After Liz Truss’s spectacular fall from power, it was hard to find Tories who were happy to admit to having supported her. ‘Trussonomics’ became a punchline. Most of her plans were scrapped, including, this week, her childcare proposals. But among the wreckage of the Truss experiment, there is one survivor who is willing to defend its principles, loudly and publicly. And now he’s waging a lonely fight on the backbenches.
‘If the leadership dramas have taught us anything, it is that a battle for the soul of the Tory party is under way’
Simon Clarke had little profile when he was a Treasury minister under Boris Johnson, but as Truss’s levelling up secretary he was one of the most vocal advocates of her ideas. When she was forced to abandon cutting the top rate of tax from 45p to 40p, Clarke deplored the U-turn. He is pro-growth, pro-enterprise and (he’d argue) pro-young. His side of the debate, he thinks, is being silenced in an overreaction to the failure of Truss’s premiership, which risks turning the Conservatives into the party of managed decline.
His new project is called Next Generation Conservatives. ‘It’s about the political sustainability of the Conservative electoral coalition,’ he says. Current polling is ‘nothing less than apocalyptic’ among the under-forties – just 15 per cent say they will vote Tory. Clarke, a millennial himself at just 38, fears that his party is retreating into a grey comfort zone. He believes long-term factors are more to blame for the collapse of public support than just September’s mini-Budget.
So what went wrong? ‘The bluntest answer would be that because we are so reliant on older voters we have at times done things unwisely which have dragged us too far over in our courting of the grey vote,’ he says. ‘If we are serious about giving people the chance to own a home, we’ve got to build some. If we’re serious about them accessing childcare, we should be addressing things like [staff-to-child] ratios and maybe the tax breaks.’ Truss recently ordered a review to increase the ratios which she felt were pushing the price of childcare to un-attainable levels. Rishi Sunak has just junked that review.
Before Truss, the Tories were about ten points behind Labour in the opinion polls. Now it’s closer to 20 per cent. Do her allies have to take some share of the blame? ‘Dreadful mistakes were made in those six weeks and I am not putting myself on a pedestal here. I bear my share of responsibility.’
But this does not mean he is sitting quietly. Barely a month after leaving government in October, he tabled an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill to overturn the ban on new onshore wind farms. ‘If we’re going to have some anti-growth amendments,’ he said, ‘we might as well have some pro-growth ones too.’ It was backed by both Johnson and Truss and prompted a government U-turn. Yet that came just 24 hours after ministers dropped compulsory house-building targets thanks to a rebellion led by Theresa Villiers and Bob Seely. The latter suggested that the term ‘Nimby’ ought to be seen as a badge of pride.
The Next Generation Conservatives eschew words like left and right, preferring instead to position themselves as a force for ‘pro-growth’ conservatism. For Clarke, it’s about ‘making sure that when it comes to those internal policy debates that inevitably arise that we aren’t allowing negative forces to organise without contention’. Clarke expects ‘dozens and dozens’ of colleagues to sign up in the coming months. So far, 11 have publicly announced (including the soon-to-be-ex-MP Matt Hancock).
Clarke served as Sunak’s deputy at the Treasury for ten months and calls him ‘one of the cleverest people you will ever meet’. He praises the ‘formidable minds’ of No. 10 chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith and policy aide Will Tanner but warns that restoring stability ‘can’t continue deep into 2023 – we don’t have time. There’s no point governing with the brakes on because we’ve only got two years until an election’. He continues: ‘We do need to be looking at those supply-side reforms that Liz was talking about and I know Rishi believes in this stuff because he’s an economic liberal at heart. There are always siren voices arguing for a much more cautious approach.’
Clarke fears that the Tory wets are starting to hold sway. ‘Perhaps the way the leadership election played out meant that much of Rishi’s support ended up coming from the One Nation wing of the party, which I frankly think is just so wrong on so many of these questions,’ he says. ‘It would be lovely if life was as basically comfortable as a lot of One Nationers would like it to be. But it isn’t, actually. You’ve got to fight for reform, you have to challenge status quos and vested interests. That means tough decisions.’
By being a ‘bit more radical’, he says, Truss attracted the reformers in the Tory party. A lot of the people who drifted to Rishi were ‘almost by self-definition’ more cautious – so Sunak, a radical, ended up being the candidate of the anti-radicals. ‘Rishi, I know, is actually a pretty radical and brave policymaker underneath. I really want that side of the Prime Minister to win out.’
The fight, he believes, is on. ‘If the leadership dramas of the past year have taught us anything, it is that a battle for the soul of the Tory party is under way. I am not a conservative: I am a Thatcherite, really. That’s what I’ve come to realise this past 12 months. There is a form of conservatism which is just about the literal business of conserving the status quo. That’s not why I’m in politics.’
But do the Tories want to hear more from the Trussketeers? ‘I always try to be very humble. Liz hasn’t been wading out there, shooting from the hip like John Wayne,’ he says. ‘I don’t think there’s a lack of acceptance that we got the balance wrong. I just think that there is a real risk that with Liz’s eclipse comes the wider rejection of an entire school of Tory thinking. We don’t have time for that. We do not have time for this to be the 1970s again.’
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