If the Tories don't get behind Rishi this could be the last Conservative PM ever
24 October 2022, 16:10 | Updated: 24 October 2022, 17:47
Yet another new prime minister and, for the Tories, an absolutely final chance. If they don't get behind Rishi Sunak now, giving him the parliamentary space and authority he needs, this could be the last Conservative Prime Minister, ever.
This autumn, many will say, "and a good thing too.” Much of the country is desperate for a general election, as the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is calling for. It isn't going to happen. Tory turkeys are scratching their necks and wondering whether Christmas is such a good idea after all.
Right now Sunak has more problems with his angrier Conservative critics and, more generally, the right in politics. So let's deal with what they are saying.
First, Sunak has no mandate. “Boris” won the 2019 election, not Sunak (or Truss). It's an argument we have recently heard from Nadine Dorries, Johnson's former culture secretary. How dare mere MPs frustrate the will of the people?
Jacob Rees-Mogg similarly argues that Johnson won an effectively presidential mandate which should not have been taken away from him. And among deflated, defeated and now exiled Johnsonites, this is an viewpoint curdling and festering against the new prime minister. We’ll hear more of it in the days and weeks ahead.
In terms of the British constitution it is utter nonsense. We are a parliamentary democracy. In general elections, we elect MPs, not presidents. The leader of the party with the most MPs, if he or she can command a Commons majority, becomes prime minister. That party’s election manifesto, its debate with the people, is the basis on which it governs.
Johnson fell from power because, thanks to his personal behaviour, he could no longer command the support a majority of Tory MPs. But if MPs can find another leader they do back - in this case Rishi Sunak - then the mandate the voters gave to the Conservatives three years ago remains in date.
Sunak wouldn't have a moral mandate if he was pursuing a radically different direction to that 2019 manifesto. There is so far no evidence of that. This brings us, however, to the next criticism made of him on the right of politics, that he isn't really a Conservative at all. Somehow, a global conspiracy has taken over Britain and Sunak is its face. Nigel Farage takes this view.
What would a “ proper Conservative" look like then? First, a supporter of Brexit. Sunak is, and always has been. He is even determined to push the row over Northern Ireland to breaking point.
Second, presumably, someone who wants to cut taxes. In his leadership contest with Liz Truss, Sunak wanted to cut the 20p basic rate of income tax by a fifth, not to 19p but to 16 p. The big difference with Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng was that he planned to do this not in a matter of weeks, panicking the markets, but steadily and carefully through the lifetime of the next Parliament.
Oh well, the “Rishi’s not a Conservative" crowd might say, We were looking for somebody really tough on immigration and tough, too, on public sector waste. Sunak is completely signed up to the highly controversial Rwanda deportation policy, and has promised to come down hard on public sector pay in order to make the books balance.
It wasn't his fault, or the fault of a “globalist plot" That bond market and currency market traders knew their basic sums and didn't like the smell of the Truss-Kwarteng experiment.
We should be suspicious of this plot stuff. It is being peddled by people who actually hope for the destruction of the Conservative Party and have their eye on the main chance, creating some kind of hard right rival to it. Further out, beyond them, there are those who really mean that Sunak has a brown skin and is therefore not one of “us”.
The last argument against Sunak is that ordinary Conservative party members rejected him last time, and have not been given another say. But again, when you think about it, that's not his fault. Penny Mordaunt failed to make the cut. Boris Johnson (perhaps) did, but then pulled out because he realised he could not govern with a split party.
If they have any beef with anyone it’s with Sir Graham Brady and the 1922 committee executive. But anyway, if I had been part of a vote which elevated Liz Truss’s impossible promises to Downing Street, I think I would be keeping my head down.
No, the Conservatives have today chosen by an entirely legitimate and constitutional process a new leader who has the huge task of binding together the Tory party and leading Britain into a calmer and less embarrassing phase of our politics.
He succeeds or the Tories collapse. The challenges ahead - on inflation, energy, the public deficit, the war and all those challenges we don't know about yet as well - are awesome and haven't gone away. The odds of him winning the next election are not good.
But in the sense what happened today was healthy and honest. We are back to the politics of right against left, arguing about spending and taxing choices, rather than scandal and mayhem.
The British people elected the conservatives in 2019 on the basis of Boris Johnson's manifesto, not his personal behaviour, for which they never voted.
The basics of that, levelling up and getting Brexit done, remain. The troubles of this ghastly autumn, caused in the short term by a Tory experiment and in the long term by economic decline during the Conservative years - including, of course, under the new Prime Minister, - will still scar the economy.
But as my mother used to say, coming into my chaotic childhood bedroom: “You made this mess. You clear it up.”
