Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring with a regularity that’s disturbing to those of us who can remember the prelapsarian age when we were the only people who gave a stuff about politics and that we were considered odd because of it.
The marked outlandishness of British party politics has been evident since that day in September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party. Followed closely by parliament’s inability to implement the referendum result, Theresa May’s manifesto massacre of 2017, the rise and fall of Boris Johnson, with a dollop of Covid and war in Europe on top, and the broadcast media screaming and clucking and gotcha-ing throughout, has made the country seem, at times, ungovernable. The events of the past fortnight have seen yet another crescendo in a frenzied symphony that never seems to stop.
Like most people, I suspect, the workings of the financial markets are something of a mystery; like the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster. When they panic I’m painfully aware that all I have to rely on are my prejudices and my tribal loyalties, weak as those are. I have no idea what a gilt market is, but then even people who do know what they are offer wildly contradictory takes. It’s a bit like overhearing a heated dispute in a language that you don’t speak.
Tory MPs have behaved like a herd of antelope at the sight of a lion on the horizon
I do, however, know about engaging with the public, at least as much as anyone can hope to. The truth must be delivered wisely. And it seems clear that the fiscal event was the worst sold thing since Coca Cola proudly unveiled ‘pure’ bottled water that turned out to have sprung from the municipal supply of Sidcup. Expecting the already busy and worried British populace not only to react rationally to counter-intuitive ideas but banking on them to take a long-term view, when your legions of enemies will spin them in the most negative, and clear, way possible seems suicidally optimistic.
The broadcasters reacted exactly as anybody except Truss and Kwarteng would have expected. They are horrified when anybody in government does something that Tony Blair would not have done in his first term. That is their factory settings for politics, as if those fleeting fool’s spring conditions could ever apply again. And it’s not as if the package was notably that extreme. Bizarre policies like lockdown school closures, the abolition of the category of sex, granting certain groups extra rights based on random immutable characteristics, etc: these just roll by, largely unexamined and subsumed into public life.
But did the squawking and whinnying among Tories help? I’d suggest not. My attitude to the Conservative party is like that of a miner to a shaky pit prop, rotted, wonky and worm-eaten, but it’s all you’ve got to prevent thousands of tons of dross and clinker descending to flatten you.
Tory MPs have behaved like a herd of antelope at the sight of a lion on the horizon. They are spooked and jumpy, and surprisingly active for people who are commonly said to be ‘exhausted’, but which I think really means bored. Liz Truss did pretty much what she said she was going to do, at length, again and again, throughout the summer. And she is, let’s put it politely, not renowned for her communication skills. Why were her MPs so taken aback?
My advice to Tory MPs, now they’ve got the tax U-turn, is this. Yes, it may all very well be going wrong. But for goodness sakes, let it be.
Yes, it would be very funny for people like me if you tried to defenestrate yet another leader. (And the seriously mooted idea of reinstalling Boris is even funnier – why stop there, dig up Bonar Law.) There is really nothing much you have to lose. You’ve tried everything else, doing the policy Hokey Cokey of austerity/massive public spending, firing thousands of police/hiring thousands of police, etc. You got rid of a leader who wanted to be loved, and replaced him with a leader who doesn’t care if she is hated. You did this. So accept it.
And losing your seats, would it be so bad? Look on the up side: you wouldn’t have to sit looking at Richard Burgon every day.
So let Truss be Truss. You made your bed. Lie in it.
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