche, both for himself and the party. Tory MPs generally sit to the Left of their voters on most social issues, including crime. Many of the party’s rank and file support the death penalty. Around a third of voters do too, with that number increasing with more specific questions, such as when it comes to terrorists or murderous paedophiles. It’s a faction the Tories are never actually going to yield to, but that they want to keep inside the political tent. These are older, poorer voters — exactly the demographics the Tories are increasingly reliant on. Figures such as Anderson give them some red meat without really changing anything.

But is this useful to the party in the long term? On current predictions, Anderson will struggle to save his seat at the next election. It probably won’t even be close, and he may well slump to third behind the local Ashfield Independents. The picture is so bleak for the Tories, his defeat will be just a footnote as more famous faces fall and far bigger majorities are overturned. A reversion to the meanness of hang’em and flog’em policies won’t do much to stem this.

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Serving him up as antidote to Sunak’s gloss is far from guaranteed to work either. As much as the party wants to appeal to an authoritarian base, its electoral coalition is much broader than many assume, and it’s hard to embrace it without pushing others out the other side. Many Tory voters see the death penalty as abhorrent and are largely conciliatory about immigration and poverty. About a quarter of Conservative voters oppose the Rwanda scheme, for example, while about half think it is “difficult” for the poor to raise their incomes.

Rather than win them over, Anderson’s approach could alienate these voters, especially in his more outlandish moments. He was previously suspended from Labour when his action to block Travellers from a field led to a charge of fly-tipping, and his parliamentary comments on Gypsies have also drawn strong criticism. Elsewhere, Private Eye has reported on his links to those who flirt with the far-Right, and his tussles with journalists are far from edifying. The praise he garners from “common-sense” Tories will be matched by dislike from The Sensibles. In the southeast, where the Tories are struggling to hold on to the professional classes, Anderson is unlikely to shore up anything.

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Even in the Red Wall, it’s wrong to assume that everyone is a budding “30p Lee”. These areas were originally defined as being demographically Tory when it came to wealth and age profiles but alienated from the party culturally, largely because of Thatcherism. They are more varied in their outlook than most would admit. You might be able to pick up a street house for £70,000, but many of Lee’s voters will sit in comfortable detached houses with mid-six-figure asking prices. They’ve probably paid them off and are receiving generous pensions. The Tory success in these northern seats is linked to Brexit, but is driven by many of their traditional political factors.

Yet even if the Tories are wiped out, the party will always have its Andersons — just as Labour will always be a home for the hard Left. Where else are they to go? But this is where the Conservatives should take care. When the Conservatives have been successful, it’s been because they have been able to knit together the shy Tories, the quiet Tories and the wet Tories, along with the broad-chested, pugilistic tribune archetype. Taylor and Dickens, after all, were always on the outside of the party establishment, more tolerated than loved. As Labour learnt with Corbyn, giving too much prominence to the outliers alienates far more voters than it brings in — and, after their inevitable electoral failure, they tend to leave chaos in their wake.

Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, this makes it even harder to establish his programme for government. Sunak’s place as leader is weak in an unprecedented way. Not only are there three former prime ministers on his backbenches, but two of them, (Truss and Johnson) never had their falling popularity confirmed by a bad election. This makes them, and their ideas, more potent than any former leader roundly ousted by the public. Moreover, neither seems willing to slide quietly into the obscurity of the speaking circuit.

Truss sees herself as the party’s Cassandra. She thinks her prophecies of the need for deregulation and growth were right, but wrongly ignored. She has a group of supporters who think the chaos of implementation should not hamper the salience of her suggestions. The so-called “ginger group” are trying to seize the intellectual levers of the party, ready for another go at the top, and want to chart a course of economic liberalism, deregulation and growth.

On Sunak’s other flank sit the continuity-Johnsonites. What they believe is a little hard to ascertain. Boris made his way through the party by promising every faction he was, deep down, one of them. He was, oddly enough, like the errant husband who tells his wife he is staying and his mistress he is divorcing for her — with both believing the other is the fool. The Johnsonites show little intellectual purity but are bound in personal loyalty to their man. A few dozen are even plotting his return.

For them, only Boris can arrest the party’s polling nosedive; only Boris can hold onto the Red Wall and the Tory seats of the south-east. The fall in polling in the first half of 2022 is ignored, and so, too, the by-election defeats that triggered the vote of confidence in the then PM, or even the contradictory threat that Johnson, the one-man electoral magic, will give up his challenge to Sunak if he’s allowed to chicken-run to a safer seat than his current Uxbridge. It’s more about faith than facts.

Taken together, these tribes present a problem for Sunak, but not a fatal one. Both his predecessors were popular with the membership and both have a parliamentary faction that is big enough to disrupt but not destroy his premiership. In any case, it’s unclear if either has the appetite to bring him down: Truss blew her shot and lacks an obvious successor, and Johnson pulled up at the first fence of the recent leadership contest. What they can do is snipe and plot.

Tory leaders have always faced grumbling. Heath was barracked by the Right-wing Monday Club and the development of the economically liberal faction that would become the Thatcherites. A decade later, Mrs Thatcher had to face down her Wets, whose spiritual leader became the ageing Earl of Stockton, Harold Macmillan, who fired softly-spoken broadsides against her embrace of “the Manchester School” and rejection of old Tory patrician ideals. Yet in these eras, there was sufficient deference to the leader, and the prime minister had sufficient strength, to lead an alternative narrative. Sunak seems to lack this.

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Where Boris could be a chimaera that every faction could see themselves in, Sunak is the opposite. He is a Brexiteer, a true, pre-2016 believer, who has the air of Remain about him. He’s an MBA touting hedge-fundie and Goldman Sachs man who is attacked as a socialist. He was Boris’ side-kick in the Treasury for the high-spending, minimum wage boosting, pre-Covid budget, yet is seen as an austerity-monger. His Covid spending was hugely popular inside and outside the party at the time, but now no one seems to praise him for it. Even his popularity in parliament seems to be by default rather than dedication. He has ascended to the top of politics despite an incongruent lack of political appeal.

The steady managerialism which won him the job makes it hard to pull together a narrative. Boris won the party over with his showmanship, Truss courted the members with a steely determination to implement her beliefs. Both largely fell for the same reasons. With Sunak, everything seems neatly totted up, but it’s a whole that is lesser than the sum of its parts. There is nothing irresistible about his leadership — and so you can see how it will be resisted. Probably not directly, but he will have to work hard for the party to steer his programme through the Commons with these factions in play.

He’ll probably get the chance to do this. The rabble-rousers will make the water choppy, but not prevent him from steering through it. Their minds are on what comes after. The smarter, less party-line-taking MPs are accepting that the game is up and opposition beckons. They know this will be followed by a leadership election and a period of party soul-searching, so they are getting their ideas formed early. Both the Trussketeers and the Johnsonians seem to have this period as their real target.

The problem is that the triumph of ideas in the next term might simply be decided by the rate of decline in the Tories in this one. Few on the Right seem to understand how catastrophic the next election could be. On current polling trends, the party could be reduced to fewer than 150 MPs. While such a rout instinctively feels impossible, so too did the collapse of the Lib Dems and Scottish Labour in 2015 — even when all the data pointed to it.

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Just because something is unprecedented does not mean it is impossible. Mid-term polling tends to narrow as governments approach general elections, but it is not an automatic process. With the economic outlook for this year looking gloomy, industrial relations worsening, and another bad winter for the NHS between now and polling day, there’s as much chance of a Tory rout as a revival.

Should this come, it adds an interesting gloss to all this infighting and positioning. The next leadership election will be largely decided by the Tories in Parliament after the next polling day. If a wipe-out hits, that caucus looks very different. Many of the frontbench could be gone, Truss’ protégé Simon Clarke could be handed his electoral P45, and even Boris could be kicked out without a new seat. Even if they spend the next 18 months floating ideas and launching papers, the new direction of the Tory Party will largely be decided by who is left clinging to the wreckage when the electoral tsunami has swept through.

At that point, the factions will seek to differentiate themselves from Sunak’s programme. Whether it is continuity Truss or the Johnsonian cabal, they are likely to be noisy. Other factions will also emerge — Priti Patel is reportedly working with the members, and is allied with the new Conservative Democracy Organisation that seeks to empower them.

