Out of Control

(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

The speed at which the Government is falling apart is staggering. Even grizzled hacks who’ve been reporting on politics for decades can’t think of anything comparable. Things were already going very wrong in advance of the Conservative Conference this week. The Bank of England had to intervene to rescue the Government from their own budget, and Labour’s poll lead soared to its highest for over two decades. But the remarkable collapse of party discipline and the total loss of the Prime Minister’s authority was still unexpected.

Truss has not helped herself with a series of execrable media performances -  first on a round of local radio interviews, then on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning show, and thereafter with agonising regularity through the conference. I have been saying for months in these posts that Truss is a poor communicator but even I thought she would have been able to manage to answer questions like “are our listeners pensions safe?” and “do you have confidence in your chancellor?” with a “yes”. The horrible long pauses, the weird nervous inappropriate laughter, the pretending not to understand obvious questions, have all become grim trademarks. At one point during Beth Rigby’s evisceration of the Prime Minister on Sky I quite literally had to hide behind the sofa. Truss’s speech today was mediocre at best – a stream of banalities leavened only by needlessly insulting most of the country. I find it astonishing that someone who has been in frontline politics for over a decade still cannot read an autocue properly.

But in truth there is probably not much she could have done. The anger at the sheer ineptness of the budget was already too great to keep things muted during conference, or in the weeks to come. Michael Gove’s intervention, condemning the decision to remove the 45p tax rate, on the same Kuenssberg show, set the tone. By the end of the day the policy was dead. And then the floodgates opened. Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt made it clear she disagreed with Government thinking on cutting benefits; Home Secretary Suella Braverman attacked Gove; Kemi Badenoch attacked Braverman; former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries attacked everyone. The conference became a battle royale.

Disintegration

Indeed a key reason why everything has disintegrated so fast is the lack of clear factions in the party. If there were two or three coordinated ideological clans with an obvious leader it might be possible for the whips to keep them in check via the normal tools of party management. A free for all is much harder to control.

The most coherent grouping are the fiscal conservatives who most strongly backed Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaign, like Mel Stride, his campaign manager and Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, who successfully pushed Kwasi Kwarteng to bring forward his medium-term fiscal plan. Sunak himself has stayed quiet but is clearly in contact with his allies. His core support group, though, was never particularly large, many of his MP backers supported him due to a lack of better choices.

Other senior backbenchers who are often bracketed as moderates because they backed Remain and talk like grown-ups, such as Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, are in fact not far away from Truss when it comes to economic ideology. Both men proposed large packages of tax cuts in their brief leadership campaigns. Hunt, in what can only be a decision caused by nominative determinism, even backed the reintroduction of fox hunting in his 2019 campaign to be PM. Michael Gove, who led the charge on the 45p tax rate u-turn, backed Kemi Badenoch for leader, a candidate who has become a favourite of the party’s right-wing. Yet he was also described by Nigel Farage earlier today as a “high tax, big state social democrat”.

On the nominal right of the party there is also little clarity. Braverman and Badenoch have both been continuing their culture warrior shtick following their leadership campaigns, and making clear they would not support any increase in immigration as part of a growth plan. But they publicly disagreed on the 45p u-turn, and Braverman went far further than anyone else in demanding cuts to benefits. Iain Duncan Smith and Nadine Dorries, who both backed Truss, took her to task on that one. Meanwhile Steve Baker, who backed Braverman for leader, and is the former chair of the right-wing backbencher alliance, the ERG, was apologising to the Irish for the Government’s behaviour during Brexit negotiations, and promoting “taking the knee”. Pick a coherent platform out of all that.

Add to all this confusion a bigger and even vaguer Tory collective – the NIMBYs. No MP wants to actively acknowledge being in this group, but most of them are in rural or semi-rural constituencies and are well aware that nothing winds up their association members more than the prospect of a large new development blocking their view. The day before conference Brendan Clarke-Smith, a Minister in the cabinet office no less, took to twitter to proclaim triumph over stopping plans to build solar panels in what appeared to be a muddy field. Thank goodness we don’t have an energy crisis.

Thus Truss and Kwarteng, with very little core support of their own, find themselves trapped on all sides. The fiscal conservatives won’t accept the kind of casual attitude towards public finances that crashed the markets last week. There are mini-alliances all over the place to block unpopular spending cuts, as we’ve seen on benefits – with unlikely partners like Penny Mordaunt and Lord Frost speaking out. As for supply side reform, the right won’t accept higher immigration and the NIMBY collective won’t accept planning reforms that hit their constituencies. MPs are already being inundated with emails from the RSPB campaign against “investment zones”. As one said to me “the British like animals? Who knew?”

When Parliament returns next week there are no immediate votes that the government could lose. Short Bills to pass Stamp Duty and National Insurance cuts will pass easily. The next major hurdle could be as soon as the 14th October when the Bank of England ends the gilt buying scheme that stopped a collapse last week (albeit they haven’t had to buy many). If the markets have seen no further sign of a change of direction by then things could get hairy again. But if that moment is survived the fiscal statement that Kwarteng has been forced to bring forward to the end of the month, becomes the clash point.

Here he and Truss will have to find some way to make their sums add up, either by reinstating tax rises or setting out brutal spending cuts - a trade off Truss carefully avoided acknowledging in her speech. The alternative would be to say the independent forecasters at the OBR are being too negative about growth. But I don’t see anyone buying that. Especially as the OBR have a record of always being too positive about growth. So what could they do, if anything, do to save themselves? And what happens if they don’t?