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Blue Summer

Henry Brittingham-Brett, Wag's Sharp-Witted UK Advisor, Weighs in on a Silly Season for Britain's Conservatives

Jul 29

Letter from Lyme Regis

Dear Wags,

Surprise: There are reasons to pay attention to British politics right about now. You may be dimly aware of the leadership contest in the Conservative Party, which plonks the 160,000 Tory electors picking their new standard bearer between Scylla and Charybdis.

Let us explain their dilemma the oblivious on the left-hand side of the Atlantic: You may recall that in early July, Boris Johnson resigned after a series of whoopsies, which included hosting booze-ups during Covid lockdown. Mr. Johnson, a man possessed of vast bacchanalian appetites but nary a comb, does love a party! Confined and uninvited, the British public was not amused. These flubs (including one involving a handsy Tory politician delightfully named named Pincher), ended Boris’s long run as a Wodehousian rascal. He has at last become a liability— unless one is throwing a rager that involves wearing a fez and nodding off into the soup. Actually, Boris is not gone, he’s gone-ish, acting as a caretaker PM until early September and casting a lumpy shadow over the election process. Whatever would that be like? Presumably a chap who ends his last parliamentary speech with hasta la vista, baby is not intending to fade quietly into anonymity.

This puts would-be successors, whittled down to Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, in a spot when it comes to positioning themselves as change candidates. For one thing, they worked for the last fellow. For another, he’s far more charismatic and diabolical than they will ever be, even if his powers never extended to reliably tucking in his shirt. Boris remains popular with a of the Conservative base, who appreciate that he led the charge on Brexit. And Brexit—complex, excruciating, and endless—has become a tedious article of Tory faith in the way Second Amendment blam-blam is sacrament to Republicans. It’s the death march one must be seen to be on. So, we have the spectacle of a leadership race in which candidates strain to call themselves a breath of fresh air while tiptoeing around the political corpse their former jefe, a fellow even friends admit was a scoundrel. Whatever else happens to Trump, this neatly forecasts the contours of a future Republican primary debate.

Like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, Boris was an outsized figure, warping the dynamics of a parliamentary system which is supposed to focus less on presidential personality. With their distracting showboater gone, the Tories, who have been in power for 13 years, are left to confront an unhappy electorate and a terrifying economy. Inflation, a phenomenon previously unknown to most adult voters, is at a 40-year high and will be worse when the new P.M. takes over. Winter is coming, and with it, rage-inducing fuel prices. The Tories have conducted their leadership debates during the most blistering British summer on record, featuring Pacific Palisades-style wildfires in greater London. No country fetishizes property ownership like the UK, but it’s never been harder for young people to afford a home. A public inquiry into the government’s not excellent handling of Covid-19 just opened. These little bits and bobs tend to favor the opposition.

Still, the Tories have always been lucky in their enemies, who have a habit of scaring the English suburbanites who decide national elections. Jeremy Corbyn, the dispatched poobah of the Labour Party, was a socialist’s socialist, in other words, a gift. His successor, anodyne Keir Starmer, will not be so easily cartooned as a keffiyeh -wearing militant. Starmer has the reassuring look of a fellow who strayed from his cubicle to another Starbucks pod. Being more colorless than red, he’s probably just what Labour needs to form a government. To do that, it will need to regain seats the party lost in traditional strongholds in Northern England, Northeast Wales, and the Midlands, which have drifted to the Conservatives over immigration and Brexit (it would also do well to claw back constituencies in Scotland, where Labour support collapsed in the face of rising nationalism). Starmer has gone about ridding Labour of Corbyn and other Bolshies after an investigation into antisemitism in the party. It’s intended to insure that the next election will not be fought on polarizing Culture War territory but the bread and butter anxieties of everyday Britons. Tacking to an accommodating middle is something Democrats may want to pay attention to.

Back in the Conservative leadership race, there has been much grumbling over the selection process. There was excitement about Nigeria-born Kemi Badenoch, a firecracker who skewers Wokeism wherever she spies it, and Penny Mordaunt, a former member of the Royal Naval Reserve who wove a naughty word into a parliamentary speech on a dare. Neither of these sizzling personalities made the final cut; nor did Tom Tugenhadt, the only pale male in the race (imagine such a circumstance in the GOP). The two final contenders are longtime coworkers who are thoroughly sick of one another, and some insiders fear their sparring is divisive “blue on blue action.” That sounds like the title of a porn movie nobody wants to see.