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By John Oxley

There are two ways of looking at the current turbulence. Either discipline is collapsing into fractiousness, or the party is genuinely trying to figure out its next direction. Some MPs will be pure of heart, others entirely self-centred. Many will be in the middle, anxiously looking at their constituency prospects. For Sunak the motives matter little. His agenda will be disrupted by each flexing their brains and their numbers in parliamentary rebellions, even if his premiership endures.

It’s arguable that the Tory Party malaise has its ultimate roots in the failure to find a footing after 1997. It groped around for ideas until the financial crisis gave it the opportunity to return to government. The party’s most distinct theme for that era, its euroscepticism, was something leaders largely tolerated rather than embraced. The result was a party which seemed to stand for little beyond winning elections. There is a risk that soon it won’t even have that.

This does all point to a broader problem for the Right. The Conservative Party has maintained conservatism in one form or another for two centuries. If it is not able to put together a convincing and coherent platform that is both principled and popular, it is unlikely anyone else will be able to do it. When both the affluent and the left-behind feel comfortable voting Labour, it becomes questionable whether conservatism itself can survive.

This distortion dates back to 2009 and the expenses scandal, when the perception of the political class shifted overnight. No longer were MPs insincere spinners who occasionally slipped into outright dishonesty, but a parasitic body only out for themselves. The presumption became that they were venal until proved otherwise. But the scandal itself swiftly became a melange of accusations which obscured the reality of the situation.

Lines were blurred between those who made generous claims within both the spirit and letter of the law, those who ruthlessly exploited every loophole, and those who committed wholescale fraud. MPs such as Denis MacShane, jailed for falsifying documents, were spoken of in the same breath as those who had put in entirely lawful applications for fripperies that fell within the rules. It’s unclear whether the most infamous claim of the period, Sir Peter Viggers’s duck house, was even ever paid out.

In the wake of the scandal, MPs’ expenses became the go-to for cheap, anti-political point scoring. Social media accounts regularly pop up criticising MPs for their claims without digging into the detail. Large headline figures are quoted, without recognising this usually includes the MP’s parliamentary staff and constituency offices. Compared with the previous system, parliamentarians find it very hard to pack their pay cheque from official coffers.

At the same time, a second front has opened up against MPs — around second jobs, donations and lobbying. This was renewed this week with the Westminster Accounts, a visually spectacular representation of the funding MPs have received, both for their work for outside interests and as donations to their campaigns and offices. There were headline-catching figures and a strong implication that either MPs were lining their pockets when they should have been tending to the public, or were selling their influence to the highest bidder — or both.

Behind the figures, however, the reality of the scandal seems pretty banal. First, the scale of the money involved was pretty small. The reports confirmed that around £180 million had been paid to MPs and their campaigns in the lifecycle of this parliament. If this is democracy for sale, it is going pretty cheaply. In the US midterms, political funding hit $16.7 billion for federal races alone, with about half of that again spent on local races. Indeed, buying our entire legislature seems to be cheaper than assembling a Premier League-winning side.

This absence of money points to another factor of the so-called scandal — that it is hard to spot where the bought influence has returned very much. Even where the lobbying rules have been broken, the impact seems unclear. Andrew Bridgen, who lost the Tory whip yesterday after comparing the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust, was also suspended from the House this week for breaches around lobbying regulations after he wrote to ministers on behalf of a local company which gave him donations of cash. While our MPs should be purer than the driven snow on these matters, there appears no suggestion that his letters actually obtained any benefit for the company.

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The same is true of the Owen Paterson scandal. In 2021, the MP was first suspended then resigned his seat after breaching rules around donations from Randox, the healthcare company, and Lynn’s Country Foods. Like Bridgen, his “egregious case of paid advocacy” involved writing to ministers. Again, it remains unclear if the companies concerned achieved anything from his actions.

It is, of course, wrong for parliamentarians to sell their influence and access, and even the suggestion of impropriety should be dealt with appropriately. Yet both these incidents seem to suggest that, rather than a corruption-ridden system, we have one where even paid influence has little impact and the infractions come to light quickly. One might speculate that if our system were corrupt, there would be a bit more money in it.

The reality seems that MPs are far more swayed by political arguments than financial incentives. Our parliamentarians sign up to plenty of bad laws or myopic campaigns because they look politically appealing. Often, they take the side where the money isn’t but the votes are. If they were truly on the make, we probably wouldn’t have a housing crisis — but in most cases, a thousand Nimby votes speak louder than the cash the property industry could lavish on them.

Indeed, the real graft seems to be away from Westminster. In 2021, a government inspection of Liverpool City Council found evidence of repeated incompetence and corruption. Last year, in Nottingham, six councillors were arrested for fraud and remain under investigation. In Newham, staff members have been implicated in a £9m fraud involving social and housing and road repairs, while Tower Hamlets has become a byword for electoral malpractice.

While parliament should always be under scrutiny, it is arguable that the suspicion levelled at our MPs exacerbates a wider problem — many of them just aren’t that good. The expenses scandal ushered in a new era of hostility towards parliamentarians, which was turbocharged by the rise of social media. Few sensible people would submit themselves to such hostility.

At the same time, the party selection procedures seem to struggle to find and prioritise effective parliamentarians. Snap elections have seen candidates rushed through who turned out to be successful but wholly unsuitable — Imran Ahmad Khan for the Tories, for example, subsequently convicted of historic sex offences, or the former Labour (now independent) MP Claudia Webbe, who was convicted of harassment. Beyond that, there has been a drift towards more local candidates and more ideologically pure ones — narrowing the pool yet more without really filtering for quality.

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Even within these constraints, the selection processes tend to favour the sharp-elbowed self-aggrandising. The result is a legislature that seems replete with odd characters of dubious skills. Andrew Bridgen has been punished for lobbying offences and his strange embrace of Covid vaccination conspiracies, but he was also found by a judge to have lied in court proceedings during a family dispute. He is not simply lining his pockets, but chaotic in a multitude of directions.

The trouble is, he’s not the only one. There’s a cloud of madness over Westminster which finds its outlet in a variety of ways. Some shill for cranks and vile regimes (whether for money or for free), while others are involved in sexual impropriety (some public, much not but widely whispered about) or are prone to Twitter spats with the public.

There is no argument that our MPs shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny, but the obsession with their financial dealings obscures a bigger picture. Very few are openly venal. Most would earn a better living outside of politics than inside it, and MPs often seem just as swayed by charities and local campaigns than by rapacious corporate interests. Equally, no one really seems to have identified much of a difference in performance between those MPs with second jobs (or even ministers) and those who dedicate themselves full-time to constituents.

But in the rush to pillory MPs for lining their pockets, it feels we might be missing something else. Our system is not riven with corruption, but with inadequates. While many MPs are dedicated and insightful, our parliament is packed with also-rans, has-beens and never-will-bes. It leads to poor debate, poor law-making, and, ultimately, poor government. It’s hard to convey in fancy charts, but we should be perhaps more concerned about the ability of our politicians than some of their outside interests.

Like the Tories, the GOP go into 2023 electorally bruised. Their embrace of populism has not proved popular enough to sustain victory, but instead left them sullied by association with men who largely co-opted them for vehicles of their own ambition. Neither party seems capable of sating their supporters’ desires on key issues, such as immigration, but have adopted rhetoric that scares off their more centrist supporters. Equally, they are finding their support in diminishing demographics — older, whiter, and less well-educated than the rest of the population.

Both parties also find themselves with an unclear message. Over the past decade, the Tories have struggled to find a defining narrative beyond wanting to win. They have tried austerity, Brexit, levelling up, tax cuts and austerity again, yet have still ended up with an economy devoid of growth and stagnating wages. They have waged a half-interested culture war but largely become socially progressive. Even on immigration, their professed conservatism has resolved into higher rates. They have chased focus groups and polls until they have come out of the rabbit hole believing in nothing.

The Republican Party has the same problem, but in an even more chaotic form. The neocon Christianity of the Bush years gave rise to the Tea Party which eventually spiralled into the Right-wing populism Trump harnessed. Now moving even more quickly, the American Right largely seems to be made up of an assortment of “own the libs at all costs” reactionaries. Still struggling to digest the impact of the TV-star president, ratings and attention are their driving force. There is little narrative to what they discuss, little thought — just knee-jerk responses to whatever the Democrats propose. Everything else seems more co-opted than born of conviction.

