The running theme of the final years of the last government was ministers standing up and making bewildered speeches about the awful state of the country: Hot Dog Toryism. Almost a year into opposition, the next phase of the Conservative Party is becoming clear, and what it resembles most of all is the joke about an Irish farmer who, asked for directions, replies: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
Kemi Badenoch and Mel Stride had summoned us to a small room in Conservative Headquarters, to hear about the terrible state of the economy. “People are working harder, but taking home less,” Badenoch began. “And now Labour has made it worse.” Was this a refreshing acknowledgement that things hadn’t been in a great state before the current government took over, or a Freudian slip?
The specific way in which the government was making things worse was the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions, which is certainly an eccentric tax to raise for a government that is trying to get more people into work. Rachel Reeves has presumably chosen it partly because it’s one of the less well understood taxes. In an effort to deal with this problem, Stride had done some sums on a scrap of paper and worked out that it would cost “£3,500 pounds for every working family”. Is that correct? I can only say that the more time he spent explaining his arithmetic, the less plausible it sounded.
But let’s accept the point that, whatever the number, all taxes end up being paid by taxpayers. What would the Conservatives have done differently, someone asked. “The first thing is that we would not have created a budget that caused so much crisis,” Badenoch said, suggesting that her memory doesn’t stretch back to 2022. In any case, she went on, it was unfair to ask her what she would be doing if she were in charge: “Our job is opposition.”
Stride meanwhile was positively cryptic. “We would have taken different choices on tax and spending, and certainly on borrowing as well,” he said. Oh, different choices! Poor Reeves —if only she’d known to take Different Choices (No One To Know What Those Choices Might Be), she wouldn’t be in such difficulties now.
There was more: “We would have gone further and in a more principled way on welfare reform.” Given that his leader had just affirmed, once again, that she would not even take the Winter Fuel Payment off millionaires, one might raise an eyebrow at that. The next couple of years are likely to see the Tories demanding much deeper welfare cuts in general, while opposing each specific reduction.
Should someone have thought of this before?
But these weren’t the only ideas the Conservatives had to offer. Asked how the government should respond to Donald Trump’s wizard plan to crash the world economy with a mass tariff war, Badenoch’s answer was simple. “We need a UK-US trade deal,” she said. Should someone have thought of this before? Should it have been the person whose job it was not nine months ago? Ah, she explained, but Joe Biden hadn’t wanted one. Fortunately, she went on, Trump was “a willing partner for trade agreements”. You do wonder, at moments like this, whether her backbenchers should club together to buy her a subscription to the FT.
Several others had a go along the same lines, but Badenoch decided she’d had enough. “You ask what I’m going to do,” she snipped. “I am the leader of the opposition. We need to ask what the prime minister is going to do.” Nothing is more Badenoch than holding a press conference and then complaining that people are asking you questions.
Why, asked someone else, should voters trust the Tories with the economy? “Our reputation was not built in the last few years,” Badenoch began, more by way of expressing a heartfelt hope than stating a fact. “It was built over many decades, I would say centuries.” She is presumably hoping that voters at the next election will reflection more on the record of Bonar Law than of Kwasi Kwarteng.
Finally, she was asked about comments from the US State Department about free speech in the UK. When JD Vance first raised this, the general assumption was that he thought people should be able to say what they whatever thought. Recent events suggest that his concern might in fact be that Britain has too much free speech: no one here is getting deported for writing mean things in their student newspaper. But it was noteworthy that the Conservative leader, so recently an avid fan of the Trump administration, is backing away from it. The US position was “more commentary than reality,” she said. Doesn’t anyone want to be seen as a fan of Donald?
And that was it. Perhaps “Irish farmer” is an unfair comparison for the Conservatives. As things stand, they’re more like an Irish taxi driver, telling you they wouldn’t start from here having just insisted on driving you somewhere.
