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.
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