Category: Conservative leadership

The Truss issue

She did it, and is in place, and with a new Cabinet team. It will take more than a mop and bucket to clear the blood on the carpet: gallons of it.

It is looking good so far – a pause to the Online Safety Bill and the Bill of Rights Bill; both measures robustly criticised here. (Both Truss and Sunak attacked Nadine Dorries’s Online Safety Bill in their leadership debates, so her resignation was not unexpected.) In the Commons, the nervy Paisley schoolgirl was gone, and we saw a confident performance, with no mention of cheese or pork markets.

When her predecessor stepped at into office, I wrote a post (“Boris the chosen one”) with a number of  observations, including the tribute he received from Toby Young, another journalist and achiever, who had headlined his piece “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man”, and the same quote appeared, with one necessary change, about Liz Truss in the Mail yesterday.

I also wrote and a list of predictions, which were all borne out in time.  I can repeat much of that here about Mrs O’Leary:

Some things we can be pretty sure of:

  1. She will surprise her opponents;
  2. She will disappoint and frustrate her supporters;
  3. A great many MPs will be drawn from the backbenches to fill the shoes of those who cannot hack it;
  4. The coming men will themselves surprise their enemies and disappoint and frustrate their supporters;
  5. Someone will start a cry of ‘betrayal’.

When there is a change at the top, political commentators will project all their own hopes and fears on the new PM and declare in all solemnity that there is only one way to go on X, Y or Z, and claim to understand exactly what is in the mind of the new PM, which is surprisingly exactly what is in the commentator’s own mind, and they will be shocked, and convinced of an establishment plot, when it does not turn out so.

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From Boris to Liz

The phenomenon that was Boris Johnson is moving into the background. A new face will take his position, but never his place, for he is a force of nature. A return to ordinary politics is a disappointment.

His tenure was shorter than we could have imagined, though average for a Prime Minister, over the ages.  At least he outlasted Theresa May, whom I had though of as ‘May-fly’. Another two weeks and he would have beaten Henry Addington – now that puts me in mind of something.

We need PMs with character. That is not to say that Boris was always a good thing – his chaotic nature enabled him to achieve many things that others would have been unable to do from their own, constricted outlooks, but it also prevented him from getting a grip when that was needed. (Often it needed a grip on the throats of his spads, if truth be told.)  The abilities of the new face are unknown but I can predict that if she is too soft, the staff will run rings around her and bring her down, and if hard enough, she will be accused of bullying. (Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, Dolly assures us.)

All this is to come, and the clock is running to a general election likely to be held on 2 May 2024.

If it is Liz Truss as we expect, she has come a long way since her childhood in Renfrewshire.  I believe she would be the first Norfolk MP to become Prime Minster since Robert Walpole himself, the first Prime Minister of all. I know her constituency – I used to have family there – and it is a charming area, in an eccentric county. Norwich I know well too – once second only to London amongst the cities of the land, it is the only town of any size in the county. I have drowsed in the Norfolk towns like Diss (not in Liz’s constituency) with its lake and lost-in-time appearance: such tiny towns as Diss are the stuff of Norfolk.

It would still have been nice to overhaul Henry Addington, a history lesson in himself.  He succeeded William Pit the Younger: Pitt who bestrode his age, who restored the confidence of a depressed kingdom, made us ready for the challenge of the generation and mended the country’s finances to do so. Boris with his boundless enthusiasm was doing the same in his own way, apart from the finances, which he has inadvertently wrecked. Then Pitt retired and handed over to Addington, and the wits wrote:

“Pitt is to Addington, as London is to Paddington”

(This was long before trains, stations or loquacious bears – Paddington was an insignificant village outside London, and Addington could no more aspire to replace Pitt than Paddington village could equal London.)

To be fair to Addington, he had his own abilities, amongst which he readied the country’s defences and finances for the war which Napoleon was preparing. But he was not Pitt.

The next year and a half have many challenges, many of which will bring failures, but many successes, we trust, if the government machine yields to the directions given to it (not always a given). There are also opportunities for failure. Mrs O’Leary, or Mr Sunak, whichever wins through, will be busy, and may succeed, and if it is the lady in question, good for Norfolk. It is not normal for Norfolk to propel one to such high office, but in the Paisley schoolgirl it may have provided a force for success.

Even so, I keep worrying that:

Boris is to Liz, as London is to Diss.

I would like be wrong.

Henry Addington served for three years, until overwhelmed by criticism of his perceived failure so secure good terms in a treaty with our European neighbour. When he resigned, Pitt returned.

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Books

The Wild One

The safe candidate and the reckless one.  A counterintuitive choice. Strong and stable is all very well if the situation needs stability but nor if it needs to be overthrown. That is what a reactive, democratically moderated system is for. Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak? Stay in the safe, coastal waters or plunge into the wild ocean? I know what Boris would do, or what he would have done once, before the weight of responsibility bore him down.

The sensible choice surely is the responsible one – but then Theresa May was the sensible choice after David Cameron fled the scene. She was an experienced minister, and the only Home Secretary in living memory not to go power-crazed. We found though that calm, sense and moderation were the very worst qualities in the circumstances – the civil service handed her the white flag of surrender and instructed her to wave it, which she did. Another few months of respectability would have been disastrous.

