Are the Tories still the cake party?

I hadn't been paying much attention to the Tory leadership election. After all, selecting a new Conservative party leader is a matter for the party, so why should I waste time even thinking about it? I wasn't even sure why the TV debates were aired on mainstream channels. Why not spare us by having those debates in front of the MPs whose job it is to produce the two candidates to put forward to party members? And then put that stage on a stream accessible only to members? But I got suckered in by the newspaper coverage and snippets of the debates on the news. Which revealed that I should have been paying attention and the Tories have some big problems.

Firstly, the Tory party seems to have lost its sense of what it exists for (besides winning elections, at which it has traditionally been very successful). I've been saying for some time that the current government, if you set aside Brexit and a few dog-whistle policies such as sending small numbers of immigrants off cross channel dinghies to Rwanda, has been the least right wing Conservative government since Ted Heath's. The Johnson government was strong on rhetoric more than anything else. I suppose some would argue the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, which came into force in June,  is an extreme right wing measure designed to restrict the ability to protest. It was used within a day of enactment to silence the irritating "Stop Brexit" guy outside the Houses of Parliament. But it still leaves plenty of scope for legitimate protest and as it was designed to crack down on disruptive guerrilla protests of the kind used by climate change activists it's fine with me. Those who disagree are presumably perfectly happy to see ambulances held up. The candidates tried to sound a bit more like Tories but with no particular coherence.

Secondly, it seems that, despite having got rid of Boris Johnson, the Tories has not moved on an iota from his policy on cake, i.e. to be pro having it and pro eating it. I hadn't thought "cakeism" was a real word but  the Cambridge dictionary defines it as the wish to have or to do two good things at the same time when this is impossible. So most of the candidates, with the exception of Rishi Sunak, indicated they would implement tax cuts without saying whether they would cut spending or how they would make up the shortfall. The sort of promise that the Tories have rightly castigated over many decades.

Indeed, some of the candidates have revealed a startling lack of economic marbles. Promising unfunded tax cuts is bad enough for a Tory but Mordaunt spoke about having a monetary policy, seemingly unaware that this was delegated to the Bank of England 25 years ago.Truss talked of paying back the covid debt over a longer period when we aren't actually paying anything back at the moment, as the debt is continuing to grow.

I'm not particularly bothered that it was described as a "dirty" race by David Davies, a Penny Mordaunt supporter (indeed, one of the few prominent "PM4PM" supporters). If MPs are so determined that a candidate should not be their leader then that seems to me to be significant. No cabinet members supported her bid, but it was more notable that none of her colleagues at Trade supported her either.

I had been well disposed to Mordaunt before the race started. I suspect this was mainly out of sympathy for her brutal sacking from her dream job as SoS for Defence after only 85 days when Johnson took charge. But I read some devastating critiques of her, particularly by Dominic Lawson and I was relieved when she didn't make the final two. It seems she can't take a decision, is a good presenter but has no grasp of policy and prioritises her personal aims over ministerial duties. When she gets things wrong (which she seems to do quite a lot) it isn't that she's a liar, just "awesomely ignorant".*

So the debate changed my mind about the Tory leadership election being open to public scrutiny, even though the nature of that scrutiny has been poor. The questions posed in the "debates" were weak. We didn't find out much or anything on important issues like foreign policy (China? Where's that?), energy strategy and supplies, how to fix social care and unblock hospitals, how to tame inflation or what to do about public sector pay. The fact that there might not be very good answers to any of these questions is perhaps something that we will all have to acknowledge, not just the candidates.

The debate allowed Tom Tugendhat to increase his profile and probably earn a cabinet post in the future. But please not defence, he needs to have something else to talk about. It also brought Kemi Badenoch to our attention. She has earned a promotion to a more significant role so she can be tested and we can see more of what she could do.