In 2023, the parties will have to find a way past this, a way to consolidate before the next electoral test. Instinctively, it feels it could be harder for the Tories. They are in government, dealing with the daily challenges that it throws up. With the economy in crisis, public services falling apart, and a war in Europe continuing, these will not be insignificant. After a dozen years in power, they are exhausted, emotionally, and intellectually, with many of their MPs already checked out. Those who remain are too focused on surviving to think of thriving. Party unity is shot, while internal bickering is rampant.

If the party is to succeed, perhaps even survive, beyond the next 18 months, the work has to begin now. The Conservatives need to find a compelling case for their own existence, beyond relying on the votes of older retirees. They need to find big answers to the practical issues the under-50s face, as well as a way to argue for conservative principles without sounding like an old man wailing at a cloud.

None of these issues is beyond the scope of conservatism. The only reason it should fall into decline is a lack of ardour and applied thinking. After all, young people should be more economically Right-wing than ever. Far more want a slice of prosperity than to tear it down. They bridle at stagnant wages and rising prices, but have embraced “side hustles”, investing and entrepreneurialism. In this sense, they are conservatives, even if they don’t know it. The Tories would do well to explain why.

On the climate, the Right can be the party of technological development and conservation, as opposed to the grim self-denial of the progressive degrowthers. A vision of nuclear power stations, replanted forests and efficient urban density is far more appealing than eating bugs and living in pods. It can bring with it an expansive view of the family, one that sees gay marriage as a win for tradition rather than a kick against it.

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Meanwhile, faced with the rising tide of divisive identity politics, both the GOP and the Conservatives could articulate a positive view of integrated communities, seizing on some of the conservative instincts of minority groups. They could acknowledge concerns about immigration with policies that are discerning while still encouraging economic growth, and have at their heart integration rather than separation. The Right gets caught out when it sees its values on economics and culture as antagonistic, rather than seeing both entwined in a sense of national stewardship. This is where the foundations of continuity and renewal can be laid.

In essence, both the American and British Right are hamstrung by the different iterations of the same problem: the Tories and GOP are devoid of ideas, empty of vision, but adept at election campaigning. This has made them susceptible to demagogues such as Trump and Johnson, both of whom were only loosely conservative in their hearts. It has also left them exposed as electoral trends have shifted. Indeed, both parties now find themselves languishing among emerging electoral groups. Not only are the educated and ethnic minorities less likely to support them, but these are also a growing portion of the electorate. This means that a concentration in whiter, older, suburban and rural fringe votes is becoming more pronounced for both parties and becoming a less sure-fire route to success.

And yet, British and American conservatives are used to regeneration. They have enjoyed success across different eras and political landscapes, adapting as they go. The lack of ideological dogmatism on the Right lends itself to effective pivots, while a belief in the value of the individual often allows them to listen to voters better than ideologues. In the Fifties, both parties bounced back from defeats by embracing a tempered version of their opponent’s economic reforms, rather than rejecting them outright, while both Thatcher and Reagan managed to sell their vision for prosperity to the ordinary voters and elites alike.

But past performance is no guarantee of future success. Where the parties have fallen into the doldrums and been beset by scandals, they have found a reanimating purpose.  After the debacle of Nixon, the Republicans found Reagan. In the decline of the Seventies, the Tories found Thatcher. They corrected their fall not by repeating the same things more loudly, but by innovating on a platform they believed in and could sell to voters.

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Can the Tories survive a Right-wing insurgency?

By John Oxley

2023 will be the year where the Right decides if it can do this once more: by finding a narrative that engages with the modern world and appeals to a modern electorate; by finding ideas beyond those led by polling and focus groups; and by shedding the chaos and dishonesty of some of its recent incarnations. Without an injection of ideas, conservatism will flail and founder. The Right has sustained itself on “whatever gets us elected”, but has now driven itself into a corner built on voting blocs where the maths no longer works.

Conservatism revolves around duty, service, community, and prosperity. Its advocates succeeded in the past by finding 19th and 20th-century ways to apply them to 19th and 20^th-century problems. Macmillan and Thatcher did not spend their premierships talking about Empire Preference, nor did Eisenhower and Reagan simply ape the politics of the Gilded Age — they saw new challenges and attempted new ideas. If their successors are to avoid ceding the field to the Left, they must do the same.

The election year of 2024 could push Tories and Republicans out of power until the end of the decade. Their failure to generate a convincing case for survival could do the same. So, 2023 will be marked with a key test — whether either party can shed the shouty charlatans and hollow men and find some answers which connect with people. If not, it will be another year of wailing while the tectonic plates shift against them.

In their own ways, both David Cameron and Theresa May were undone by this threat from the Right. The success of Ukip, taking more than a quarter of the vote in the 2014 European Elections, forced Cameron into pledging an EU referendum at the following general election — a move which arguably delivered him a majority but saw his premiership unravel once he lost the ensuing vote. Then, after the following European election, the Brexit Party’s 30% share accelerated the end of May’s time in office. In 2024, another strong showing could inflict even greater damage on the Tories. For a decade, the Tories have struggled to fully reconcile with their Right wing, leaving the door open to insurgents.

Reform UK, like the Brexit Party (technically the same beast by a different name) and Ukip, looks to take votes from the populist end of the Tory spectrum. As a rule of thumb, around two-thirds of their supporters are former Tories; the rest are largely from the Eurosceptic Left. On that basis, polling at around 10% suggests they’ve gained about 6 points off the Tories, though it could be higher as some have already made the Lab-Ukip-Con journey.

This probably isn’t enough to win any seats. Our first-past-the-post system continues to work against new parties, and Reform UK’s support seems spread across too many areas to carry them into parliament. Where they are concentrated, it tends to be in heavily Tory areas where a massive swing would be needed. So far, this has eluded the Right-wing challengers. The Brexit Party didn’t make much of a dent in 2019 (perhaps because of the Tories’ embrace of Brexit) and Nigel Farage failed in every attempt to get into parliament for Ukip. Neither party has won a seat in a general election but have gained votes by grappling with issues such as immigration and Brexit where the Tories have often looked weak.

Yet this doesn’t mean the threat to the Tories is over. With a 6% swing against them, losing votes to Reform UK could mean the difference between holding on and being swept away in a bunch of key constituencies. There are a dozen or so seats on Labour’s target list where a strong showing from Reform could help edge out the Tories — places such as Kettering or Thanet North where even a good night for Labour might fall short, but where losing a couple of percentage points to Reform would be costly.

These seats in particular point to an interesting electoral pattern. They are areas not simply where old industries have died away, but old patterns of life have too. They’ve aged as towns, with the young and ambitious moving away to universities and not returning. They have born some of the brunt of austerity and feel alienated on more cultural issues such as immigration. With these shifts, older voting habits have splintered, with Labour seeming too metropolitan and the Conservatives too economically liberal. Yet the major parties have only occasionally spoken for them, while Farage has often embraced their narrative.

The return of Reform also presents a strategic problem for Sunak. The Conservative success of 2019 sits on an odd electoral coalition, built as much from anti-Corbynism as the Vote Leave success. It brought together the sort of populist Brexiteer voters who might be tempted by Reform as well as more centrist Remain-leaning voters who held their nose to keep out a radical Labour government. Now the party must be selective about who it keeps in the tent and who it chooses to retreat from: in the next election, the Tory party will face a fight on all fronts.

Many of those already fed up with Boris will be far more relaxed about letting Starmer’s Labour in than Corbyn’s. These are the type of voters who already switched to Lib Dem in Chesham and in North Shropshire, and could do the same across the Home Counties. They are unlikely to be swayed by another populist turn from the Tories. Yet abandoning the cry of “more Brexit, more police, more spending” risks sending other key voters into the arms of Reform. It’s a narrow path to the best possible outcome, a result of the Tories inability to present as truly centrist or truly Rightist over the last few years.

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At the same time, the decisiveness of Reform is not guaranteed. The party is a strange beast — not even a party in the truest sense, but a registered company with centralised control. It had been a Farage vehicle, but is now led by Richard Tice, a property investor turned political agitator. It lacks much internal coherence, and often seems to be chasing social media clicks more than votes.

