Mushroom's Conservative Leadership Vote

 

Mushroom has cast his vote in the, apparently, never ending mudslinging and self-destruction of the Conservative brand.  The Labour high command must be laughing all the way to the bank having saved themselves a fortune from their campaigning budget.  Meanwhile, Starmer’s speech writers have been presented with a treasure trove of embarrassing political faux pas, all to be deployed against the Conservative Party as the next election approaches.

In the early rounds of the contest, I constructed a matrix of essential and desirable criteria for leadership and marked off each prospective candidate accordingly.  Unfortunately, the candidate who emerged top of my scientific evaluation, Suella Braverman, failed to impress enough honourable members and didn’t make the cut.  Instead, as we are reminded by the always excellent Rory Sutherland, “we get to choose between someone who studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Lincoln College Oxford, and someone who studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Merton College Oxford.”  How lucky we are.  Sutherland remarks that he finds “the very idea of an undergraduate degree in politics alarming.”  He concludes, “it’s one thing to theorise on the basis of practice; quite another to practise on the basis of theory.” 

Quite so, and as the various hopefuls were eliminated the two remaining had managed to say something that ticked every box in my Excel selection matrix.  So much for science!

But this contest is much more than a political game.  As Allister Heath points out in the Telegraph today, we are faced with, “looming power cuts, rocketing bills, water shortages, dysfunctional public services, sky-high taxes and a failing economy.” Heath, dammingly, blames, “a quarter-century of political, intellectual and moral failure in which most of our political class has been complicit.”

Oddly, the looming crises, offers an opportunity to choose a different path to the technocratic consensus of cakeism and political compromise.  Of course, neither candidate has dared to suggest that we should spend less, least of all on the NHS money-pit.  However, it seems clear that more of the same will not do – we must take the chance of doing something different.

I like Rishi Sunak but I have concluded that he is one of the technocratic consensus and that his solution of squeezing inflation whilst reassuring the work-shy that help is always at hand will not work and will be a certain recipe for defeat for the Conservative Party when the next election comes.  Of course, Liz Truss does not have a magic wand for inflation and the economy but she does seem to have the breadth of vision to, potentially, enact some more radical polices to increase growth and productivity from which economic equilibrium may be restored.  With the election still 2 years away, there is still time to restore the reputation of the Party.

But the game changer, for me, is that Liz seems to have appreciated that we need stand up to Russia and treat China more firmly than hitherto.  She seems to appreciate that this means spending more on defence – not just repeating the meaningless NATO target of 2% of GDP but serious expenditure to fund the military capability we need to promote our foreign policy.

So everywhere I look I judge that we could not be any worse off by giving disruption a try concurrent with beefing up our defences in an uncertain world.  It’s Liz for Mushroom.