Sunday Roundup: Mordaunt refuses to give policy details

Penny Mordaunt – ‘I’m not being drawn into the detail’

Penny Mordaunt found herself in an awkward position this morning as she faced off against Laura Kuenssberg. With a lot of ground to make up before nominations close for the Conservative party leadership on Monday, Mordaunt’s interview could well serve as a crucial moment in the success or failure of her campaign. Kuenssberg repeatedly asked her for some (indeed, any) details on spending pledges, but unfortunately her answers proved to be light on content:

Steve Baker – Boris Johnson would be ‘a guaranteed disaster’

Meanwhile, if Boris Johnson thought that MPs would be rolling out the red carpet for him as he raced back from his holiday in the Dominican Republic, he had another thing coming. The contest is still very much open, and the former Prime Minister appears to be trailing his former Chancellor for nominations, of which he would need 100 to go forward to a ballot of party members. Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister whose time at the head of the European Research Group has assured his enduring influence, explained to Sophy Ridge why he was endorsing Rishi Sunak over Boris:

Eurosceptics may ‘implode the government’ over Northern Ireland policy

Baker also stressed that maintaining the government’s current policy towards the Northern Ireland Protocol was of critical importance to his wing of the Conservative party, and threatened to put the next leader in the same place as Liz Truss if things changed:

Jacob Rees-Mogg – Boris made ‘fundamental achievements’

The former Prime Minister still has some stalwarts in his camp, one of whom is the Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg. Kuenssberg challenged Rees-Mogg to put the case for Boris V2:

Keir Starmer – There will be ‘tough choices’ on taxes and spending

The Labour leader Keir Starmer also made an appearance, telling Kuenssberg that future Labour voters should not expect a land of milk and honey if Labour prove the pollsters right:

The momentum is with Sunak now

Rishi Sunak has now formally declared that he is running to be Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party. In a statement released online, he says he is running to ‘fix our economy, unite our party and deliver for our country’. With well over 100 backers, Sunak — who I should say I have known for years — is guaranteed to be on the ballot on Monday. This morning, sources close to Boris Johnson have been emphasising that he is going for it too, even though he isn’t yet formally declared. This suggests that there’ll be no joint ticket between the two men. The pair met last night, but nothing has come out about the meeting.  

Sunak’s lead in public endorsements by MPs is clear: he has 132 to Johnson’s 59. Following the backing of Kemi Badenoch last night and Steve Baker this morning, he has just picked up the support of the Home Secretary Grant Shapps — the man who ran the numbers for Boris Johnson’s last leadership bid. Johnson has picked up former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s support. But with Sunak gaining 22 new supporters in the last 24 hours to Johnson’s 4, it is clear that the momentum is currently with Sunak.

The attention now shifts to whether Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt (who has 25 public declarations) can meet the nomination threshold of 100 MPs. The Guido Fawkes spreadsheet puts him on 75 – thanks to 16 anonymous backers verified by Guido. With over 60 percent of Tory MPs publicly declared, Mordaunt will need to put on some pace to reach the ballot.   

It is worth remembering that if only two candidates get 100 candidates, the MPs will still vote – so the membership will know exactly who the preferred candidate of the parliamentary party is, and by what margin. It’s being assumed that Johnson is the member’s favourite, but that’s down to multi-candidate polling and even Tory members might hesitate to impose on MPs a Prime Minister that most of them do not want (and who would have lost a no confidence ballot this summer). The Tories can have an election as late as January 2025 if they want: so how viable would it be to foist upon Tory MPs a leader who was not the majority choice?

Zahawi’s Johnson U-turn

So much has happened over the last few months, that perhaps Nadhim Zahawi should be forgiven for a slight lapse in memory. The Tory MP, and former chancellor, has this morning come out to back Boris Johnson to become leader of the Conservative party and prime minister again. Zahawi wrote on Twitter:

That’s strange. Has Zahawi forgotten what he, er, also wrote on Twitter back in July, when, after just over a day in the Treasury, he threatened to resign from Boris Johnson’s government? No bother. Mr S can remind the onetime Tory leadership hopeful:

Yesterday, I made clear to the Prime Minister alongside my colleagues in No10 that there was only one direction where this was going, and that he should leave with dignity’, Zahawi wrote in a statement back in the bygone era of July 2022. ‘I am heartbroken that he hasn’t listened and that he is now undermining the incredible achievements of this Government at this late hour.

He continued to argue, quite persuasively, that ‘the country deserves a government that is not only stable, but which acts with integrity.’ So the PM who Zahawi said wouldn’t ‘leave with dignity’ back in the summer, was actually, apparently now told with the benefit of hindsight, ‘contrite.’ Once ‘undermining’, now ‘honest about his mistakes.’

Mr S would love to know what’s changed, but perhaps Mr Zahawi has forgotten that too…

CCHQ scramble for membership ballots

Action stations! It’s go go go this weekend as the old campaign vehicles crank into life once more. Are you (still) ready for Rishi? A Boris backer? Or a Mordaunt man? As the three candidates scramble around to tot up their tallies of parliamentary supporters, a rather different madcap muddle is happening in associations across the country. For those whizz kids at CCHQ – Tory high command to you and me – are in something of a pickle.

Up to 20,000 members lack an email address which mean they will be unable to vote in a membership vote, if the indicative vote tomorrow night fails to persuade one candidate to stand down. A 36-hour race is now on then to track down every offline member and try to establish an alternative way for them to vote. CCHQ are currently coordinating telephone canvassing sessions tonight and tomorrow to reach out to these grassroot Tories, with association chairmen being given huge Excel sheets and being asked to get on the phone as soon as possible.

A national task force of volunteers is currently being recruited to assist in this, with associations told to only get volunteers who have not endorsed a candidate and are choosing to stay neutral. Some associations are going round knocking on members’ doors this weekend to collect contact details, with one London district alone having more than 125 members without an email address.

Looks like it’s not just the MPs in Westminster who have a sleepless night ahead of them…

Why is Macron’s foreign policy such a mess?

Last Sunday I marched through Paris with tens of thousands of disgruntled Frenchmen and women. I was there to observe, not holler and sing like those around me, a mix of Socialists, Communists and Greens. They had much that they wanted to get off their chest: the cost of living, ‘climate inaction’, the war in Ukraine, the state of the health system and their opposition to social security reform.