Since Brexit, it has struggled to pin down either a political philosophy or a policy platform. Instead, it lurches between various reactionary statements, often disagreeing with itself. It seems to have no real sense of who its target voters are or what they really want. It has continued to stoke concern about a frustrated or stolen Brexit, but struggles to convey the complex policy details this entails when the Tories so cleanly marketed leaving the EU as “done”. Elsewhere, it generally opposed Covid lockdowns and has been sceptical of vaccines — an odd line for populists to take when both measures were widely popular, especially with the older, authoritarian demographic who tended to support Brexit. Equally, the party’s attack on Tory taxes sits uneasily with their likely voters, who tend to favour higher spending. More often than not, Reform gives the impression it is driven by populists who fail to understand what is popular.

The migrant crisis is perhaps where they are closest to the national mood, but still they have failed to translate this into popular success. Farage and co. are happy to film themselves on Dover beaches being outraged by the arriving boats yet have no real suggestions beyond bedding in behind the Government’s Rwanda plan. Even more than the Tories, they seem short of ideas. This has shown through in recent electoral performances. Reform have barely made a dent in any of the recent by-elections. In December last year, Tice took 6% of the vote in Bexley, but that was a big name standing in a heavily Tory seat. This year, candidates have failed to score above 3%, and in Tiverton, a Tory seat lost to the Lib Dems, they racked up fewer than 500 votes.

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All this points to the other weakness of Reform: a real lack of ground game. It’s not a mass-member organisation — it lacks local branches and councillors and appears to have minimal central campaigning abilities. Hard work on the doorstep is essential for turning voter intentions into crosses on ballot boxes. It is hard to see how Reform will be able to do this effectively. If they get this wrong, it could be a big get-out-of-jail-free card for the Tories. If they get it right, it could pin down Conservative resources in seats they would normally go easy in.

But this is all a matter for the next election — in the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the Reform surge will hold. It depends on whether Farage and Tice are able to settle on a platform beyond Brexit to sustain it, and whether that appeals to enough people. Reform’s impact also depends on how the Tory Party reacts, and whether they are able to hold their Right flank without ceding more ground in the centre. At best, a resurgent Right-wing populist party will be a diversion for Conservative strategists; at worst, it will be the final part of an electoral encirclement. And looking at the most recent multi-regression polling, released yesterday, an effective showing from Reform might not win seats but could cost the Conservatives dozens.

And yet, it’s probably more likely the threat from the Right will peter out rather than solidify. Reform seems based on unsteady ground and hasn’t found a way to deliver the electoral shock that Ukip and the Brexit Party did before. How it plays out will be the result of both parties’ electoral deftness, but strikingly little to do with Labour.

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The Tories are fleeing a sinking ship

By John Oxley

The entire outcome in 2024 perhaps rests on whom the Tories choose to alienate. All through their time in government, the party has found a way to weave together different narratives, holding together the suburban, settled and affluent — while picking up more precarious voters in the neglected North and Midlands. Now those voters have pulled apart even more, leaving the Conservative Party in the middle.

The Tories appear to be finding a narrative to ride through the country’s increasing divergence between geographies and age cohorts. So far, however, they have failed to find an answer for Britain’s deeper problems. Left-behind regions still feel left behind; many of the voters there do too. For a while, the Conservatives were able to appeal to them, largely through the lens of Brexit. Without that draw, those voters who have been abandoned first by Labour and then by the Tories may yet fall to Reform.

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It’s hard to shake the feeling of parliamentary necrosis within the Tory party. In the last few weeks, around a dozen MPs have indicated they will be stepping down at the next election. The party is decaying before our eyes.

At every election, a few old faces and former big-wigs shuffle off the stage, but what is striking now is the youth and vigour of those announcing their early exit. Chloe Smith, Chris Skidmore, and Andrew Percy were Bright Young Things of the Cameron era and are still barely into their forties. William Wragg, elected in 2015, is 34, while Dehenna Davison, the breakout starlet of the Red Wall, is only 29. This is not the stream of usual retirements, but an exodus of some of the party’s most promising hopes for the future.

Equally, it seems like those who could form the backbone of an opposition cabinet are mulling their options. Though none has explicitly handed in their badge, Matt Hancock’s appearance on I’m A Celebrity suggests that he will be standing down, having irritated both the whips and his local association by spending a fortnight chowing down on kangaroo penis rather than attending to their political needs. Michael Gove, despite his renewed interest in housing and Levelling Up, also feels like he is easing his way to retirement.

It’s not hard to see why they might step away. Most of those who have announced they are off represent seats the Tories won on the way back to government and are likely to lose on the way down. For some, this is exacerbated by the proposed boundary changes. Fighting an electoral battle is a gruelling experience, especially when you anticipate losing comprehensively. Even if they do defy the current polling, these MPs would find themselves on the opposition benches for the first time — denied both the chance to chase ministerial briefs and to get stuff done.

The departure of so many young MPs, however, points towards the changing nature of how we see parliament — less of a vocation, more of a career choice. For much of the 20th century, those who went into parliament at a young age stayed in and around politics for life. Harold Macmillan was first elected to parliament in 1924, three decades before he reached the highest office (and more than six before he gave his final speech in the Lords). Churchill’s parliamentary career spanned 64 years, and like Macmillan he found himself losing seats before staging a comeback. On the other side of politics, Attlee served a similar time. Those who only stayed in office a term or two tended to have entered politics late, a nod to public service in their later years.

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By contrast, the trend of youngish MPs returning to private life seems to be increasing. Labour’s opposition period also saw young MPs walking away, whether they were established (David Miliband) or up-and-coming (Tristram Hunt). These departures, like some of the Tory ones, were partly tied to ideological disagreements with their own side and the prospect of a long time in opposition, but also the increasing onerousness of being an MP.

A parliamentary career was once seen as a rather gilded time of public service. It appealed to the bright and young who wanted to change the world, often off the back of early success in private life, and the elder statesmen who fancied some time giving something back. Now it is a far less appealing prospect. Increasingly, constituency workloads have placed more demands on the time of parliamentarians, while social media has exposed them to new levels of abuse. The generosity of the expenses regime has been curtailed, and salaries have lagged compared to the outside world. Though still nearly three times the median wage, an MP’s pay is likely lower than an inner-London headteacher’s, never mind comparable private-sector roles.

As the incumbent party staring into the wilderness, the Tories are going to feel the brunt of this. This will be compounded by the general malaise which haunts the party; its inertia means few will feel that the party is going in their direction, or that the period in opposition will be a brief one. An early, dignified exit might well seem preferable to defeat or a lacklustre term watching Labour enjoy themselves.

This unwinding will only magnify the Conservative Party’s problems. Losing experienced MPs in winnable seats as well as those that go to Labour will increase the damage done. The Tory opposition will lack institutional memory and parliamentary experience. It’s hard to keep the government on its toes when you are still finding your feet in Westminster. Meanwhile, returning MPs will have significant sway over the post-defeat direction of the party. The narrower this group is, the narrower the road becomes.

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This is not just a problem for the party, but for politics too. Poor oppositions allow poor governments to flourish without proper scrutiny. Equally, the longer it takes for the Tory party to be rebuilt (or, indeed, replaced) the more one-sided our politics may remain. It’s essential to have the balance there to hold Labour to account, and to make an active case for Right-of-centre politics. In an era where people are becoming more disillusioned with democracy, the retreat of one party could be dangerous.

In the meantime, rebuilding the parliamentary party will become even more difficult as the party’s popularity diminishes. The Conservatives have always relied on a vanguard of talented wunderkind to shape and lead the party — the post-war intake of 1950 had Heath, Macleod, Maudling (and Powell), while Clarke, Howard and the rest of the Cambridge Mafia sustained the party through the late Eighties and Nineties. Cameron and Osborne led the party back to power while still under 50, and now the mantle has passed to the youthful Sunak. Each generation brought with it a fresh energy to the political problems of the day. Now they seem to be fleeing.

