Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’ did Margaret Thatcher immense damage. The ‘winter of discontent’ has become too easy a shorthand for the coinciding of deep-seated problems which Thatcher herself approached with great caution.
I believe Sunak did a sterling job getting grown-up government back on its feet after Johnson and Truss
‘Dementia tax’ was an expression critically important in the ultimate downfall of a prime minister, Theresa May, who had proposed a rational means of underwriting care for the elderly: not, in fact, that any new tax should be levied upon them or anyone else, but that when assessing eligibility for a taxpayer’s contribution to their care costs, the value of their house should no longer be excluded from the estimate of their means. Arrangements were available for them to keep the house until they died by drawing current income against its future value. The real losers, those who stood to inherit, were never going to like the idea, but the term ‘dementia tax’ misled millions more into regarding the proposal with horror.
This general election is set, I’m afraid, to add another sweeping statement, as fluent as it is glib, to the list of killer phrases, rooting itself in the national imagination. We have most assuredly not had ‘14 years of Tory misrule’. But you’ll hardly find any media commentary on this election that does not contain the words ‘14 years’ followed by one or another generalised castigation of Conservative government.
The truth is different. We’ve had 14 years not unlike any other longish period of government: plenty of quiet competence and plenty of inglorious incompetence too; a scatter of signal successes and a handful of ghastly blunders; and, as ever, a sprinkling of newsworthy scandals, some of little consequence, others engendering public shock.
Here’s my view of our five prime ministerships since the fall of Gordon Brown. David Cameron’s time at Downing Street, from 2010 to 2016, ended in failure only if you think calling a referendum on Britain’s EU membership was wrong. The real mistake (I believe) was made by the electorate after he’d done so. He should never have asked us, but he did, and that’s democracy. Cameron’s other big gamble – the Scottish referendum – paid off. The SNP was never the same again.
Otherwise, Cameron’s tenure was notably smoothly handled and comprises almost half the 14 years of Tory-led government. I still miss the five coalition years. Without ‘austerity’ the economy could have buckled, and many of the cuts he and George Osborne made were to wasteful spending. The cuts to local government were too harsh, and the Libyan adventure was a miscalculation – but one his Labour predecessors would also have made. Cameron’s determination to legislate for gay marriage was brave, and throughout he looked and sounded like a proper prime minister. There was nothing mean, hateful or bitter about his leadership. I would happily see him back in Downing Street.
Theresa May was not cut out for the job, but behaved with dignity and brought intelligence and integrity to an impossible task. She had a sort of nobility. It all ended in the political equivalent of an appalling traffic snarl-up, but Brexit had made the Commons unmanageable by any PM with only a tiny majority. Imagine Sir Keir Starmer trying to negotiate with both the EU and his own party. Would he have done any better? A transitional figure, she held the fort.
Boris Johnson’s tenure is the most serious prolonged disaster zone among the prime ministerships on this list. About his own moral qualities enough has been said. But kicking out a whole cadre of some of the best men and women in the party was sheer vandalism. For me this was the last straw: I quit my membership. In his apparently blithe and carefree way, Johnson demeaned himself, cheapened our politics and injected a poison into the Tory bloodstream: toxicity that endures. He will – mark my words – attempt a comeback. Beware.
Of Liz Truss the less said the better. She left her successor a shocking mess.
I believe Rishi Sunak did a sterling job getting grown-up government back on its feet after Johnson and Truss. As chancellor during Covid and then in Downing Street through a period of European war and global inflation, he steadied things. It was he, not Johnson, who finally got Brexit done by fixing a problem (Northern Ireland’s interposition between Great Britain and the European Union) that had defeated May and that Johnson had failed to solve by dishonest bluster.
Sunak showed a shaky hand in some of the small things that should be second nature to a prime minister. Insulting the Greek Prime Minister was rude and silly. A bigger judgment call, his amputation of the part of HS2 that made the project viable, was baffling. The D-Day blunder was hard to forgive. And calling an early general election looks no less nutty a decision now than it did at the time. But the fact remains that over the past 18 months an atmosphere of looming chaos that had gathered around British government has lifted. Shrieks have been replaced by grumbles. And a fundamentally decent, stable, even admirable person has been in charge. When the dust has settled, and when Keir Starmer has demonstrated that there are not, after all, any obvious answers, Sunak will be judged more kindly.
And those 14 Tory years as a whole? A mixed performance, occasionally awful, often impressive, from which Britain emerges in one piece and (looking over one shoulder at politics on the European continent, and over the other at America) in reasonable shape. It’s time for a change, so let’s see if Labour can make it look easy.
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