On Thursday it was the right who marched in Paris, led by Éric Zemmour, on the streets to voice their anger about the horrific murder of a 12-year-old in Paris. They see it as symptomatic of an immigration system they claim is broken.

Throw in a month-long strike by oil refinery workers that has caused huge queues at petrol stations, and the prospect of further industrial action by rail staff and nuclear plant workers, and it’s evident that France is beset by deep social and economic strife.

None of this would unduly worry Emmanuel Macron who, after all, saw off the gilet jaunes movement four years ago, were it not for the fact that his global credibility also appears to be on the slide.

Macron was scheduled to meet Olaf Scholz in Fontainebleau next Wednesday for the annual Franco-German ministerial council, the first since the new German chancellor replaced Angela Merkel, but it has been pushed back to January. It is reported that there are significant and bitter divisions in energy and defence policies.

Macron is said to be particularly aggrieved after Germany unveiled a €200 billion domestic energy support scheme without consulting him. French noses were also put out of joint in March when Scholz announced that it would modernise its airforce with American F-35 combat aircraft rather than developing the European alternative, the SCAF jet-fighter. The latest row is over the European missile defence shield, which has crystallised tensions between the two nations. According to an Élysée spokesman, France is ‘attached to the construction of a strategic autonomy’, and Germany (along with several Eastern European countries) wish to grow within a Nato led by the US.

This contretemps is not a surprise to the French media, which in recent years has been increasingly critical of the lop-sided nature of the Franco-German couple. As one prominent magazine put it last year, for how much longer will France tolerate being ‘fleeced’ by the Germans, whose European policy is predicated on what’s best for Germany?

When Macron was elected to office in 2017, he was lauded by globalists still in shock after the victory of Trump and Brexit. They overlooked the fact that here was a man with scant political experience. He was an investment banker before joining François Hollande’s staff in 2012.

Macron is not only politically callow but he has character flaws that have exposed his inexperience, his vanity, his arrogance and his temper. One of his first acts on becoming president in May 2017 was to sack his chief of staff, General Pierre de Villiers, after a row about the defence budget. Macron announced an €850m cut to military finances. When de Villiers vigorously protested he was removed. ‘I am the boss’, the then 39 year-old president told the 60-year-old general.

De Villers’ successor, François Lecointre, resigned unexpectedly last year, reportedly because of disagreements with Macron about his decision to withdraw French troops from Mali, where they had been fighting Islamic insurgents since 2013. One newspaper described Lecointre’s resignation as a ‘bitter departure’, adding: ‘Sometimes, the armed forces and their entourage are exasperated by French diplomats’ lack of creativity and extreme prudence.’

If the military regard the diplomatic corps as light on initiative, Macron’s beef is that they’re too elitist. With that in mind, in April this year he announced that the 800-strong diplomatic corps would be merged into a larger body of senior civil servants. ‘With this reform, we will create a more concentrated, more diversified hub of civil servants,’ said a government spokesman. The diplomat corps went on strike in protest, and 500 of their number wrote to Le Monde, warning: ‘We risk the disappearance of our professional diplomacy… it is the very existence of the ministry that is now being put into question.’

Some diplomats claimed Macron’s move was motivated less by elitism and more by control. Gérard Araud, a former ambassador to the US, suggested the reform would mean that the ‘door is now open to American-style nominations’ – in other words, appointing friends, donors and allies to key diplomatic positions.

The dispute underlines the diplomatic and military tensions that have emerged during Macron’s presidency, and these are reflected in France’s diminished standing in the world.  

The French generally approved of Macron’s negotiations with Vladimir Putin in February in a bid to avert a war with Ukraine. It made them feel that the Republic still had clout and wasn’t merely an insignificant member of the US-led Nato; but the talks ended in embarrassing failure and the French didn’t like that.

In a desperate bid to stay relevant, Macron has only revealed his inexperience, vacillating between robust support for Ukraine and mooting more peace talks with Putin. If this has irritated his Nato allies, so has his recent declaration in a TV interview that in the event that Putin used tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, France would not respond in kind.

Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace accused Macron of ‘revealing his hand’, and some of the French media also criticised their president for his lack of ambiguity. In an interview with Le Figaro, Bruno Tertrais, a specialist in nuclear strategy at the Foundation for Strategic Research, compared Macron’s answer with François Mitterrand’s in 1986 when asked how France would respond in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on West Germany. ‘He refused to answer, saying among other things that it would mean that deterrence had failed, etc,’ explained Tertrais. ‘I think Emmanuel Macron should have said that he refuses to enter this game… without being more precise.’

Nowhere is France’s reduced status in the world more apparent than in Africa where, according to an article this month in Mondafrique by the veteran French reporter Leslie Varenne, ‘the days of the “policeman of Africa” are definitely over.’

Leaving aside Macron’s clumsy dealings with Algeria (last year president Abdelmadjid Tebboune accused his French counterpart of ‘reopening an old conflict in a totally unnecessary way’, it is in sub-Saharan Africa where Macron has stoked the greatest discord.  

This year there have been violent anti-French demonstrations in Mali, Niger, Chad and Burkina Faso. The latter were particularly disturbing, involving attacks on the French embassy.

Russia helped foment the trouble in Burkina Faso by enabling Captain Ibrahim Traoré to seize power last month in a coup, and the Wagner Group of mercenaries has been prominent in Africa for a number of years. But Vladimir Putin has been able to gain a foothold in Africa because of strategic mistakes by France stretching back to 2008 when, under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, France began to reduce its military presence in Africa. The next year France re-joined Nato’s military command structure after an absence of 43 years and this decision, says Varenne, has ‘contributed to the degradation of its image on the Continent.’ 

France then took part in the ill-conceived Nato-led coalition intervention in Libya in 2011, removing Colonel Gaddafi and throwing the region into a chaos that persists 11 years later. As a result, France came to be seen by Africa no longer not as an independent nation, a bridge between the Europe and Africa, but part of the colonialist West.

France’s image has further deteriorated because they have turned a blind eye, or tacitly supported, what Varenne describes as ‘juntas’ in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso and Guinea. The people in these countries blame France for ‘the support given to presidents who are illegitimate in the eyes of their populations…these practices make the people who aspire to democracy despair.’ 