Where the next vanguard comes from is unclear. The Tory vote has collapsed among younger people, with some polls suggesting the party is at single-figure support in the under-50s  The party is especially struggling with the professionals it used to tempt into the parliamentary party. Failing to connect with these voters not only harms the party’s long-term electoral process but narrows the pipelines of potential MPs. At the same time, a party’s ideas are defined by its people, and the fewer young MPs the less it will be connected to the needs of those demographics.

On an individual level, the actions of these MPs are entirely rational. Their political career is likely to be ended at the next election and stepping down now is beneficial for everyone — the party has a chance to select a new candidate well in advance, and the MPs can have the pick of the best jobs they might be offered. They also get to ease away over the next year or so, spending more time with their families after years of what can be a very isolating job.

For the party, however, it feels like a symptom of hastening decline. MPs are drifting away, not even committed to the pretence that they might win. Equally, they seem to show little interest in the rebuilding project and fightback that is likely to be needed. For the rest of this parliament, it will make them harder to control, with little to fear from the games of the whips. Moreover, unless managed well, this lack of optimism will infect the bloodstream of the backbenches, making them more likely to stand down or just check-out.

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As the rot sets in, more MPs will be looking to polish their CVs. Public affairs and lobbying firms will offer handsome remuneration without abusive DMs or Saturday mornings knocking on doors. Matt Hancock will likely try to follow Ed Balls and Michael Portillo into the world of inoffensive TV. It’s hard to blame them, with their lack of enthusiasm matched by many Tory members, activists and voters.

The worrying thing for the party, though, is where the infusion of new, hungry talent might come from. If the necrosis spreads too far, too fast, there will be no recovery. The Conservative Party will decompose — leaving Labour, and Britain’s voters, deprived of any meaningful Opposition.

Of course, there is only one poll that really matters — that on election day. Conservative MPs may look back on 2017, when they held a similar lead over Labour, and think that a few weeks can turn an assured victory into something far closer. They also know that boundary changes, voter ID laws and the balance between rural and urban votes (Labour win populous seats by big margins, Tories sparser ones by smaller numbers) all give them an edge. And yet, most must be polishing their CVs for after polling day.

The Tories’ problems are not transitory. They have been in power for over 12 years and seem out of ideas. Since they took power, wages have stagnated and the economy stalled. The party itself has become beleaguered by scandal and the chaos of this year’s carousel of Prime Ministers and Chancellors. The future looks little better: Hunt’s bread-and-water budget may have steadied the markets and offered some protection to the poorest and pensioners, but there was only pain for average households. Between now and the next election, the country is likely to get poorer. A recession is highly probable, and even popular governments rarely recover from recessions.

With the headwinds against the Tories, there is no sign that Sunak is an expert election-winner. He could not even convince his own party the first time around. The main hope seems to be a Keir Starmer implosion. It’s not impossible, but not something to bet the farm on.

There comes a certain liberation from giving up hope. Letting go of something you are chasing alters your perspective, opening your eyes to wider opportunities. This could happen to the Tories — taking them from trying to eke out electoral advantages to deploying political capital to create difficulties for future Labour governments and opportunities for the country.

For all their problems in the polls, the Conservative Party remains in a strong position in Parliament. It has a sizeable majority and with sufficient internal discipline can get a lot done in the remaining parliamentary time. Rather than thinking about winning the next election, they could run down the clock with measures that will stymie the government that follows them, spreading the ground with political bear traps.

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What Hunt can learn from Truss

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No Tory government has really been in this position before. Where the Conservatives have led the country into an election, they have either had a hope of winning, or like in 1997, had decayed enough to lose their majority. They should pay attention instead to what Labour did: in the dying days of the Brown ministry, the Prime Minister introduced legislative and fiscal measures that he knew would trip up any Tory government. It worked.

The most famous is the 50p tax rate. This was a symbolic move for Labour of limited fiscal impact, whacking a tax on high earners after the financial crisis. The Tories have never been able to fully repeal it, and their attempt in the mini-Budget was akin to jumping on a grenade. It was not the only sting Labour left behind — the Browne Review was set up so a new government would have to deal with student finance, while measures like winter heating allowance and free buses for over-60s are easy to pass but hard to remove.

There is a range of moves you can pull to hamstring the government that replaces you. In general, they should not be obviously detrimental to the country, but should be things which cause your opponent’s pain, either internally or with the wider country. Some will be things that you ideologically favour but will be hard for your opponents to repeal, even if they want to. Others may be necessary for the public good but are front-loaded with unpopular changes – that only take effect when you are gone. The goal is to do things which cannot be whipped away in the stroke of a pen, but will continue to grate with the next government for all their time in office, eventually becoming bedded in.

The Equality Act offers some opportunity in this. As James McSweeney has argued, the Tories could tweak the Act — by removing certain sections on diversity — to reduce its least conservative effects. This serves up a challenge for Labour, who would struggle to amend it again without opening internal battles they’d rather avoid. A flashpoint for them on the act would be around gender identity, but also on balancing racial and class discrimination concerns. Either the change would stay in place, or it would force Labour into conversation it would rather not have.

Another option would be to push through strike-curbing legislation, such as the Minimum Service Levels Bill. This already has the political effect of pitching Labour an awkward gap between its union backers and the ordinary voters it wants to win back. It would have a harder choice in government — liberalising union laws would be a proactive step not just an opposing one, and subsequent strikes would be Labour’s problem. Getting these measures on the statute books now would prime the trap well.

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Planning reform could be an even more ambitious lure. Moving on this now would give the Tories a chance to shape it in a way they might not have for a decade. Most obviously, the party could skew the plan to hit the inner cities and urban fringe worst, pushing the effects into the seats they will lose anyway. Furthermore, as liberalisation takes time, and constructing even more, the houses would not arrive for a few years — meaning Labour parliamentarians would bear the unpopularity of buildings going up. This may feel unfair, but people forget who originated policies when the effects kick in on your watch; and as the old adage goes, if you are explaining, you are losing. For the Tories, making the Nimbys someone else’s problem could pay dividends.

Another easy win would be to push ahead with devolution deals and enterprise zones, especially in Tory areas. Moving powers away from Westminster to places where your support is stronger is a good way of minimising the effects of a change of power. Done smoothly, the Tories could end up with a figure who can do the things they like while blaming central government for any shortcomings. The Conservatives have obviously suffered from this in Wales, Scotland, London, and Manchester, but could benefit from it in other areas — such as in the Midlands and Teesside — where they do hold sway.

At the same time, while the Tories have already indulged in some long-grass kicking, bumping the reports of social care review until 2025, they could do more with other issues — perhaps a royal commission on criminal justice (promised in the 2019 manifesto) or NHS reform. Each would open a complex issue and force Labour to take decisions that would be controversial with its members, MPs and the public.

Apart from doing this, what choice do the Tories have? This government is struggling and is unlikely to survive the next election. And when you can’t win, it’s time to think about how you make the ground hard to hold. Doing so would require a lot of the party to drop their egos, accept the loss and pull in the same direction — but done right, it could be the way to begin the way back to power.

If Hunt fails to address these, he knows what will happen. The fate of his immediate predecessor still looms large; it’s not even two months since Kwasi Kwarteng made his September statement, a moment that will go down as one of the biggest political calamities in history. The fallout showed clearly that the country’s creditors will not support unbalanced books — and this makes Hunt’s job infinitely trickier.

For all the failings of Truss and Kwarteng’s short reign, their fundamental diagnosis was right: the British economy had been too lethargic for too long. It is an inescapable fact that GDP and real-term wage growth have never recovered their pre-Financial Crisis trajectory. Both as a nation and as individuals, we are much poorer than we could have been, especially compared to some of our European neighbours. Without borrowing, this creates a particular crunch around public spending.

In simple terms, as the economy grows, more money becomes available for public services even if the proportion of tax remains the same. As Liz Truss delighted in putting it, if you increase the size of the pie, the slices get bigger. The problem for Britain is that we have failed to do this, meaning that even to keep services at the same level requires a greater proportion of spending, which must come either from borrowing or taxation.

But with the price of borrowing increasing and the markets averse to unfunded promises, the government is unwilling to commit to more debt-led spending. Hunt, then, faces a stark choice: between protecting services by raising taxes and protecting households by cutting spending. Hunt is likely to chart a course through the middle of both, with a sober budget that both increases personal taxation and reduces public spending. Neither of these is likely to be popular.

