Politics: it still isn’t over yet

By Richard North - July 21, 2022

So, it is to be Miss Trussed versus Sushi, the terminally thick versus the bright but compromised. But the real takeaway point from the final vote is that the MPs delivered a three-way split: Sushi got 137; Trussed 113; and Mordor 105. They failed to give any one candidate a clear endorsement, declining to give a lead to the party members.

There are those who might have preferred Mordaunt, whose backers blame “vicious personal smears” for her downfall. Others are less sympathetic, arguing that her campaign failed because “she was exposed as lazy, woke, lacking the ability to master her brief and she received bad references from those who worked with her”. The Tories thus “have dodged a bullet”.

Overall, the final round of the MPs’ votes makes for an interesting situation which bears comparison with the responses of MPs in previous leadership elections. In 2005, when Cameron took the crown, he walked away with 46 percent of the MPs votes. In 2016, May took 61 percent and then Johnson in 2019 led with 51 percent, before winning outright in the membership election with 66 percent.

By contrast, at the end of the MPs’ voting this time round, lead candidate Sushi gets a mere 38 percent from what has been called (wrongly in my view) the most sophisticated electorate in the world. This is by far the lowest proportion of the vote for the last four contests, effectively leaving it to the members to decide who should have the pleasure of redecorating the Downing Street flat.

While the Mirror cleverly headlines this as “Out of the lying man & into the dire”, another commentator calls it “a triumph for diversity”. Our next Prime Minister will either be someone who studied PPE at Lincoln College, Oxford, or has studied the same subject at Merton College, Oxford.

One clue as to the outcome of the membership election comes from Conservative Home which suggests that the members might have preferred Badenough but following her elimination will probably have gone for Miss Trussed when the results are announced on 5 September.

That is certainly the sentiment expressed by the Telegraph in its front-page lead, based on bookmakers’ odds and a string of recent polls of Conservative Party members. One of those is a YouGov survey which gives Trussed 54 percent when up against Sushi, who only polls 35 percent.

If that spread is reflected in the final result, we will have the membership at odds with their own MPs. Having gone for Sushi, albeit by a narrow margin, the parliamentary party will have as its leader someone who attracted only the support of only 31.6 percent (less than a third) of MPs, which augers ill for the unity of the party – not that Sushi would do much better  in the unity stakes.

Trussed could, of course, re-appoint her rival as chancellor, but that would install an alternative power base next-door, something she might want to avoid. But if the membership vote is also divided, the Truss administration will be struggling from the very beginning. It will be hard put to unite the party, much less the nation.

Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in the tweet she mistakenly posted after the MPs’ result had been declared, saying that she would “hit the ground” if chosen as PM.

It is not necessary for me to rehearse the full horror of a Truss victory – Pete has made a start on that, the inevitable conclusion being that we are probably facing a general election before the end of the year, as a fading PM tries to assert her authority over her own MPs.

I would not rule out a William Hague scenario where, having failed to win that election and without the support of the majority of her MPs, she resigns as party leader, triggering yet another leadership contest to mark its further decline.

Inevitably, this is far too far in the future – where a week is a long time – to qualify as a prediction, but such speculation merely reinforces the reality that we are looking at a selection process which seems incapable of picking a credible leader. We are thus doomed to a succession of mediocrities, with no end in sight and where even a general election will afford no relief.

One wonders, in this respect, how long it will take for the realisation that politics in the UK are terminally broken to translate into direct action. At the moment, there does not seem to be any appetite for a popular uprising, or even the modest, evolutionary reforms of the nature proposed in The Harrogate Agenda.

But, on top of Covid – which is by no means over, and could well precipitate a winter crisis in the NHS hospital system – we have the energy crisis topped up by the wider cost of living crisis, driven by food price inflation. The unions are flexing their muscles, creating a further element of crisis and bringing us closer to a 70s-style “who governs Britain” confrontation which a weak government will be poorly placed to withstand.

Possibly, the only upside is that the accumulation of crises will completely marginalise Brexit as an issue, taking it off the political agenda – especially as the EU has problems of its own, that will keep its attention elsewhere.

Racing up the agenda though is the situation in Ukraine, with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov expressing increased intolerance at the flow of modern western weapons – and especially the HIMARS launchers.

Not only is Lavrov threatening to up the ante in Ukraine – assuming the Russians have the ability to do so – there are increasing indications that the energy weapon is ready to be deployed to even greater effect.

Here, we have Ambrose Evans Pritchard warning that Putin may cut off oil as well as gas to cripple Europe, with moves being made in “the coming weeks”, before a global recession erodes his leverage.

The progressive throttling of gas supplies, therefore, may be augmented by the Kremlin halving its total oil output temporarily, starving the world of up to five million barrels a day – 5 percent of global supply – without doing lasting damage to the Russian drilling infrastructure, or suffering an intolerable economic hit.

A “shock and awe” squeeze of this magnitude would drive prices to $380 a barrel, levels we are told would bring the global economy to a shuddering halt, and massively intensify the cost of living crisis.

This might not allow time for the leisurely transfer of power dictated by the Tory leadership contest rules and may hurl Johnson back into the firing line over the summer break as Putin attempts to strike a quick knock-out blow. The timing may even be calculated to take advantage of the political weakness of the UK.

As such, it may turn out that, as the summer progresses, the Tory leadership contest becomes the least of our concerns, as we are precipitated into a fuel crisis on top of the burgeoning gas shortage. At the very least, this could complicate the transfer of power and blunt the UK’s response, pitching the new leader into a major crisis from day one of the new administration.

The prospect of an impending crisis might even favour Sunak in the coming votes, as he is more likely to be regarded as a “safe pair of hands”, compared with the demonstrably incompetent Truss. The ultimate irony, though, is that it may fuel calls for a return of Johnson to office, which is apparently an aim of the “Pastiche Terminator”.

I think it was Parris who said that Johnson isn’t finished until someone has driven a stake through his heart. We may have to get sharpening before this is finally over.