Under Macron, France has been a failure in Africa diplomatically and militarily. ‘For many, the French army that arrived in Mali in 2013 was going to solve the problem quickly,’ said Djakaridia Siribié, a journalist for Burkino Faso paper Sidwaya. Instead Macron withdrew his troops, angering not just his military leaders but also sending a message to Africa that France is not the power it once was. So they are looking elsewhere, to Russia, Turkey, China and India, all of whom are expanding their interests in the Continent.

Varenne also claims that Macron’s strategic errors have even left him isolated within the EU, because ‘member states such as Italy, Germany and Spain do not wish to pay for the mistakes of Paris in the Sahel… thus the EU is looking for a way to re-establish good relations with Mali after France’s departure.’

When Macron was re-elected for a second term in April he declared in his victory speech that ‘France must make its voice heard, show the clarity of its choices, and build its strength in all areas. And we will do it.’

Six months later, there is confusion, not clarity; weakness, not strength. Macron’s people are on the street protesting and France’s allies are questioning his reliability.

On hearing of Liz Truss’s resignation on Thursday afternoon, Macron expressed his hope that ‘stability’ could soon return to Britain. France could do with some stable governance of its own.

Does Boris really deserve a second chance?

The original fans of Boris Johnson feel a special kind of disappointment about his disastrous premiership. He’s the best campaigner of his generation, he governed London well, his superpower is to find and devolve to brilliant people who can implement a vision of liberal conservatism that he articulated over a 20-year career.

Judge him, we’d argue, by his achievements. That’s what we argued in 2019, anyway. If we judge him by his record in No. 10, it was one not just of disaster – but of doing the precise opposite of what he promised. As we argued in The Spectator, he was becoming the very prime minister that, as a journalist, he warned us about. That’s why, as I argue in today’s Sunday Telegraph, I cannot cheer him on this time.

Yes, lockdown hijacked his premiership. But events hijack every premiership: leaders are distinguished by how they respond. Johnson had an ability to take bets, get things right. He and Ben Wallace fought the Ministry of Defence establishment over arming Ukraine before anyone else; his vaccine taskforce format worked superbly and was a success admired the world over.

But against this, we must balance his drawbacks. He spoke about how he wanted low taxes but spent like a drunken Keynesian: the absurdly unaffordable Net Zero, defending HS2. I wrote a cover story attacking his plan to tax ordinary workers to protect the inheritance of the rich via care home subsidy. He refused to accept a choice between high spending and low taxes, leaving us with massive debt and high taxes.

His sheer disorganisation meant he was pushed around by others and shouted down by illiberal voices: hence the high spending and those lockdowns. A social and economic calamity, one from which the country will never properly recover. And yes, almost every country locked down – to an extent. But how many countries locked down longer or harder than Britain? And how many countries sustained more economic damage? That explains the mess we’re in: under a mountain of debt, suffering low growth with a workforce that never recovered to its former size. The moneyprinting used to finance lockdown left us with inflation, as Mervyn King explained this morning. Johnson took a “see no evil” approach during lockdown, refusing to commission a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are hard to find but the costs confront us daily. Johnson has a lot of apologising to do. His vaccine procurement success was, in the end, squandered because he kept Britain locked down anyway.

So yes, he gets points for managing the vaccine programme: that’s his swashbuckling good side. But his failure to convert this success into earlier reopening – due to his inability to challenge the pro-lockdown voices around him – blunted this success. If he’s going to get out-argued by people with bad ideas, what’s the point of having good ideas?

The hassle of managing the coalitions involved in a parliamentary democracy proved too much for him. He had a (huge) personal mandate in City Hall – and acted as if he had one in No. 10. But that’s not the way our system works. His hoarding of power in Downing Street might have worked had it been a cauldron of great ideas, but it wasn’t. The appalling banning of protest; the chilling censorship laws outlined in the Online Safety Bill; the highest tax burden in 72 years; they all formed a pattern of illiberal Conservatism. That became his trademark. What he did was the opposite of what he promised. His advisers peeled away, one by one, in recognition of this grim reality.

When he was all set to impose vaccine passports, The Spectator ran a page in the magazine listing all the times that Boris the Journalist warned against power-grabbing PMs who exaggerated threats to force us to carry identity cards. To me, that the 180th degree of the U-turn; this was the sign that the Boris revolution had failed, this was his equivalent of crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion. Johnson the writer had campaigned harder than anyone else against Tony Blair’s appalling identity cards – saying he’d sooner eat one than produce one. And when Blair was back, again pushing vaccine IDs – an even more intrusive version of his original idea – he found Johnson as his useful idiot. And yes, I revere my predecessor as a writer and remain in awe of his hugely successful editorship. But did he expect The Spectator to cheer him on as he implemented the very things that – when he was editor – the magazine had campaigned against? We regularly held up his own words against him asking: what had he become? And why?

I wrote a Telegraph column saying that as a writer (again) he would be in a position to explain all of this. Did he, in No. 10, think his old ideas were naive, unviable or anachronistic? Has he joined the big-state fatalists who think the demographic and protectionist forces give us no other option than to have a massive government, 50 per cent bigger, even, than in the Blair years? Or did he not change his mind but rather found himself under-resourced to make the change? Or will he just enter denial, gloss over lockdown, and repeat his old refrain that there are good times just around the corner?

Here’s what I keep coming back to: what are the rational reasons to expect that Johnson V2 will be any better than Johnson V1? I have no animus toward him. I continue to like and admire him and think of his political career as historic: the Brexit vote; vanquishing Corbynism and more. His books alone would be enough of a legacy, set aside his ground-breaking political journalism. He is one of the most consequential writers and politicians of our times. But as prime minister, his flaws overpowered his benefits – and his attempt to apply a presidential model to parliamentary democracy undid him. A political disaster movie has been rewound, with the Tory finger again hovering over the ‘play’ button. It’s time to press eject instead. Boris’s friends and enemies know how this movie ends. Please, let’s not watch it again.

Steve Baker backs Sunak

What a year it’s been for Steve Baker. Fresh from leading rebellions over Brexit and Covid, the Wycombe MP joined the revolt against Boris Johnson, briefly mulled a bid to replace him before getting on board the Truss train, becoming a Northern Ireland minister and issuing an apology for the UK’s behaviour in Brexit. Now, he’s back at the centre of it all again, using an appearance on Sky today to come out and back Rishi Sunak.