However, the main reason I think it is a good idea for the debate to be open to the public is that we have steadily moved to a more and more presidential status for the PM without the checks and balances constitutions of countries with presidents, such as the USA, provide. This process is not new - it's certainly been developing since the time of Thatcher - but Johnson put a twist on it with his reluctance to quit even when he had lost the support of his MPs. We need to know about these people so we can make it clear whether they are suitable. The public might not choose new party leaders but the people who do are influenced by whether the candidates are acceptable to the electorate. After all, it was arguably public opinion that eventually persuaded Tory MPs to ditch Johnson so they could clear the decks well before the next general election.

There are lessons for democracy in the rise and fall of Boris Johnson. Daniel Finklestein argued in the Times that leaving party members to make the final choice must be changed as it delivered us Corbyn and Johnson. But Johnson was perhaps the only candidate who could have pushed through Brexit. Remainers might think this was a bad thing but it implemented the will of the people and cleared a log jam. 

In the USA the selection of presidential candidates is influenced by a much wider electoral base, though that does not seem to have produced better quality candidates of late. Worse though is the fact that the American system cannot deliver sensible gun controls even though a majority of the electorate would be in favour and ditto has not acted to protect abortion rights, leaving a flaky precedent to be overturned by the Supreme Court, when the politcians should have enacted legislation and had plenty of opportunity to do it.

I've always thought that the party leaders should be chosen by the people who know them best and see them at close quarters - the MPs. The Tory MPs have produced the short list of two and we will now see whether Sunak sticks to his sound money stance and, if so, whether the Tory members vote for that or for tax cuts off the back of an envelope, the sort of promise Tories would previously have condemned out of hand.

However, some polls of Tory members, many of them still Johnson loyalists, indicate that tax isn't necessarily the crucial issue in the ballot. Sunak is viewed as disloyal so they will go for Truss. It's often been said that, in the Tory party, he who wields the knife shall not wear the crown - Michael Heseltine is an example. The general population may feel that Sunak did the right thing in precipitating Johnson's fall (though he only twitched after Javid jumped) but Truss may be rewarded for sitting on her hands. And the Tories will still be the cake party, leaving those of us who support sound money with no party to vote for. Ho hum. Maybe, just maybe, the Tory members will vote for jam tomorrow instead of cake.

* Dominic Lawson's Sunday Times column on 17 July noted that a colleague of hers during her brief stint as SoS Defence told him that, of several defence secretaries he had worked with, Mordaunt was the worst: "couldn't take a decision". Another she worked with in a ministerial role said she performed well at the despatch box but on anything to do with policy she was "all over the place, absent" gaining her the nickname "Penny Dormant". Lord Frost said that, when Mordaunt was his deputy in the Brexit talks, she didn't master the detail, wasn't accountable and wasn't always visible: "Sometimes I didn't even know where she was". Her colleagues at Trade wondered the same when she didn't fly abroad to sign a trade deal. One official, asked where she was, said "I have no f***ing idea". (She was on a promotional tour for her book).  She advocated NHS funding for homeopathy, despite no evidence for its effectiveness. She wrote that the Queen stuck by the country, no matter that at one stage it meant working with a government that wanted to abolish the monarchy (no such UK government ever existed). During the 2016 referendum campaign she erroneously told a disbelieving Andrew Marr twice that Britain would not be able to veto the accession of Turkey to the EU. Hence "awesomely ignorant", though Lawson noted that, when challenged on this some years later, she came up with a "shifty" account of why she hadn't really been wrong.  She claimed that when she said to the Commons, with furious emphasis "trans men are men; trans women are women" she didn't really mean all of them, just that "in law, some are". Lawson branded her the continuity candidate: little grip on policy, a tendency to go AWOL, a rich line in fantasy and an inability to admit error. "But Boris Johnson had the intellectual capacity, if not the character, for the job of prime minister. Penny Mordaunt has neither". Ouch. I'm glad we found out more about her. Though if she'd got to the last two maybe Sunak could have prevailed.