The in-tray of horrors

‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards — and good luck!’ Liam Byrne will forever be haunted by the note he left on his desk for his successor in 2010. Both coalition parties made much of what was supposed to be a joke about the difficulties of keeping Whitehall spending in check. David Cameron waved the note around in his victorious 2015 election campaign. Byrne later said he was so embarrassed by his mistake that he considered throwing himself off a cliff.

There’s nothing funny about what Theresa May leaves on her desk for the next prime minister. Rather than just one pithy note, there’s a teetering, disorganised in-tray of decisions the Tory leader has been putting off. For three years, Britain has had a government that has been unable to govern, leaving what is perhaps the biggest pile-up of unfinished business ever created by a peacetime government.

Under May, a nuclear winter descended on UK policy-making. She seemed to think that the best way to tackle the ‘burning injustices’ she named on the steps of Downing Street in 2016 was to pour cold water not on the fire itself, but on any ideas her ministers came up with. At first, secretaries of state were impressed with the shift from chillaxed David Cameron, who didn’t understand the detail of the NHS reform his government was carrying out until it became an enormous political row. May was serious, asking for more information on every policy. Ministers liked this — until they realised she wasn’t really ensuring something was designed correctly. ‘She just wanted to prevaricate for as long as possible,’ says one. ‘Anything to avoid making a decision.’

All the unresolved problems have created opportunities for the leadership candidates. They’ve each picked an issue to grandstand about, hoping their suggested solution demonstrates what sort of Conservative they are.