He told Sophy Ridge that Boris Johnson would be ‘guaranteed disaster’ because of the investigation into whether he misled Commons: ‘It’s a guaranteed nailed on failure. We cannot allow it to happen. I’m not willing to lay down my integrity.’ Baker added that ‘If Boris is in charge his premiership will implode and we’ll be back here… it’s just too easy for his opponents to absolutely make hay over this.’

While Baker’s wariness of a Johnson restoration is no surprise, it is interesting that such a key figure within the European Research Group is willing to support Sunak. Last time the ERG were key in getting Truss over the line into the final two, having first backed Suella Braverman and then transferred most of her 30 votes over. Unlike last time, there seems no ‘unite the right’ initiative – something that should spell trouble for one B Johnson…

Would a Boris-Rishi pact work?

There is generally a basic problem to be overcome whenever somebody suggests two competing political egos come together to campaign on a ‘joint ticket’ – one of them has to be the boss.

There is only one vacancy being fought over by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and it cannot be subject to a job share. It is not, after all, the political editorship of the Guardian at stake here, but prime minister of the United Kingdom.

It can be surmised that Sunak and Johnson will have had very different ideas about what a pact between them might look like when they met last night for extensive talks.

Sunak will likely have favoured himself occupying No. 10, with Johnson either supporting him from the backbenches or serving again as foreign secretary, with extra authority to shape the agenda on the war in Ukraine. ‘I’ll deal with the home front, you bestride the global stage, together we’ll be unbeatable.’

Johnson will surely have had a different outcome in mind: him back in Downing Street and Sunak as deputy PM with an enhanced role implementing the domestic agenda at a time when, in the immortal words of Labour former chief secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne, ‘there is no money’.

In the end, the details of such arrangements are little more than window dressing. The core issue is that whoever becomes PM can sack whoever doesn’t and that will make him a lot more than first among equals.

Sunak, acting with Johnson’s blessing, would appear to have the better chance of running a stable administration that can start digging Britain out of its post-Covid financial hole, given his large lead in overall nominations and especially among the experienced ministerial class of MPs.

Yet Johnson, back in the hot seat with Sunak’s support, would give the Tories the best chance of staving off the clamour for an early general election – given the unexpired mandate won from the British public under his leadership in 2019.

Whichever figure comes out on top, he will find himself struggling to keep to the spirit of the platform the Tories fought on in that campaign, with its emphasis on higher spending on public services such as defence and the NHS and upon infrastructure-driven ‘levelling up’ investment. In the words of one former minister: ‘It’s going to be bloody and awful and indeed bloody awful for whoever is in charge.’

Perhaps Johnson presiding over a new burst of austerity and seeking to limit its scale would go down less badly in the red wall seats that turned Tory three years ago than Sunak the billionaire overseeing savage public spending cuts from the deck of the new heated swimming pool at his mansion in North Yorkshire.

On the other hand, the wise counsel of Boris’s friends, such as Charles Moore, is telling him to sit this one out. They say Rishi has a more suitable ‘skill set’ to face the current predicament, and can keep intact the fragile confidence of financial markets.

What appears certain is that neither man can have a successful premiership without the goodwill of the other. Should Sunak and all the other ministers who resigned from the Johnson administration in July refuse to serve under him in November, Johnson would be left in charge of a mixed-ability fan club of frontbenchers rather than a sensible government. But were Johnson to view a Sunak premiership gracelessly, the narrative of betrayal would infect his relationship with his party.

If Johnson really can get 100 nominations from Tory MPs, as his supporters insist that he can, then he has the bigger call to make. Despite all of Sunak’s momentum, and after securing the support of grassroots darlings like Kemi Badenoch, few would bet against Boris winning a members’ ballot.

But putting the Big Dog on a short leash – imposed by bond and currency traders while the entire non-Tory media takes daily pot shots – hardly seems like a recipe for success.

Does he really want to fight Sunak to the last, just to lead through a tricky period with depleted stocks of political capital? Wouldn’t the risk of it all turning into a disaster – in Parliament, across Whitehall, on the financial markets – be too great to make this a sensible course?

Then again, there is always the question of whether his ambition still burns so fiercely that he can do no other. As the scorpion is fabled to have said while stinging the frog upon whose back he was hitching a ride across treacherous waters: ‘It’s in my nature.’

The Tories have no good options

As the Conservative party holds its third leadership contest in four years, Britain is not experiencing déjà vu; we’re just stuck on square one. The three frontrunners consist of the previous contest’s runners-up, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson, the man they previously deposed. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the Conservative party lost its marbles a long way back.

These candidates have already been tested and found wanting. Penny Mordaunt is still a Labour politician in blue clothing, a living representative of your HR department’s moral values and political purpose while still willing to flip between trendy views and crude jokes on trans issues in order to cadge a few extra votes.

Rishi Sunak is still the candidate who walked into the contest expecting a coronation and disintegrated at the first serious opposition. If you are finding yourself struggling with the debating skills and charisma of Liz Truss, politics may not be quite your thing. It’s also worth remembering that Rishi’s essential flaws still remain: Truss’s attempt to announce tax cuts before the policies that would pay for them backfired spectacularly, but Sunak is still the representative of a Treasury orthodoxy that has seen Britain experience a decade and more of economic stagnation.

And as for Boris Johnson, he is still Toad of Toad Hall. He will apologise and claim to have learned his lesson. He will be very contrite. He will be charming, funny, and promise not to do it again. And then, poop poop! He has, once already, alienated his MPs and the public, refused to do anything meaningfully conservative, squandered and whittled away his majority, and insisted that economic growth comes from the government announcing a new policy for levelling up.

Part of the problem is the Conservative party itself, which is now running desperately short of talent. The first wave of losses followed in the wake of the Brexit vote, as the Remain-backing grandees left or turned to the backbenches, ineligible to lead. A second such wave followed as Theresa May’s government sank beneath the burden of implementing the result. After six years of infighting and bleeding talent, there are few candidates who are both talented enough to be prime minister, whose reputations are sufficiently intact to qualify them, and who can command the loyalty of enough MPs to have a chance of meaningfully governing.

Whoever takes over, it looks as though the Conservatives are royally screwed at the next election. If they can engineer an economic boom, then maybe they can hold on to a good chunk of their current seats. But the tight timeframes and the lack of party cohesion needed to actually push meaningful reforms through seems to indicate that this isn’t on the table.

