It is extraordinary that Liz Truss, one of the longest-serving members of the Cabinet, has succeeded in presenting herself as the change candidate in the Tory leadership contest. While Rishi Sunak resigned as chancellor because he was no longer willing to support Boris Johnson’s lies, the foreign secretary remains loyal to the outgoing prime minister, yet she has somehow managed to become the one who represents a break with the past.
Despite having spent two years as a Treasury minister, Truss now denounces the “economic orthodoxy” that she once upheld. Although she has been a minister for over a decade, she criticises the lack of radicalism from the governments in which she served. While parroting the old applause lines of the Tory right—tax cuts, grammar schools, immigration and crime—she claims to offer a fresh start.
With breathtaking audacity, Truss has seized the mantle of hope for herself in this campaign, while smothering Sunak in the cloak of Project Fear. If the polls are to be believed it is working and she will soon be moving into Number 10—another blonde bombshell with shape-shifting tendencies and a populist touch.
Whoever becomes the next Tory leader will have a short-lived honeymoon, however. Hope almost always beats fear in political campaigns, but there is one emotion that trumps both of them and that is anger. The underlying frustration with the status quo that led to the Brexit vote in 2016, and later gave Johnson his 80-seat majority in 2019, is still bubbling away. It has been exacerbated by the rule-breaking in Downing St and will not have been helped by the fractious Tory leadership contest. As the cost-of-living crisis bites, it is certain to deepen further.
The more prices rise, NHS waiting lists grow or transport infrastructure collapses, the more voters will become disillusioned with politicians’ broken promises. Four months ago, a majority of people who voted Conservative in 2019 thought the government was handling the economy well. Now just 37 per cent do and 56 per cent say it is managing the country’s finances badly. The numbers are negative for almost every issue from health to immigration.
The slogan on the banner that hung in the hall at the Conservatives’ October 2019 party conference—which went on to form the basis of their subsequent election campaign—was “Get Brexit Done. Invest in our NHS, schools and police.” The second sentence was a crucial factor in the landslide Tory victory, particularly in the northern and Midlands constituencies that had previously voted Labour. In those areas, nobody was talking about tax cuts. But for all the talk of levelling up, a recent analysis by the IPPR found that public spending in the north of England has risen less quickly than across the rest of the country over the last three years.
The truth is that the Tory Party has still not resolved the inherent tension between the economic populism favoured by its voters in the red wall and the fiscal conservatism of its traditional supporters in the true blue shires. That clash of values is playing out noisily in this leadership election but neither Truss nor Sunak has found a solution to it. It is hard to see how any leader could because the two positions are fundamentally irreconcilable.
Johnson held the new Tory coalition together by the force of his personality, combined with the promise of Brexit. But as the recent by-election defeats in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton showed, Brexit is no longer a unifying force for the Conservative Party. Both these constituencies in the north and south of the country backed Leave in the EU referendum, but that was no longer a reason for them to vote Tory.
At the very moment when the left is slowly coalescing, with Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green Party supporters becoming more willing to vote tactically, the coalition on the right is rapidly fracturing.
In 2019 Johnson neutralised Nigel Farage by adopting many of his policies, but his successor will be vulnerable to attack from the right both within the Tory Party and beyond. The latest incarnation of the Brexit Party—Reform UK—has so far failed to connect with the public. Its campaigns on Covid restrictions and climate changes have not had the cut through with voters that Brexit did. But the anti-politics mood is real, and the threat of its success is almost as important, politically, as its actual success. Tory MPs in marginal constituency live in fear of Farage (or another populist leader) squeezing their support and handing their seat to Labour.
Already, Eurosceptic Conservative MPs are insisting that the next prime minister delivers a “proper Brexit,” echoing Farage’s criticism that the UK’s departure from the EU was “Brexit in Name Only.” Although Truss is now the right-wingers’ favourite, if she wins the leadership contest and gets to No 10 it will hard for her to agree to all their demands when faced with the economic and diplomatic consequences of those policies.
This time it will not just be Farage shouting “betrayal” from the sidelines, unconstrained by the realities of power, Johnson will be sitting in the House of Commons offering the promised land and whipping up dissent against his successor. The petition demanding that his name is added to the list of leadership candidates shows his capacity to become the figurehead of the rebel right.
David Gauke, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, who was deprived of the party whip by Johnson, predicts that “the post-prime minister Boris Johnson is going to be a complete nightmare—particularly for Rishi but in pretty short order for Liz as well if she wins. I don’t believe he will disappear off and form a new party I’m sure he’s thinking about a second term, it would be completely out of character for him not to.” Politically, he points out, there is only one place for the current leader to go. “The opportunity lies on the right. There’s always been a tendency on the Conservative right to feel that they’ve been betrayed. They won’t accept some of the downsides of Brexit, the inevitable trade-offs. They have an impossibilist belief in what can be done so whoever is in government is likely to disappoint them. If Liz gets there that might keep them happy for a little while, but in the end she won’t be able to deliver everything they want.” Whether Sunak or Truss triumphs on September 5th, the ugliness of the Tory leadership contest may look like a beauty parade compared to the blue-on-blue skirmishes to come.