It is unclear where any new austerity will come from. “Efficiency savings” have largely failed to materialise and an air of dereliction now hangs about the public realm: NHS appointments are oversubscribed, the police overstretched, and councils cutting back, while staff are demoralised and likely to turn militant if faced with further pay attrition. This has an economic effect but is also a political problem for the Chancellor.

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Austerity was never a popular platform beyond a few evangelists for the small state. It worked to win elections when contrasted with perceived Labour profligacy and an immediate emergency (the 2008 crash), and was focused on those who would rarely vote Tory anyway. Households in the shires can stomach slashing Universal Credit and foreign aid, but do not like it when things they value are cut. A Conservative Chancellor could slice away benefits but would face electoral wrath if they force councils to abandon weekly bin collections. The biggest test of this is, of course, the triple-lock pensions increase, where the beneficiaries are most likely to vote Tory.

The temptation for a Chancellor is therefore to cut the things people cannot really see — long-term expenditure. Proposed infrastructure spending is easier to reduce or cancel because the public do not feel its impact for a decade or so, but this is a false economy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted the folly of failing to build nuclear power or maintain gas storage, while many British cities find their growth stymied by a lack of transport investment. Underinvesting now will only preserve those problems.

In the Eighties, Harold Macmillan lamented that Thatcher’s government saw no difference between income and capital when it came to money coming in, viewing receipts from privatisation as much the same as taxation income. He saw the government as like an old aristocratic family, selling the family assets and living on the receipts day-to-day. Now the party must avoid making the same mistake with expenditure and discriminate between the things which will fuel growth, and which will not — as “Supermac” might put it, you cannot keep buying champagne while cancelling the restoration of the Caravaggio that brings the day-trippers in.

Part of the strength of the Sunak campaign to replace Truss was that he was at home in the world of finance — that he could speak the language and understand the fears of those who lend Britain money. His years in the City should have taught him something else: the difference between streamlining and hamstringing. Cutting spending and restructuring borrowing only adds value if growth is unimpeded.

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And yet, chastened by the mini-budget, Hunt seems poised to revert to the austerity of the first half of the decade. The issue he faces is that without something to stimulate further growth, he is just making a rod for his own, and the country’s back. Like any Tory, he will also find it difficult to navigate around the economic costs of Brexit. At the same time, borrowing more to spend cedes political ground to Labour, who can then outbid the Tories and trap them in their own hypocrisy.

There is, however, one aspect in which the Chancellor can be liberated this Thursday. If he’s smart, he will understand the party has already lost the next election. The drop in polling established by a year of Johnson and accelerated by the Truss debacle offers little chance of resurrection. There should be fewer giveaways for favourite groups, more governing in the national interest. Where normally budgets are padded with electoral quid pro quos, such as nudging up tax allowances or funding for towns in marginal seats, the Tories are on to such a loser this can probably be avoided.

When Hunt comes to the despatch box on Thursday, he will be constricted by the realities of a complex economic crisis and the political decisions that brought us there. Though leaks from Downing Street suggest all manner of changes are on the table, the path to success is narrow. His decisions are fettered, and there’s no shouting “I’m a Chancellor get me out of here”. The question is whether he finds the catalyst for growth, or simply tightens the vice.

Outside Downing Street yesterday, it took Liz Truss just a few minutes to call time on her condensed premiership. But the Conservative Party’s spasm of anger had already erupted. On Wednesday, decades of brewing feuds, petty grievances and polite disagreements exploded into a contraction of chaos. In a few short hours, the Government saw the Home Secretary depart office, scuffles erupt in the lobby, and confusion reign over whether the Chief Whip had resigned or not. Tory MPs began to openly lament the state of the party. Within 24 hours the Prime Minister would fall, the shortest tenure in British history.

It was a dramatic spectacle for the Lobby to feed on and a day and a half of despair for Liz Truss. It was not, however, an unheralded implosion, but rather the culmination of shifting party dynamics over the last few decades. Cameron’s attempt at detoxification, the gamble of the referendum, and the squabbles over Brexit each played a role in pushing to this moment — as did a thousand snubs, slights and overpromotions. This mess took only a few hours to unfold, but it was years in the making.

The Conservative Party has always been an uneasy alliance of unlikely figures. Driven more by the desire to govern than ideology, the party attracts confused and conflicting views and rebrands the resulting contradictions as a “broad church”. Passing electoral trends add new layers onto this, embedding fault lines. The party rubs along reasonably well by focusing on its one shared goal: winning elections. When the possibility of this diminishes, as with a precipitous dip in the polls, the fault lines start to crack. In a land of first-past-the-post, the Right’s broad coalition works. Until it doesn’t.

The current party is perhaps more riven by these divisions than ever in its history. They have been compounded by recent political divisions and the polarisation which occurred within the House and the public at large. With a weak prime minister and the prospect of electoral oblivion, the scene was set for a quake.

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It is tempting to see the split in the Tory party as binary — a matter of Wet vs Dry, of economic liberalism versus a more mid-century paternalism. Yet very few in the party neatly fit this spectrum. In fact, the various Westminster tribes are often a bizarre and competing mix of each. The Thatcherites would usually happily throw state money at their pet projects and would rarely abandon their staunchest supporters to the whims of the market. There’s no real movement in the party to expose farmers to cheaper imports from abroad, for example, and there are many who would free every market but the movement of people.

In the same vein, the Left of the party did little to reject austerity and now pushes for its return, at least where it didn’t impinge on their voters. Benefits and schools seem easier for them to cut than pensions and bin collections. For most, the real north star is whatever motivates the voters and principles often come second to vibe.

Part of the reason for the party’s multi-decade battles over Europe is that it was the only issue that forced them into a binary choice. There was no real nuance when it came to Remain or Leave: it was a simple question with a single answer. This challenged the ability to be all things to all men and forced them to nail their colours to the mast. It also served to cut every faction in two.

Brexit applied a new lens to every internal debate. Leave MPs who pushed for protectionism and an anti-immigration stance suddenly became Dries, while the One Nation tag seemed to stick to Cameroons who had no issues with austerity but largely voted Remain. Moreover, this dividing line became baked into the party machine. While some MPs, most notably Truss, wore their affiliation lightly and skipped from one side to the other, the rest decided to dig in. It no longer mattered if you were a Singapore-on-Thames libertarian or a faith-and-flag protectionist, you shared an enemy. Outside of parliament, too, the members generally saw their new identity and took to it as partisans.

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The conduct of the parliamentary party and respective governments in the aftermath of the referendum made this worse. Theresa May’s ministry failed to either placate or nullify the hard-line Brexiteers, giving them enough space to undermine her attempts to reach a settlement with the EU. Repeated cabinet resignations, rebellions, and plots to oust her aggravated those who supported Remain, while her compromises with the EU angered the ERG and allies.

Seeing the difficulties May had fallen into, Johnson had a direct plan of confrontation with his internal opponents. In an early act of his premiership, he withdrew the whip from those who defied him on Brexit. These were Remainers, but there was also an implicit threat to those on the Right, which ultimately got his deal across the line. From then on, he rewarded loyalty with promotions and treason with political exile — there was no room for conciliation or meritocracy. This, naturally, angered his internal opponents, but he held one trump card, his popularity with the electorate. When that wobbled, there was no shortage of volunteers to act against him.

Whoever became leader after him was due to inherit a soured atmosphere. That Truss edged through with only a third of MPs supporting her did not bode well. In appointing a Cabinet of loyalists, she exacerbated this anger and put a huge wager on things going well. It didn’t. When her mini-budget imploded, and took Tory poll ratings to new lows, her authority sank. The one thing that brought Tories together and kept them civil, winning elections, was gone.

This set the scene for a rapid unravelling. When your polling goes that low, there is a swathe of people who know they have nothing to lose. Their seat will be gone whether they have the whip or not. Equally, all sides think that tacking their way is the solution, and ambitious seniors see it as their chance to audition for the top seat. The clouds gather, and every issue becomes a lightning rod.

When the party is at peace, the nebulous nature of factions makes it easier to manage. People can be nudged into line because they aren’t that wedded to one ideological strain. When it is in free-fall, it makes everyone a potential enemy. That’s why the government picking an argument over fracking was such a terrible idea. The enviro-wets might be already against you, but so too are the MPs who don’t want hydraulic drilling under their constituency. There aren’t enough diehard growthers who will put ugly scenes in their backyard into second place, and seeing you are weak gives other malcontents an opportunity.