The 2024 election is already almost certainly a write-off. In some ways, this is (if you squint hard enough) almost an opportunity. It’s rare that a party has enough seats to make serious changes without being constrained by the tantalising possibility of holding onto power in the next election. If they really wanted to, the Conservatives could do quite a lot of good for the country by passing unpopular but badly needed reforms now, taking the blow and then, later on, the credit. 

Unfortunately, the reasonable objection that individual MPs would quite like to remain employed means that this won’t happen. Instead, the leadership contest is an exercise in damage limitation; what’s best for the party? As things are, appointing Penny is an exercise in attempting to outflank Labour from the left, while returning Boris would make the party look even less competent than it already does. That leaves Sunak as the least bad option.

Has Cambridge abandoned debate?

My views on gender identity are well known. I believe that biology, rather than a person’s feelings, determines whether they count as a man or woman. My arguments support what many instinctively believe to be true. However, in academic circles, the idea that biology informs gender is far more contentious. So contentious that respected academics have denounced me as ‘offensive, insulting and hateful’.

I am due to speak at an event next week. The philosophy professor Arif Ahmed invited me to talk about my work on gender identity. The discussion is due to be held at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, although it is not an official event put on by the college authorities. This has clearly upset senior members of the college. The idea of a writer discussing her work is, it seems, too dreadful a possibility for these academics. The master of the college, along with a senior tutor, have written the following email to graduates and undergraduates:

Subject: A message regarding Criticising gender-identity ideology: what happens when speech is silenced, 25 OctoberWe are responding to concerns raised with us by members of Caius about the 25 October event here featuring Helen Joyce. We are writing in our personal capacities, not as Master and Senior Tutor but as Pippa and Andrew.Freedom of expression is a fundamental principle which we wholeheartedly support. Individuals should be able to speak freely, within the law. Views should then be challenged by debate, key in academic freedom. This is the case no matter the subject or topic.However, on some issues which affect our community we cannot stay neutral. The event featuring Helen Joyce is not a College event, although it is taking place at Caius. We do not condone or endorse views that Helen Joyce has expressed on transgender people, which we consider offensive, insulting and hateful to members of our community who live and work here.Caius should be a place for the highest quality of research to be produced and discussed, rather than polemics.We will not be attending the event. The College has already made a statement to the media.We have worked hard and we will continue to strive to make Caius an inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows. We feel events such as this do not contribute to this aim.Best wishes,Pippa [Rogerson] and Andrew [Spencer]

This is what those who go against the new orthodoxies face; the idea that we should be able to discuss and challenge each other’s arguments is gone. The academic commitment to fair-minded debate is over. Instead, Caius residents have been presented with an ignorant and insulting characterisation of me. My work is dismissed as ‘polemics’ and the authors of this message insist that they ‘will not be attending the event’ in an email that they must have known would go public.

I am used to people who should know better­ – people with high-profile posts in great academic institutions – making a show of defending free speech, open debate and academic standards out of one side of their mouths even as they say ‘however’ out of the other. This is the fate of everyone who, like me, refuses to be frightened off discussing the baleful impacts of gender-identity ideology on vulnerable groups, including women, children and same-sex attracted people.

The reason that ordinary people like me have had to stick their necks out and force proper consideration of changes in the law and institutional rules is because of the utter failure of people like this. It’s because the very people who should be brave – the people whose job it is to hold space for free speech, and to ensure that their students are inculcated in the culture of academic freedom – have turned out to be cowards.

They say that they work hard to make Caius an ‘inclusive, diverse and welcoming home for our students, staff and Fellows’, and that my event ‘will not contribute to this aim’. How inclusive and welcoming do they think this sort of shunning makes their college feel to students, staff and fellows who care about sex-based rights? To those who want to attend my talk, but are frightened that there will be protests, enabled by their unwillingness to give unqualified support for free speech? To women who understand their identities are based on biology, not tired sexist stereotypes? To the people – and some do still exist in Cambridge; even if these two don’t hear from them, I do – who still care about the highest ideals of academia, and watch despairingly as it is shredded?

If they truly think that I, and what I say, is so awful, surely they should come along and point out my errors? Why not tell me to my face that I’m offensive, insulting and hateful? Why not critique my book and tell the world what I have got wrong? Instead, they have given license to the little totalitarians who wish to see me silenced rather than debated.

I’m sure they have read 1984. I often think about the moment when Winston, while being tortured, cries out: ‘Do it to Julia!’ They know that if they do not kowtow to the new identitarian orthodoxy, their students might turn on them. They would rather see anger taken out on me because, I think, they are afraid of their own students.

This is a version of an open letter to Pippa Rogerson and Andrew Spencer at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

The mystery of the Hu Jintao incident

A steward tries to lift Hu Jintao from his seat, but Hu doesn’t want to move. The former Communist party leader is sitting to the left of current boss Xi Jinping, and he reaches out to take Xi’s notes, but Xi moves Hu’s hand away and takes back the papers. The world’s cameras follow every move, as Hu is eventually raised to his feet. There are two stewards now, one holding him firmly under the arm, the other gesturing for him to leave. But Hu is clearly reluctant to go, leaning over and saying something to an impassive-looking Xi, who nods and gives a brief reply to Hu without looking directly at him. Hu then taps the shoulder of Premier Li Keqiang, who is sitting on Xi’s right. Li looks uneasy, turning briefly to watch Hu being ushered from the hall.

By the standards of Communist party meetings, this is high drama. Communist party get-togethers are usually tightly choreographed events, scripted well in advance and with very little left to chance. Much of the congress took place behind closed doors, but the spectacle of Hu’s apparent expulsion from the hall took place at the closing session of the congress Saturday, in the full glare of television cameras. As is usual practice, journalists had been let in to film the finale, and what a finale it was.

What exactly does it mean? Hu, 79-years old, was Xi’s immediate predecessor. He was easy to spot in the hall, one of the few on the leadership benches with grey hair – black hair dye is usually de rigueur among the old party elite. He looked confused, unsteady on his feet, leading to speculation that he might be ill, that it was possibly some kind of medical emergency. He had reportedly looked frail earlier in the congress, only able to walk with assistance.

