The high point of the Tory rally last night were the superb speeches from Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. ‘Is it not the height of insanity, if these polls are right, that we are about to give Labour a supermajority?’ said Johnson. After all, voters ‘sent Jeremy Corbyn and his then-disciple Keir Starmer into orbit’ in 2019 and then saw the UK develop the vaccine first and has now beaten the ‘post-Covid inflation’. Reform UK voters will end up with ‘exactly the opposite of what they want’ – the ‘Kremlin crawlers’ who ‘make excuses for Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine… don’t let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas’. Gove listed Tory achievements: a reformed welfare state, closing a huge school attainment gap between rich and poor. Even on this last day of the campaign, said Gove, there is still time to fight Labour ‘with our every breath’.
They were the best two speeches I heard from anyone in the campaign and reminded me why these two were such a powerful duo in the Vote Leave campaign. They were a hard act to follow and I didn’t envy Rishi Sunak when he came on after them.
The evening highlighted the party’s failure to regenerate: how it ran out of people and ideas
But the juxtaposition rather reminded us why the Tories will perish tomorrow. ‘Isn’t it great to have our Conservative family united?’ Sunak asked the crowd. Yes, but Gove has quit. Tory feuding meant Johnson was hounded from parliament and his calamitous party management meant mass ministerial resignations (not an organised coup, as he still claims) collapsed his government. This fallout meant Johnson has been on the beach in Sardinia rather than pounding the doorsteps like David Cameron and Theresa May. A superb campaigning asset, squandered
And how about Gove, inviting those activists to fight, fight and fight again for the party and country that they love. How much more convincing this would have been if Gove was actually fighting, rather than resigning. When Sunak told the Cabinet about the election, Gove responded by saying ‘who dares wins!’. Then he decided that, on reflection, he would rather not dare and resigned – plunging his local party into a last-minute selection crisis. The Lib Dems may now take Surrey Heath because they are fighting an unknown candidate.
Sunak paid tribute to Cameron: ‘David, it’s fantastic to have you here.’ But Cameron also bolted, refusing to serve his constituents for the remainder of his term after his Brexit gamble failed. Boris, Cameron, Gove – the men Sunak was parading to his activists are not standing in this election. The evening highlighted the party’s failure to regenerate: how it ran out of people and ideas. The feuding purged talent that was not replaced. After 14 years in power, the Tories are simply out of ideas and people.
And Gove will know that, when he says ‘we took millions out of tax’, Sunak’s plans would put them millions back into tax via his current stealth tax programme. Gove will now that the welfare progress has been wiped out, with a new crisis brewed post-lockdown even worse than the one they inherited. The hard-won progress on educational inequality that Gove so rightly praised was wiped out by the damage needlessly inflicted by the lockdowns he backed. Attainment for primary school leavers is back to where it was five years ago and the attainment gap is back to where it was a decade ago.
In lockdowns, the richest children do best for obvious reasons. They’re more likely to have a two-parent setup with one acting as teacher; more likely to each have their own room to do home schooling, more likely to each have an iPad rather than have to share a device. Sunak pointed this out to Cabinet at the time. His kids would be fine in lockdown, he said: chilling in a big house, home-schooled by a mum with a Stanford MBA. But who, he asked, was speaking up for the less fortunate kids? Deplorably, unforgivably, no one did. Johnson point-blank refused to admit to or even consider lockdown tradeoffs. Gove was so fervent about lockdowns that he’d have rejected this point if he was forced to confront it.
Last night, Johnson referred to the ‘post-Covid inflation’ as if it was linked to the virus rather than the £500 billion the Bank of England printed while he shut down the economy. There was always going to be a terrible economic price to pay for the free money – a point that the lockdowners, to their shame, refused to acknowledge at the time. These gentlemen destroyed their pre-lockdown achievements by panicking and cannot verbally resurrect those achievements now. Perhaps why neither are themselves facing voters in tomorrow’s election.
If Johnson had spent this campaign out as the anti-Reform weapon rather than being on the beach in Sardinia – and developed his excellent points about Reform – that might have worked. If Gove had been prevailed upon to fight his seat, to at least go down fighting as voters passed verdict on the results of his lockdowns, he would also have been a more effective voice.
But neither would have been able to sustain, for very long, the arguments that were naturally uncontested last night. I think that, for all their faults, a Conservative government would be the best option for Britain – but if even I am listening to the speeches thinking ‘hang on – that’s a lie!’ then I have to accept that the rally serves as a requiem to the victory that might have been, had what the speakers said been true.
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