What it needed was reckless bravado. It needed unbridled confidence  that would steamroller opposition, and it needed joy – that is what Boris gave us. He achieved a route out of Europe and a trade deal which every commentator said was impossible, and swelling economic confidence when we had been promised failure – until the lockdown, which put the whole world into collapse.

Once again my hand hovers over the paper.  The sensible choice, the responsible one, urges the dull establishment, is Rishi Sunak. I am impressed by the speeches of Rishi Sunak – but that is the young Rishi, the backbencher who spoke with firm analysis and enthusiasm of how ridiculous, how counterproductive it is to raise tax levels, who proved that no more money comes in and it harms enterprise. This was the Rishi appointed with acclaim to the Treasury. Now the young Rishi is lost, and he is now seen as Mr Tax. Oh, if he could but summon his younger self to rebuke him.

Then there is Mary O’Leary, Liz Truss, the untrusted one with wild ideas that sound good to the Tory faithful but which reason says surely cannot come to anything but grief. The scoffing from the columnists of the old guard is audible. And yet, while Rishi Sunak was drinking in Treasury orthodoxy, turning his back on his old self and raising taxes, Liz Truss was actually achieving wonders across the world with those trade deals they said could never be done. Those who said it was impossible then are those same men and women who are now attacking her.

I do not know either candidate. I have never met either of them. I do not trust promises that sound too good, but then I can hardly object when one candidate says she will do just what I have yelled (at anyone who will listen) should be done. Slicing taxes at once will allow personal pockets to recover, reduce business costs, and allow profit to reappear. It may too give a kick to unhappier foreign lands that they should do the same: their prosperity is needed for us to prosper. All the same, ripping a chunk out of the revenues coming into the Treasury is surely dangerous?  Not according to a keen backbencher a few years ago – one Rishi Sunak. If accompanied by ripping a slice out of state expenditure, that will help too.

(Is it still too late to get Boris back?  At least the old, pre-lockdown Boris?)

Of course, it could all go horribly wrong. It need not, if the Wild One keeps their nerve and takes the right countermeasures to the problems which it is known will arise, like the fall in tax revenue and pressure to increase already crushing borrowing, and the special pleading of inveterate tax-drinkers.

Sometimes the dangerous option is the safest – as Boris was, until he became captured by respectability.

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Books

Moderation, in moderation

Extremist governments murder millions: moderate ones let them die of neglect. The idea of moderation in opposition to extremism though is a wilful deception. The only solution – is a dangerous fallacy.

The murderous fault of the extremist is his one-dimensional approach. Marx was one-dimensional in his theory and it led to evil beyond anything seen before him. Adam Smith (for example) looked at a huge sweep of data and effects and produced more benefit to mankind than any mortal man has done before. I could not call Smith ‘a moderate’ because when you step out of the single dimension, the word is meaningless – ludicrous in fact.

The faults in the infamous dictators of the twentieth century were worsened immensely by their belief in false theories of Marxism and racial theories, which are still haunting us; as Churchill put it “a Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science”. Bad science is always with us and does not always lead to the death camps. My concern here is the nature of extremism or what we think of as extremism.

I have previously taken a cynical view of the demand that a political candidate  be a moderate candidate: commentators who use the word often mean ‘one who agrees with me’. It is worse than that though. The word ‘moderate’ assumes that the subject can be placed somewhere on a single scale, moderating between extremes. There is no single scale though, unless the ideologue sets one and refuses to look outside it, and that makes for what we call extremism.

The words “left” and “right” are one-dimensional words. They are nonsense for a thinking politician. You could define a specific spectrum and look at placement along the spectrum on a specific issue, but that tells you nothing of issues outside that spectrum.  The idea of a right-left spectrum running from Hitler to Communism is a spectrum only of socialism: most people and politicians are not socialists and have no place on that spectrum. One could try a spectrum of libertarianism, presumably from anarchy to Hitler-and-Stalin, but again that tells you nothing much of value, as attitudes to liberty depend on every other opinion and balance reached.

There is no moderation between left and right because left and right are without meaning.

The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method; in that they begin not their Ratiocination from Definitions; that is, from settled significations of their words

I  have ranted in the past about America’s liberty to have guns taking away the practical liberty to walk freely without fear, and that is just one, narrow point of balance. Every element of political policy leans upon every other: spending priorities against tax against deficit management against economic effects against levelling-up, will be just one network of competing forces familiar to all. Effective law enforcement against liberty-and-due-process against efficient use of taxpayers’ money begins another.

The only solution is – no, it is not the only solution. The idea of there being one answer to any situation is in itself is a self-deception. It is adopted to avoid the horrible realisation that one may have to think and reason through a complex matrix of factors; but if a policy-maker does not think through that complex matrix, testing the interactions and likely results, he or she is not competent to make choices.

A journalist can catch a politician out by asking a one-dimensional question, as a simple answer may show the politician as foolish and a complex one as evasive. It gets a headline for a day, and provides something to wrap the fish and chips in tomorrow.