Others have speculated that it was a very symbolic power play, a very public purge. The week-long congress has given Xi an unprecedented third term in power and cemented his grip on the party. He has stacked the party’s top decision-making bodies with his loyalists. But it is impossible to know what was said behind closed doors – and what, if any, role Hu played in those discussions. Hu’s time in office was very different from that of Xi’s, characterised by a far more collective form of leadership, one that Xi has now swept away. Was the physical removal of a man who represented an earlier era, a cruel but symbolic gesture by Xi? The problem with that theory is that the party rarely airs its dirty linen in public.

Xi’s preferred method of removing rivals is via anti-corruption investigations, using a fig leaf of legality as a cover for purging those he sees as threatening his rule. In the run-up to the congress, he targeted China’s internal security apparatus, even removing top officials who had been his enforcers earlier in his leadership.

It is true that former top leaders can be a troublesome species. Just days before the congress, China’s oldest retired Communist party leader appeared to take a swipe at Xi. One-hundred-and-five-year-old Song Ping set tongues wagging in Beijing after saying in a video that reform and opening are ‘the only path to the development and progress of contemporary China’. Xi is abandoning that path, tightening the party’s grip on every aspect of life and turning the party into an instrument of aggressive ethnic nationalism. Another potential irritant, Jiang Zemin, the Communist party boss before Hu Jintao, is now 96 years old and did not make an appearance at the congress.

Hu’s very public removal from the hall will no doubt be fodder for China watchers worldwide as they try to understand the party’s opaque ways. Perhaps Hu is just ill and took a nasty turn; that is certainly what Xinhua, China’s state news agency, hinted at on Saturday, tweeting that Hu had insisted on being present, ‘despite the fact that he has been taking time out to recuperate recently’. All the same, it was highly humiliating for Hu and at the very least it is highly symbolic of the vast change in China’s governance since he was in charge. Interestingly, Hu’s son, Hu Haifeng, the party secretary of Lishui in Zhejiang province, was in the audience as he is also a delegate to the congress. If his father is in political trouble, then it will probably embroil his family – such is the nature of party vindictiveness. Young Hu’s future will be watched for clues about his father.

Look beyond the immediate action in the video clips and the massed ranks of the party faithful are sitting to attention and following every move. They look like they can hardly believe what is going on, and beyond their Covid masks there is shock and disbelief – and perhaps that is exactly as Xi would have it.

Is the Boris campaign losing momentum?

Is the Boris campaign losing momentum? The former prime minister’s supporters had briefed journalists that Johnson has 100 MPs backing him so can enter the race should he wish to. But the number of MPs who have publicly backed Johnson is much lower at 59, vs Rishi Sunak’s 131 (and a lonely 24 for Penny Mordaunt). That means either there are a lot of Boris backers who are very shy – or that the claim is inaccurate and he’s facing an uphill struggle to hit the threshold.

Johnson supporters have been keen to suggest that the bulk of Sunak’s support comes from the left of the party – ergo meaning Sunak can’t be a unifier. But there are signs that this is changing. Lord Frost, his former ally, has endorsed Sunak as Steve Baker and David Davis, both arch Brexiteers. The Spectator’s Charles Moore has written a piece for the Telegraph saying now is the time for Sunak rather than Johnson. This evening Tory rising star and darling of the grassroots Kemi Badenoch has said she is supporting Sunak, who officially declared he candidacy this morning. This is notable as during the summer leadership contest, he was a key supporter of Mordaunt (who doesn’t look as if she’ll hit the 100 needed to qualify).

Remember, about 150 MPs have not declared: their votes will have to go somewhere, so it’s still possible that Johnson has 100 MPs backing him. The European Research Group meets on Monday to discuss who they will back. If Johnson hits 100 and reaches the membership, his supporters believe the Tory grassroots will back him over Sunak. Suella Braverman is expected to endorse a candidate tomorrow – if, as rumoured, that candidate is Boris Johnson then it will give him a boost. Nadhim Zahawi, who only a few months ago asked Boris to resign for the sake of the country, now wants him back.

But what is increasingly clear is that Johnson’s comeback is failing to convince some of the people who he would have hoped to have rallied behind him. If Johnson does push on with his bid and find a way back to 10 Downing Street, he will have to govern a party where many of the MPs do not support his return. It’s why some are asking whether Johnson could choose not to push – senior Tories are urging him to come to an agreement with Sunak for the good of the party. However, after meeting with the former chancellor last night, there is little sign that Johnson plans to step aside. He has told his supporters this morning that he will keep going as he is the only candidate with a democratic mandate. Johnson will not go without a fight.

Ellwood’s endorsement backfires

It was all going so well for Rishi. With a hundred MPs in the bag, Sunak looks to be the only candidate who will cruise through to the final round on Monday unlike his struggling rivals. But has Tobias Ellwood managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory once again? The chairman of the defence select committee announced his endorsement for Sunak last night, declaring on Twitter that:

The free mkt experiment is over – it’s been a low point in our party’s great history. The reset begins. Time for centrist, stable, fiscally responsible government offering credible domestic and international leadership. Honoured to be the 100th Tory MP to support.

Such an endorsement could almost have been penned by Team Boris wanting to stoke conspiracy theories about Sunak’s lack of ‘soundness’ and ‘conviction.’ It seems someone from team Sunak has now pointed out to Ellwood that his endorsement might not have been the helpful intervention that he thought it was. He has now deleted his tweet, just hours after posting it.

For a Lieutenant Colonel, he does seem quite the fan of a major error…

Does Boris really have 100 MPs?

Does Boris have the numbers? That’s the question all Westminster is asking today. There’s been much excitement about an anonymous briefing that seems to have gone out to half the parliamentary press gallery. BBC Pol Ed Chris Mason quotes a source close to Boris Johnson as claiming that he has ‘now has more than 100 backers and so could be on the ballot if he chooses to be’.

The interesting word there is ‘could’. According to Coffee House’s own list here Johnson has 54 public backers as of 3:30 p.m today, meaning there are 46 undeclared backers still out there. Is that really plausible? There may be MPs keeping their powder dry for all sorts of reasons – party whips for instance have to remain neutral. But there seems a whiff of Boris boosterism about the figures, given the gulf between the private and public numbers is much greater than the respective claims of the Sunak and Mordaunt camps.