In these times you need iron parliamentary discipline, and with a weak leader that is almost impossible to maintain. You end up daring people to defy you, and, on finding they do, you end up in the confusion of whipping and unwhipping a vote. This is embarrassing and intolerable for the people you ask to do it, so you end up losing them too.

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Liz Truss won't unchain Britannia

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At a Cabinet level too, things become impossible to manage. With the arrival of Hunt, the people who were excluded under Boris found their way back to the table. This brought on both a personal and political fight against those they see as the under-talented beneficiaries of largesse. Suella Braverman was the standard bearer — unashamedly populist on immigration (an issue that socially liberal Tories feel relaxed on, economic liberals are enthusiastically in favour of, but others are firmly against), and widely regarded by the “sensibles” as swivel-eyed. An errant email gave the chance to boot her out, but it was fractious politics that motivated taking it.

Truss had become despised by almost everyone, for betraying her Cameroon origins to embrace a hard Brexit, and then acquiescing to a quiet coup from the other side. She tried and she failed with her own mandate, and then became unable to maintain authority after she abandoned it. In doing so she reaped the outcome of the divisions and slights that had bubbled under the surface for decades. A deft politician with a gift for deal-making and communication might have steered through these waters. Liz Truss was not that person. She flipped and flopped on her main policies, but failed to offer the one thing every Tory craves most: the prospect of continuing in government.

Now, there is no clear pretender, because the other factions are so riven and built on shaky ground. It is hard to see someone who can unite the parliamentary party, let alone the membership. In a week we will see who emerges, then question whether they can make the most of it or not. Each of the major names is tainted by some association or another, each unwelcome in certain corners of the party and with their own personal challenges. There will be seven days of deal-making, but they will inherit the burden of a party happy to fight itself.

The only question now is whether the ugly infighting continues in public. Some relationships blow up once and come to a swift and dignified end, others paper over the cracks and rumble on a while longer. But the worst become toxic in their daily antagonisms. The Tories may try to pull themselves together, to have a quiet Christmas for the sake of the nation, but with authority and cohesion broken, it is unclear how this will happen, even now Truss has gone.

The result — Britannia Unchained — was a call to look to the most dynamic economies around the world for inspiration: to cut spending like Canada, teach children like Japan, and build businesses like Silicon Valley. It didn’t oppose the austerity measures of the early Cameron government, but saw that as a precondition, rather than an endgame. The Gang of Five no doubt hoped to be the heirs of Cameron, and with the budget balanced, this global smorgasbord could be their agenda. 

At the time, the approach of the Unchainers was criticised for its inaccuracies and drew ire for eye-catching comments on productivity. But beyond that, it made little impact. The authors were promising politicians but did not have a mainline to Downing Street, and their cures for the nation’s ills were unlikely to fly with the Government dependent on the Lib Dems. Even when the Tories held an outright majority, attention quickly moved to Brexit and then Covid, leaving little time for the long-term considerations that the book sought to address.  

Through this period, however, the five authors rose through the ranks of the party. Just one week short of the book’s tenth anniversary, they made their final breakthrough when Liz Truss became Prime Minister, with Kwarteng at her side as Chancellor. Today, Trussonomics will move from campaign mode to implementation with the unveiling of the Government’s mini-budget. Will this be the moment Britannia is finally unchained?  

Together, Truss and Kwarteng have pitched their changes as an agenda for growth, prioritising expanding the economy over redistribution. Early policy leaks have suggested the moment will also be used to deregulate, confirming the reversal of the fracking ban and removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses. This is likely to be accompanied by the removal of the national insurance rise and reductions on corporation taxes.  

Yet the full realisation of the Unchained agenda has been derailed by reality. Today, the priority in the Treasury is the response to rising energy prices. The Government was half-way through detailing this when parliament was interrupted by the death of the Queen, and businesses and individuals remain desperate to see what help they will be given through the winter crisis. Tax cuts alone will not be enough to achieve this, as those most affected simply don’t pay enough tax. 

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The Government’s preferred option appears to be a per-unit price cap. The costs of this remain unclear and will be determined by the fluctuation of wholesale prices, with the government bound to make up the difference. It’s not the low-tax, low-borrowing idealism of Britannia Unchained, but rather debt-fuelled cakeism, pushing taxes down while keeping spending up. It’s a clear sign of a disconnect between the words and actions of Truss’s top table. Beyond that, despite Truss and Kwarteng’s proud boasts of doing the unpopular to secure growth, it’s noticeable they don’t appear ready to grasp the nettles that might alienate their own support. Uncapping bankers’ bonuses might not win over floating voters, but plays well with the Tory base, either among those who benefit or feel an ideological allegiance against the Government setting wages. It is also a measure that only fiddles at the edge of growth, slightly altering incentives in the already massive speculation economy. 

Even the Unchainers will not turn against the vested interests of the Tory Party. When it comes to the growth-sapping shortage of houses, Truss and Kwarteng are unwilling to deregulate planning, knowing that it will sting them in the shires. Throughout the leadership campaign, Truss equivocated on this subject, frequently attacking her own government’s approach to housing targets. Instead, her government now offers a cut to stamp-duty — not a bad idea in itself, though it will just juice the market without more building.  

At the moment, the only push towards planning reform appears to be in “full-fat freeports”: enterprise zones with reduced restrictions and lower taxes designed to spread the growth around. But this is nothing more than a distraction from the inability to build houses where the jobs, productivity and people currently are. It is unlikely to do anything to defuse the acute crisis of housing in the southeast of England, where short-term electoral interests push against new housebuilding.  Truss’s liberalisation of fracking will doutbless hit a similar stumbling block. Ministers have been at pains to stress that exploitation of shale gas will only go ahead with the consent of local communities. This is an almost impossible bar. Fracking developments generally meet with deep local opposition, the major barrier to development before the 2019 ban was in place. If this is the plan, it is a non-starter. 

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Meanwhile, there seems to be no solution for liberalisation where businesses want to build. The Oxford-Cambridge Arc, for instance, which was designed to accelerate Britain’s science and tech sectors around world-leading universities, remains cancelled due to local objections. Instead of backing what is working, the Government looks to create magic in underperforming areas.  Agglomeration and acceleration around strategic advantages cannot easily be replicated by liberalising around left behind towns. The green belt and the planning regime are likely to remain some of the most burdensome regulations afflicting British growth.  

Other policy announcements show a lack of seriousness in the Truss reforms. In 2012, the Unchainers talked a lot about raising educational standards, citing Britain’s uncompetitive PISA scores as a sign of future stagnation. So far, the main policy hinted at is the ending of the ban on new grammar schools. It is a favoured policy of a certain type of Tory, but unproven at best in its outcomes. The grammar school had certain positive impacts at a certain time, but it’s slowly become clear that they tend to favour the rich and have a minimal impact on overall attainment. It’s less of a global lesson than an expired policy gathering dust in the back of the Conservative cupboard. 

The same is true of measures such as abandoning the sugar tax, squeezing the margins on benefits, or Johnson’s proposed ban on the importation of foie gras and furs. These are things which please the ideological Right and anti-regulation small-staters such as the authors of Britannia Unchained. They are, however, small fry in the scale of the British economy. Quite literally all fur coat and no knickers. 

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And yet, in the decade since Britain Unchained was published, its diagnosis has largely been vindicated. Britain has struggled with sluggish growth and flatlining wages. The fundamental premise remains obviously true: Britain’s economy can grow and doing so will benefit the whole country. Even the practice of cherry-picking the best policies from around the globe remains sound, though often there’s valid local reasons why we’ve ended up where we are and why change is difficult.  

Much else has shifted though. The Tories sit atop an entirely different political coalition. The fiscal impact of austerity has been wiped out by Brexit, Covid and Johnsonian high spending. The low-borrowing economy has never emerged, and debt will only increase as they seek to graft a low-tax economy on it. In response, instead of turning to a World XI of global policies, Truss and Kwarteng seem keener to play the Thatcherite B team. Tax cuts will come in the face of short-term spending crises and long-term rising service costs meaning a decline in income and more borrowing, at a time when rates are rising, if the growth doesn’t come. It is, in effect, a gamble which could come up short, padded around the edges with policies such introducing grammar schools which invigorate the Tory base but are neither groundbreakingly innovative or proven to work.  

