Are the Conservatives ungovernable?
16 min listen
James Heale, James Forsyth and Katy Balls discuss whether the Tories are an impossible coalition to preside over.
Politics
Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
Saturday
How Mussolini invented fascism
Benito Mussolini, the revolutionary socialist inventor of fascism who came to power 100 years ago this week, was one of the most talked about figures of his day. Most of that talk was positive. Pope Pius XI called him ‘a gift from Providence’ to save Italy; the US ambassador to Rome, Washburn Child, ‘the greatest figure of his sphere and time’; and Winston Churchill, ‘the Roman genius’. Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, wrote that he gave their epoque ‘its only flame of greatness’, and Cole Porter even wrote him into his 1934 hit song ‘You're the Top!’ with a line that went: ‘You're the Top! You're the great Houdini! You're the top! You're Mussolini!’.
With Mary Wakefield, James Ball and Christopher Howse
22 min listen
This week on Spectator Out Loud: Mary Wakefield tells us about her frustrating experience trying to give blood (00:49), James Ball says that it may be the beginning of the end for Mark Zuckerberg (07:04), and Christopher Howse reads his Notes on... signatures (16:44).Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.
The problem with Mordaunt’s trans conversion
Penny Mordaunt’s entry into the Tory leadership race was widely predicted and she has now become the first to throw her hat into the bin fire. I’m totally impartial in this contest. I think any Tory MP would be just as hopeless as the next. But there’s a point worth underscoring: if Mordaunt were to win, she would be the third liberal in a row to lead the Conservative party. Now, when I say ‘liberal’, I mean liberal in a Tory context. Boris Johnson, the long-time social liberal, immigration liberal and, until 2016, pro-EU liberal, convinced the right to hoist him as its standard bearer when the time came to replace Theresa May.
What’s Rishi Sunak’s pitch?
Rishi Sunak has passed the 100 publicly-declared supporters which, it if is converted to nominations when Sunak officially declares, will meet the threshold required to make Monday’s MPs vote. Boris Johnson (like Sunak, not yet officially declared a candidate), is somewhat behind at around 70. Penny Mordaunt, who officially declared on Friday, is further back, in the mid-20s. There are a lot of MPs yet to declare, but as things stand it is looking plausible that either Sunak is the only candidate to make the nominations threshold or that it is a Johnson vs Sunak run-off. In that event, it seems very likely that Boris would win.
Rishi Sunak and the triumph of managerialism
A few short months ago, Liz Truss dismissed Rishi Sunak’s business-as-usual managerialism on the economy. The former chancellor responded by constantly reiterating that her homage to Thatcherism, led by cuts to personal and corporation taxes, would unleash chaos rather than growth. She peddled belief while he dealt in realism. The grassroots preferred the former. Seven weeks after the result and Sunak looks vindicated. Trussonomics collided with the reality of the markets. Interest rates surged and the Bank of England was forced into a massive gilt-buying operation. The pound slumped against the dollar and (even after a few rallies) sits down slightly on when Truss came to power – and is worth nearly twenty cents less than last autumn.
Boris is no conservative
The current Tory breakdown is all the more remarkable given how quickly it has happened. As recently as last September they led comfortably in the polls. Keir Starmer was widely derided as an ineffectual centrist bumbler with no charisma. At the start of this parliament, in early 2020, the Tories looked invincible, holding an 80-seat majority having won 43.6 per cent of voters. And now, at the peak moment of crisis, there is serious talk of bringing back Boris. Well-informed commentators seem to think he could still garner the support of more than 100 MPs, and perhaps even be back in Downing Street in time for Guy Fawkes Night. The Emperor slips away from Elba and marches north to Paris, attracting the old veterans of his great campaigns. One more shot at glory.
The US knows the main threat is China
China's President Xi Jinping opened the CCP’s 20th party congress by doubling down on four key issues: no let up on zero-Covid; no renunciation of force when it comes to Taiwan; a promise to build up China’s military strength; and no tolerance of any opposition to his rule. As he enters his third term, the most important new challenge he has to address are the export controls announced by the US on the eve of the congress that threaten to undercut China’s ability to develop semiconductors and supercomputers. Xi remains defiant: he promised to ‘resolutely win the battle in key core technologies.
Africa’s zone of anarchy is getting worse
In the most violent region in the world, the West is realising that it messed up. Protestors in Burkina Faso throw Molotovs at the French, American-trained soldiers overthrow their governments, and Malians wave Russian flags. After a two-decade American deployment in the Sahel in Africa, the Pentagon has finally admitted that the area is getting worse. A paper quietly published last month, and reported on this week, described a ‘deterioration of the security environment’, and said that violence this year had ‘expanded in intensity and geographic reach’. It predicted 2,800 ‘violent events’ in the Sahel in 2022, more than double last year’s number. Some aren’t surprised that the West has failed.
What does Russia really want?
The question of ‘why’ Russia invaded Ukraine has been forgotten amid war’s fog. Greed and malice partially explains it. History, geopolitics and culture reveals more. A country which has more land than anyone else on Earth is not grabbing territory for territory’s sake. Logically, Russia should be giving away land to anyone who might manage it better. But that’s not how Putin thinks. He is pursuing a dogged policy of annexations – first in Georgia, then in the Crimea, and now of four further Ukrainian districts.