Perhaps Mr S is a cynic but as a former journalist himself, Johnson will only be too aware of the importance of print deadlines in all of this. Given the role that the Daily Mail played in getting Liz Truss over the line, the endorsement of its sister paper the Mail on Sunday and other weekly papers could be important in making up the minds of the 150 or so undeclared MPs tomorrow.

Steerpike looks forward to finding out if there is a late Boris surge – or whether he chooses, as Charles Moore suggests, to sit this one out.

Carrie, please don’t launch a lifestyle brand

When Carrie Symonds first emerged as the paramour of Prime Minister Johnson, I liked what I saw. I admired her bravery in waiving her anonymity to reveal that, as a teenager, she had been targeted by the serial rapist John Worboys to campaign against his release from prison. And I appreciated her love of our dumb friends; she was widely believed to have been behind her boyfriend’s promise to promote animal welfare in his first speech as prime minister, quite a turnaround for a man who had said that he ‘loved’ hunting in part because of the ‘semi-sexual relation with the horse’.

But reading in the Evening Standard gossip column this week that Carrie Johnson is planning to launch ‘a lifestyle brand in the style of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop’ and ‘considering a line of sustainable and organic products for young fashion-conscious women and children’, I was torn between wild amusement and existential dread. There’s something sad about it, when you consider what an idealistic young woman she was, so passionate about everything from veal crates to FGM. At a time when her husband is being turned to as the unlikely saviour of a soul-sick nation, a fashion brand is not a good look no matter how many sustainable ribbons you tie around it. The idea that people will be paying through the nose for sustainable and organic goods at a time when a pat of Lurpak costs almost a tenner is laughable, so the Standard’s suggestion that Carrie ‘could draw on the expertise of her friend Lady Bamford, owner of the upmarket supermarket and deli Daylesford’ must surely be a jest.

This is the world in which Carrie wishes to become a ‘player’, that murky junction where luxury beliefs and luxury goods meet. Yes, the public won’t be paying for the indulgences of their rulers, but the general suspicion that the richer you are the more you get given – that rich people never have to pay, in both senses of the word – is a dangerous one for our democracy right now. It’s true that since Gwyneth Paltrow started Goop in 2008, it’s been estimated to have a value of $250 million. But that was before when we in the West believed that things could only get better. Now it’s dawning on us that things will surely get worse. I wonder how many jade eggs Goop will shift next year, when the price of the actual thing that comes out of a chicken will cost almost as much?

For the past two decades, the organic snake oil-fuelled wellness industry has attracted every last nervous Nellie with money to burn, making self-soothing and self-care the new self-abuse, with ceaseless pampering to assist us little ladies through the horror of having to work for a living. Fainting couches were replaced by those things with holes for your face to hang through; smelling salts were replaced by essential oils as women born strong sought to render themselves wet, shuffling around day spas in robes and slippers. It seemed such a comforting way to spend one’s disposable income – all those books about how-to-be-hygge, all that lounge-wear, brands like Toast, Loaf and the White Company, all those three-figure scented candles, when one could literally watch money burn and enjoy the smell. It’s funny how the idea of hunkering down seemed like a leisure option just a few years ago; now even Bed Bath & Beyond is about to go bankrupt.

Because when people are sitting around open ovens or huddling under heated blankets for warmth, the idea of cosines seems like a bad joke, a let-them-eat-cake for our times. As for sustainability, when sheer sustenance becomes an issue to the point that people are working out how they can eat every other day, and with the prospect of an imminent dystopia that may see us scrapping in the street over who gets the last lick of a Dairylea wrapper, one could not imagine a worse time for a politician’s wife ­to start a business selling dreary luxuries to people with more money than sense.

But who knows, maybe it won’t be boring. Maybe, like Goop, it will sell sizeable sex toys (‘The Gove’?). Or candles that smell like the tears of Remainers. Or Afghan pet insurance. Nothing would surprise me now. And if there’s a chance of Carrie’s husband returning to the rigours of his Prime Minister’s salary as opposed to the ease of pocketing $150,000 for a 90-minute fireside chat with our American friends, he’s going to need a working wife bringing in the filthy lucre, for all those rolls of fool’s gold wallpaper yet to come.

Watch: Xi’s predecessor marched out of CCP meeting

Is this the start of a new Xi Jinping purge? Earlier today, the former Chinese president Hu Jintao was manhandled and led out of the closing ceremony of the Communist party congress – watched on by delegates and the media. The 79-year-old is Xi Jinping’s immediate predecessor and was seated to his immediate left. A pair of stewards can be seen removing the seemingly distressed elder statesman as he tried to speak to Xi. Such shows of apparent disunity are rare within the CCP’s China, especially at heavily stage-managed events such as this.

Earlier in the congress, two of Hu’s proteges, Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, failed to be re-elected to the party’s central committee. The move has been seen by China watchers as an attempt by Xi to cement his position as premier and to proclaim to the world that he will accept no other faction: Hu’s gang has tended to focus on rural development more than urban and was seen as not quite getting along with xi’s populist programme.

The CCP ‘should more con­sciously up­hold Com­rade Xi Jin­ping’s stature as the core of the party cen­ter and the core of the en­tire party,’ said the res­o­lu­tion to re­vise the party char­ter, ap­proved unan­i­mously at Bei­jing’s Great Hall of the Peo­ple. Xi has used the congress, which happens only twice a decade, to secure an unprecedented third five-year term, solidifying his place as the most powerful ruler since Mao. Mr S wonders what’s next: is Hu going to be purged, Trotsky-style, from the Chinese Internet? And if so, on what charge?

In a recent Spectator leading article, we argued that China is sliding into a dictatorship where anyone not in the Xi fan club is purged – and retirement is no protection. The last week in Beijing seems to have borne this out. Watch the video below:

The Boris strategy needs to change

Had Boris Johnson simply wished to use the current vacancy for prime minister to remind us all of his superstar status then it would be mission accomplished already. The mere confirmation that the great blond bombshell was mulling an instant comeback transformed a prospect I likened a fortnight ago to the preposterous Bobby Ewing shower scene in the 1980s TV soap Dallas into a 2-1 shot with bookmakers.