If this happens, all the authors of Britannia Unchained will have brought are more diminished public services, which have neither seen major investment nor the reform to make them more effective. Early on, they correctly identified critical issues facing Britain — and as they rose through the ranks, they saw the need for change become more urgent. Yet now they’re in power, their agenda looks more underwhelming than unchained. Rather than a radical agenda for growth, all Trussonomics looks likely to add up to is the Eighties — but more so. 

The killing was one of half a dozen or so last week in London alone, where 67 people have been murdered since the start of the year. Beyond these shocking figures, petty crime has become almost unpoliced, while robberies and burglaries are nearly always unresolved. The city’s Metropolitan Police force remains in special measures after a failing to address, or even really acknowledge, the failings apparent in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder and other longer-standing scandals.

From the outside, the force seems entirely dysfunctional, somehow both unnecessarily authoritarian and impotent. Yet police services around the country seem little better. A further five forces are in special measures, with Greater Manchester Police failing to even record crimes, never mind solving them. Across the country there is a similar picture of forces being overzealous on trivial matters, yet repeatedly failing to deal with the most serious of crimes.

The wider criminal justice system is equally troubled. Overcrowded and crumbling courts cause unbearable delays to prosecutions, hampering attempts to bring criminals to justice. Anecdotally, lawyers tell me that trials are currently being listed for 2024, up to three years after the crime took place. This will be exacerbated by the strike action to be taken by publicly funded barristers, whose income has atrophied over recent years. Quite simply, the criminal and justice system is on the verge of seizing up entirely.

And yet, somehow, neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak seem to recognise this, let alone offer any remedies to fix it. Truss’s recent major announcement on crime was not a strategy, but rather a list of things she wished were true: a promise to bring crime down without any new resources or thinking to do it, repeating a desire for targets and league tables without any sense of how those are met. Sunak, meanwhile, has promised the strengthening of sentences, but little that addresses crime prevention or detection.

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For the most part, however, this lack of vision is merely a continuation of at least a decade of Tory impotence when it comes to lawlessness. The increase in police numbers under Boris Johnson’s government, for instance, was little more than a reversal of cuts and did not make up for the experience lost under the austerity-driven exodus. In particular, shortages of detectives have significantly worsened “clear-up” rates, with crimes more likely to go uncharged and un-convicted. As for those cases that pass this stage, they are still likely to linger in a court system which lacks sufficient judges, buildings, and lawyers to run effectively — all problems that could be largely solved by a commitment to spending where it counts.

Beyond that, the Conservatives are reluctant to confront systemic issues within the police. While ministers are keen to criticise the civil service that oversees it, the Tories appear reluctant to intervene in the actual organisation of police, despite the way the many forces fall short of the mark. What interventions have been launched in the last decade have often gone awry. The partial privatisation of the probation service, for example, proved muddle-headed, worsening performance and ending with an expensive bailout of providers. Similarly, the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners has offered little in the way of actual improvement; the office is poorly understood by the public and is notable largely for its scandals. Even the Johnson government’s reforms on sentencing — such as ending the automatic early release of offenders deemed to be a danger to the public — have been undermined by being pushed through in bills which also seek to reduce the right to protest.

Contrast this with the party’s long history of asserting its place as the home of law and order. The Thatcher government largely exempted the police from spending cuts, but also sought reform, passing the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in the wake of the Scarman Report into police search methods. Under John Major, a series of Criminal Justice Acts pushed for a more punitive criminal justice system, culminating in Michael Howard’s famous declaration that “prison works”.

Today, the party offers only soundbites, without conviction or fresh thinking. With the right approach, the Conservatives could combine the popular red meat of increased convictions and tougher sentences with the desire for more effective use of state resources. Yet they seem unable to deliver either, choosing instead to posture as the police fail and the country slips into the depths of lawlessness.

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Without clear action from a new prime minister, this stagnation will not be reversed. The police will remain a discredited organisation, derided for a preoccupation with offensive words and an inability to catch villains, while at the same time tainted with an internal culture of misogyny and lingering issues around racism. Meanwhile, the courts will continue to lack the resources to push through convictions, and prisons will remain violent and dangerous holding pens which do too little to stop future offending.

With an economic crisis looming, it’s hard to believe that crime rates, already at a 20-year high, will improve of their own accord. If nothing meaningful is done to stop this slide towards chaos, a bleak winter could easily spill into widespread civil disobedience on a scale not seen since the 2011 riots. The perception of crime, and particularly the feeling that the police service cannot deal with it, eats away at social trust. It’s a pain felt in every unlit walk home, every catcall, and every tale of a friend being mugged. And it won’t be healed by platitudes.

So, with two weeks to go, as they glide around the Tory shires looking to win their final votes, Sunak and Truss would do well to remember that crime isn’t a party issue, but one that haunts the country as a whole. And when we become numbed to attacks such as the one on Thomas O’Halloran, when an 87-year-old man can’t leave his home for fear of being stabbed, law and order can’t be said to have any meaning. Society becomes a vacuum, with anarchy threatening to fill the void. And there is nothing conservative about that.

In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point Of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.

The current Conservative leadership election has a similar atmosphere. Every day in this interminably long contest, the final two candidates fire out press releases and half-formed policy proposals, only to wind them back in — flailing around the controls they want to wield in a month’s time. Meanwhile, the country slides towards crisis.

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise the serious problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that the energy price cap will hit £4,400 this winter. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to step in to prevent this. And yet it is offering only piecemeal solutions.

This might be forgivable if it were the sole issue to which the candidates seem oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. On housing, for instance, Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, while Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with “Soviet style targets”. But as anyone who has managed KPIs will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.

Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated this have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn it around on short notice. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.

Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, the reality is bleak. While the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised rises are undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful. With beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.

But this catalogue of woes just serves to highlight the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory Party faces: it doesn’t care about politics. This is not to say that the party doesn’t care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, giving the Tories nearly 20 years in power. The problem is they no longer understand why or to what end they wield such power.

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Those on the Left must be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative Party is. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.

Factionalism within the party is therefore driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One former MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for the safe seat, he was told: “It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection.” In more than a decade as a party activist, I’ve met fewer than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues. At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst — and it really seems to be falling into the worst now — it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It’s the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.

The track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. The government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. The government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. The government that complains about “woke culture” has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

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Even on its beloved Brexit, the party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. It has no clue whether Britain’s future is Singapore-on-Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose; now it campaigns in shitposts and governs in tweets.

All of which reflects an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative Party. Its politics and principles are skin-deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the “Brexit candidate” for leadership, to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt. In place of policy innovation, the party grasps around for yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, copying the homework of a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten.

In the place of politics, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep returning it to power — the generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. Last weekend, Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that he would cut degrees that don’t lead to good jobs was viewed by many on the Left as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities. In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10% of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, and who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It’s the “common sense” of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar — not something that will ever seriously happen.

Equally tenuous is Liz Truss’s insistence that the cost-of-living crisis can be solved by tax cuts rather than handouts. Those facing the most acute pain pay no income tax and minimal national insurance, while much of their spending is likely concentrated on low-rated or VAT exempt items, such food. It’s preaching to the Tory choir, with a plan that won’t survive a collision with reality once she is in Number 10.

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I could go on through a dozen such announcements — the theme remains the same: Tory MPs and Tory leaders, saying what they think the person in front of them wants to hear. No plan for implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, no underpinning logic or principle. They are bricks thrown through windows with no notes attached.

Which takes me back to those panic-filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, they have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do, instead debating whether they want the chicken or lamb as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative Party has fallen into a fundamental problem — it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.

So when I look at my own party, I feel not fealty but disappointment. From the housing crisis, to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there. Yet the party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24-hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, while Truss will run it like a village fete, harking back with boundless enthusiasm to the old hits.

Whoever wins in September, Britain will remain stuck. The Conservative Party is failing to adapt, failing to plan. The sirens are ringing. The ground is coming.

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A version of this article first appeared on the Joxley Writes Substack