Friday
The decomposing of the Conservative mind
The Chicxulub meteor did for the dinosaurs; Netflix saw off Blockbuster. When the time comes to write the history of the Conservative party, the period from 2016 to today might be termed the ‘Whatsappocalypse’. If the Online Safety Bill genuinely wants to make Britain a better place to live, it should start by banning MPs from using social media. Politics is not meant to be conducted over each of the day’s 24 hours, with every minor event demanding an instant response. Everyone reading this piece can think of a moment where their snap response to something – their gut instinct, or initial emotional flare-up – differed from what they actually did in the end, once they’d had time to calm down and think it over.
Could Boris Johnson’s cakeism survive the markets?
In the brief time Sajid Javid was chancellor to Boris Johnson, he spelled out to The Spectator his ‘low for long’ theory about rates: a theory which would enable the new prime minister’s ambitious spending agenda. Speaking to Fraser Nelson in December 2019, Javid was confident that the era of ultra-low interest rates and extremely favourable borrowing costs was here to stay. ‘It just felt quite ludicrous seeing that a government could borrow at negative real interest rates and not take advantage of that,’ the then-chancellor told the magazine.
Don’t bank on a better Boris
In the past century, only four British prime ministers have returned to 10 Downing Street after being ejected from office. As Boris Johnson attempts such a second coming only weeks after being ousted by his own MPs, the historical record suggests that if he returns from the political grave the resurrection won’t produce a miracle. The first returnee from the ranks of the political undead was the Tory statesman Stanley Baldwin, a stolid and unflappable Worcestershire iron master. Indeed Baldwin got not only a second coming but a third too.
Will Penny do better than last time?
This afternoon Penny Mordaunt became the first candidate to publicly declare themselves for the leadership of the Conservative party. Much of the talk in this contest has been about the 'death match' between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, both of whom are a known quantity in Westminster circles. Mordaunt's confirmed entry into the race changes the dynamics of the contest and offers her colleagues a different choice. She is something of an outsider – having only held a senior cabinet post for less than three months in 2019 – and was never someone in the inner counsels of the Cameron, May, Johnson or Truss premierships. The threshold of 100 nominations on Monday is a steep one and Mordaunt is currently well behind Sunak and Johnson in the number of confirmed public backers.
Penny Mordaunt launches leadership bid
We have the first declared candidate of this Tory leadership contest. Penny Mordaunt has just taken to Twitter to announce she is running. Given that Mordaunt got more than 100 votes in the final parliamentary round, she has a pretty good chance of making the 100 nominations threshold. Now we wait to see if there is now a big push from her team to get more supporters to go public (you can keep tabs on those numbers here). https://twitter.com/PennyMordaunt/status/1583466532344328193?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The biggest question at the moment is over whether Boris Johnson runs or not.
Liz Truss’s resignation honours list: runners and riders
And so the Liz Truss regime ends after a glorious 45 days in power. And, appropriately, in a government where humour and tragedy were so often intwined, the Daily Telegraph is now reporting that Truss intends to draw up her own resignation honours' list after a mere six weeks in office. Below is a list of Steerpike's own suggestions mixed up with the predictions of the paper of record. Try to separate the fact from fiction in this list... Mark Fullbrook - Truss's gaffe-prone chief of staff who became a weekly feature in the Sunday Times. Truss was the third candidate Fullbrook backed in the summer leadership race after the implosion of Nadhim Zahawi and the defenestration of Penny Mordaunt. Since then Midas Mark has found fame for his lobbying links and backfiring briefings.
Will Boris get the numbers he needs?
15 min listen
Whilst no candidate has officially declared their candidacy for the Tory leadership race, speculation is rife about a possible Boris Johnson return. Could he get the 100 supporters he needs? Will he extend an olive branch to Rishi Sunak?James Heale speaks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls.Produced by Max Jeffery and Oscar Edmondson.
Chaos with Boris Johnson?
The chance of a Boris Johnson comeback has risen dramatically since Liz Truss's resignation. Over 40 MPs have so far come out to publicly back him while today's papers are filled with briefings about how the former prime minister would be best placed to save the party from electoral doom. Now it's no great secret that plenty of Johnson loyalists backed Liz Truss in the last leadership election primarily to stop Rishi Sunak. There were some MPs who always said Johnson should return. Now as MPs consider recent dire polling, factoring it into their own electoral calculus to see whether they would lose their seat, more are beginning to ask whether Johnson is worth a gamble. Were he to re-enter No.
Is Penny Mordaunt the Stop Boris candidate?
Here’s a little mystery: whatever happened to that nice, sensible foursome whom all week we were led to believe were ready to seize the reins of power from Liz Truss: Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt and Ben Wallace? If Truss resigned, we were told, the Tory party would behave in the same grown-up fashion that it did when it elected Michael Howard as leader unopposed in 2003. Yet come Truss’s resignation the fab four was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Penny Mordaunt quickly made it plain that she didn’t want to play second fiddle to Sunak and believed that she could run in her own right. There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly, that Mordaunt’s personal ambition is stronger than her desire to establish Conservative party unity.
Boris won’t save the Tory party
In the aftermath of Trussfall, amid the victory of the lettuce, the Conservative party has today crashed to just 14 per cent in the polls. This is the party’s lowest level of support in British polling history. The previous low, 17 per cent, was recorded during the Brexit meltdown in the spring of 2019, amid Theresa May’s resignation and the Brexit party insurgency. Today’s new low comes amid the resignation of Truss, the complete failure of her project and a governing party that has gone from being one of the most successful parties in the Western world to where it is today – on life support. Here’s what I think happens next. Liz Truss has gone. Trussonomics is dead.