Saddled with a name of a scary headmistress in a Roald Dahl story, Truss appears to have an edge. As foreign minister, she relishes a photo-op and has teed herself up as a flinty adversary of Vladimir Putin, declaring herself “Ukraine’s greatest friend.” Great politicians are often blessed with the gift the gab and the human touch. Truss, another head girl who’s leaned in well over her skis, is liberated of such burdens. There was that speech she gave calling British consumption of French cheese, at expense of the domestic variety, a “disgrace,” a parody worthy of Veep given in deadly earnest. And let us not forget the time she seemed to get lost in the crowd at her own press conference. Dominic Cummings, the dark artist behind Brexit, called Truss as “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament,” which given the company, is quite something. Her earnest awkwardness (one detractor nailed her for standing too close too people when she speaks) might be called Poehleresque.

What some Tory diehards appear to see in Truss is the faint patina of Mrs. Thatcher, who it must be said, never doubted where she was going. Truss has embraced Maggie mufti, even if she began her political career as an antimonarchist Liberal Democrat and was an ardent campaigner to remain in the European Union during the Brexit debate. Never mind— a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of failed politicians, and Truss is now a zealous Brexiteer. This has works like a charm on the mostly older male voters who will give the nod to the new Tory leader by mail-in vote. What has them most besotted is Truss’s proposal to deliver $40 billion in tax cuts, a retro way to juice a struggling economy. It even has a throwback name: Trussonomics.

Sunak, the former chancellor of the Exchequer (that’s the government’s money man) called Truss’s deep tax cuts “socialism,” which is nothing if not a hot take. Unlike Truss, he seems lab-raised for campaigning. The telegenic son of immigrants, a former Goldman Sachs banker, a Stanford MBA, and a multimillionaire. (His wife, Akshata Murthy, daughter of an Indian billionaire, is a good deal richer.), Sunak looks like a frontrunner. If only everything on his résumé hadn’t become synonymous with tech-finance-bro-globalist-ickiness. The grassroots distrusts Sunak, who obviously does his homework twice, considers a once-weekly glass of Coke a vice, and clearly gets his steps in (think of him as a Romney C.V. with an Obama BMI index). When he finished in the final two in the leadership stakes, his campaign released a video of himself fist-pumping at his computer terminal, as if he’d just cleared another fortune on the trading floor. Like many people who spend careers working with vast sums of money, he struggles to connect with those who fret over piddly amounts.

Careerists who strenuously position themselves as rising stars tend to get knocked down a peg, especially in Britain. Early in his tenure at the Treasury, somebody coined the nickname Dishy Rishi for Sunak, which always seemed like the work of an overeager flack (Rishi is only dishy if the meal you most crave is Expedia spreadsheet with a side of green juice). He vibes as level head, and oversaw massive spending to keep the economy afloat during Covid, a move that didn’t endear him to fiscal hawks. Nor did Boristas love how quickly he jumped from the cabinet over ethics and competence issues. This may be how how the game is played but the sharp elbows were a bit too obvious.

Then came revelations that his wife was taking advantage of her Indian citizenship to avoid paying higher taxes, and that he had held onto a U.S. green card long after he became a member of Parliament. All of this reinforces the borderless One Percenter narrative, even if Sunak spent at least some portion of his childhood living in a flat above his mum’s chemist’s shop. Sunak says the Truss tax cuts would be disastrous for Britain, and that he will be a steady hand on the tiller and put the UK economy on “crisis footing” to deal with economic headwinds. It sounds entirely sensible, but it’s not especially dishy with Tory-land, which likes Truss’s talk of being an insurgent.But nobody’s yet running away with this — a few more economic bobbles could align things in Sunak’s favor.

Meantime, the pair are bickering about where they went to high school. Sunak boarded at tony Westminster, while Truss was consigned to a shabbier state institution, which she points out to underscore her opponent’s membership in the rotten elite. It might do to add that they both went to Oxford and studied politics, philosophy and economics—a heavy tick in the establishment box. (Before politics, she worked for Shell and as a telecommunications executive — not exactly the natural breeding ground for insurgents). At the first of a series of hustings, or meetings before Tory voters, Truss accused Sunak of “stabbing Boris the in back,” which makes one wonder if the duo will be able to make it through 11 more such encounters without coming to blows. A televised debate on Sky TV looms on August 4.

Party members will mail in their votes September 5, and whoever prevails will eventually have to contend not just with Starmer, but the fractured state of the modern West. Here, Sunak and Truss may be far more alike and they are different — both are obviously smart, hardworking and ambitious. Both are products of an educational and professional elite that looks increasingly out of step with the world and its problems. Does anybody still believe that tax cuts, or the lack of them, is the antidote to what plague us, on every continent? Unlike many Republicans, Truss and Starmer are resigned to the reality of climate change— they’re just not very interested in talking about it (when pressed, Sunak trots outa treacly line about knowing its important because he has two little girls who care about the issue). Whoever leads the Britain, a country of people who reused shopping bags before the world knew what recycling was, will need to think about more than just business solutions to a little island’s enormous problems—fiscal, environmental, and social. More power to them.

Yours Ever,

HBB

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