The deathly fault of those we call extremists is not their absolute belief in an idea, but that they have no other. He will take one aim and pursue it in spite of all the other factors, leaving millions slain in his wake and ruin for his nation. A responsible politician may be just as extreme in their belief in certain ideas, but will pursue the idea in the context of the web of factors affected by the pursuit. Those of us who campaigned from Brexit knew there were some in the camp who had no other idea and would have ruined the nation in its pursuit, but those who led with their heads knew that Brexit had to be just one outcome of a push for free trade and sensible government, without which Brexit would be an empty gesture.

The terms ‘extremism’ and ‘moderation’ are misnomers and I would rather they be abandoned where they offend against Hobbes and his requirement for sound ratiocination.  The distinction is not in absoluteness of belief or action as that belongs to both: it is the extent to which the politician takes account of the whole of reality and its multitude of factors.

See also

Books

The Moderate Candidate

The voters demand a moderate candidate, I read. (‘Think of the Red Wall!’) Moderates do not come out of party leadership campaigns though, do they? In any case, what is a moderate? Every commentator believes he knows, but the true answer is Einsteinian.

Extreme politicians put the voters off, it is commonly understood, but that is not quite true. Voters will say they want a moderate candidate, but  you cannot stop there: it is enough to get a headline, but the observation means nothing until  you examine why any individual voter says he or she wants a moderate and what they, as an individual, mean.

The average voter is put off by the arguments of politics: we want politicians to stop arguing and get on with doing the job they are being chosen for. The ideal politician in that view is like Jim Hacker – he was all tied up in wanting to keep voters on side but what was portrayed on screen was a minister who concentrated on actually doing the job, not on wasteful , childish political arguments and bidding wars with other people’s money. Jim Hacker is a fiction. Democratic politics is a long and complicated running argument which happens to spill government out almost as  a waste product. (In undemocratic politics though, it is the population who are treated as the waste product.)

Peace and compromise sound lovely – if however we have a balance in politics such that ministers and MPs are unable to put through decisive changes towards the ultimate expression of their own political beliefs, they are despised, and rightly so, for sitting doing nothing while being highly paid for their indolence and doing no good for the nation. For twelve years, Conservative-led governments have failed to do the things they promised, failed to dislodge the tax-fed social justice warriors we loathe, failed to cap immigration, failed to cut taxes much or at all – they could be praised as moderate, but that is wilful impotence.

What then? Is a virtuous, moderate politician one who does not get into constant playground fights? The fights are necessary though to argue a policy through and put it into effect.  Is the moderate one who listens to all sides, takes opposing opinions into account and finds a middle course between them?  That is the course of indolence and a refusal to do what that politician believes is actually for the benefit of the nation. Worse, it encourages the assertion of extreme positions in order to drag the middle ground backwards and forwards, or eliminates the middle ground.

A fish may see virtue in either of two adjoining lakes, but it may not, for the sake of compromise, lie on the path between them, the moderate choice though that is.

It should not need to be said, but ministers should do what they believe is in the best interests of the nation as a whole, and if the other side, or those within their own party, oppose that action, listen to their arguments so the minister can test his or her opinions and find flaws in the detail and likely outcomes, but still do what (on all the evidence) is believed to be right not a compromise.

Moderation is a virtue, Aristotle assured us (we gain nothing of real value from him) and other antique writers as we know, but we can listen) but we must not take an extreme position on it: even Aristotle  treated the concept only as a starting point. The necessity of moderation appears demonstrated from the horrors we have seen born of extreme ideologies. Look closer though – those familiar examples, with their death camps and starvation, are evil not from extremity as an isolated concept but from false, murderous philosophy, usually of socialism. Extreme wrongness brings evil: extreme rightness need not, if only there were a way to judge rightness.

Actually, the word ‘extreme’ is toxic, but ‘staunch’ is positive. How different are they logically?

Let politicians shun extremist if they wish, as long as they are staunch. Refusal to follow their own beliefs is dishonesty, or a wilful refusal to do what they know to be best for the nation – provided that the key a keen eye on what actually happens not what they expect.

Re-reading the above there is a foolish error lurking. Please do not read the article only that far. The problem is that an ideology generalises, and reality and humanity are not capable of generalisation. A nation is composed of individuals, not systems.  Perhaps “extreme”, meaning wrong and dangerous, is actually a good way to express the application of ideology with too much generalisation. In that case one could conclude that a libertarian approach is the least extreme because it refuses to impose general rules on individuals.  There too though it can generalise itself too much and prevents the institutions of the Common-wealth from exercising the duties they have to defend the individual.

The hunt for moderation goes on,. and I did pose the question earlier of who is a moderate. We like moderates, but we like those who will do what is right, which is a logical inconsistency until we look at how the words ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ are actually used. The moderate candidate is praised by all commentators, and it is a different one, for different reasons every time. The truth is that moderation, like the speed of light, is a constant which is relative to the position and motion of the observer. In plain truth, a “moderate” to any given observer is “someone who believes what I do and will act accordingly”.

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