Scores of Conservative MPs came out in his support. Across provincial England, vox-popping BBC reporters encountered a groundswell of opinion wishing for his return – most notably a Birmingham fishmonger who pointed at the camera before saying, Lord Kitchener style, ‘your country needs you’. But Boris being Boris – a would-be world king – this may not be enough. He really wants to be PM again. In which case, he has the sales job of his life to pull off over the next 48 hours. Because as he touches down at Gatwick – the ego has landed – he walks straight into some formidable headwinds.

Many MPs on the Tory right – who do not have an orthodox candidate of their own and might have been expected to lean towards the swashbuckling Brexiteer – are instead leaning towards the candidacy of Rishi Sunak. This seems particularly true of MPs who supported Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman in the last contest. ‘Not viable’ is the term that suddenly crops up in my own conversations with such people about a Boris restoration. Media heavyweights on the right are also coming out against such a turn of events – not just obsessive anti-Borisites on the Times, but also Andrew Neil in the Mail and Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

That the impending privileges committee inquiry into whether Johnson deliberately lied to parliament is being publicly exploited by the likes of Labour’s Chris Bryant as a weapon to deter Tories from supporting him is a clear indication that opposition parties at least view him as a wild card who could yet scupper their path to power. But a bigger factor cooling support for him is the state of the public finances and the wider economy post the disastrous Truss-Kwarteng interlude. It is being said that a second Johnson administration would be seen in financial markets as a much less safe bet than a Sunak-Hunt partnership and would thus lumber the UK with an interest rate premium on its vast borrowings that it can ill afford. That is hard to argue against.

On the plus side for Johnson, some important and credible names in the party with big followings of their own have come out in his favour in the last 24 hours, including Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. While the latter gave only a qualified endorsement he did also highlight the strongest of the ‘sensible’ arguments for Boris – that he is the man who won a still-unexpired mandate from the British public and no other candidate can say that.

But to get the necessary backing of at least 100 Tory MPs, Johnson is going to have to convince colleagues that he has learned lessons from his precipitous summer downfall; that a better, wiser Boris is returning following a period of profound reflection. This will surely involve a promise to pull together a far more experienced cabinet – featuring ‘big beasts’ prepared to challenge him – and to allow realism to share the stage with boosterism in the approach to the public finances by giving Hunt or Sunak primacy over spending and borrowing decisions.

Was I running his embryonic campaign, I’d be telling Johnson to compose a big newspaper op-ed for publication tomorrow setting out his new prospectus, and arranging an interview with a heavyweight broadcast political editor too. It is essential that he reminds potential followers of his compelling phrase-making powers and on-screen charisma if he wishes to fend off the many logical arguments against him. It may be as late as Monday lunchtime before we find out for sure if Johnson’s WhatsApp message to his ally Sir James Duddridge (‘We are going to do this. I’m up for it’) has come to fruition or if it is to be another case of ‘that person cannot be me’ – the line he used when withdrawing from the 2016 leadership contest.

Can his off-the-cuff magic really defeat a formidable Sunak network that has remained in a battle-ready state throughout the autumn and is pulling in fresh and credible parliamentary supporters by the hour? He certainly won’t do so if he allows his more unrestrained backers to bad-mouth Sunak, who is recognised by most Tories as an authoritative and straightforward figure. Most of the Conservative parliamentary party – and probably the grassroots too – has had enough of feuding and juvenile name-calling. A big offer to Sunak to be chief executive to his chairman of the board – the same arrangement that Jeremy Hunt comically suggested applied to him and the hapless Truss – may just swing it.

But the case for sitting this one out after an arresting display of silverback chest-thumping is at least as powerful. After all, Tory leadership races do come around faster and faster these days.

How Mussolini invented fascism

Benito Mussolini, the revolutionary socialist inventor of fascism who came to power 100 years ago this week, was one of the most talked about figures of his day. Most of that talk was positive. Pope Pius XI called him ‘a gift from Providence’ to save Italy; the US ambassador to Rome, Washburn Child, ‘the greatest figure of his sphere and time’; and Winston Churchill, ‘the Roman genius’. Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, wrote that he gave their epoque ‘its only flame of greatness’, and Cole Porter even wrote him into his 1934 hit song ‘You’re the Top!’ with a line that went: ‘You’re the Top! You’re the great Houdini! You’re the top! You’re Mussolini!’. The Spectator, no less, in an exclusive interview, called him ‘the great Prime Minister of Italy’ who ‘weathered the storm and took the mighty ship of state triumphantly into harbour’.

In the end, Mussolini caused catastrophic damage to Italy and Europe. But throughout the 1920s, and much of the 1930s, fascism was admired across the political divide, even by legendary icons of the modern left such as Mahatma Gandhi and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister after the March on Rome by his fascist blackshirts on 28 October 1922; it was a virtually bloodless coup at a time when Italy and Europe were in an even deeper crisis than they are today. The king called Mussolini to power because Italy’s democratic governments had been unable to maintain law and order on the streets, or in the workplace, unlike the future Duce’s private force of paramilitary blackshirts.

In 1922, devastated by the first world war and then the Spanish Flu, Italy appeared on the brink of socialist revolution. Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia in 1917 and fear of communism stalked Europe. The tectonic tensions between peoples and elites, nations and empires, that had caused the first world war then caused the collapse of both ancient regimes and democracies, and the metamorphosis of socialism into communism and fascism. Mussolini founded fascism in 1919 as an alternative left-wing revolutionary movement to socialism.

A rising star of the Italian Socialist party and a brilliant editor of its newspaper Avanti!, he had been expelled from the party in 1914 because he opposed its policy that Italy should remain neutral in the first world war. Instead, the future Duce believed that Italy must go to war against Austria and Germany which it eventually did in 1915. He insisted that socialists could not wait for history, as Marxist doctrine preached. They must make history, he argued, and such a war would help, not hinder, the revolution. As it did, in Italy, as elsewhere. The French and German socialist parties agreed with Mussolini and decided to fight for their respective countries against each other. This caused the collapse of the Second Socialist International and thus of international socialism.

The first world war had exposed a fatal weakness at the heart of international socialism whose mission was supposed to be world revolution and the abolition of the nation-state: people are more loyal to their country than their class. Mussolini made this cardinal rule the key to his version of socialism. It inspired him to replace international socialism with national socialism which he called fascism. Hitler, who would copy much from Mussolini, would call his version of fascism national socialism.

Fascism began as a left-wing heresy against the Marxist creed and remained so at heart to the bitter end – regardless of the far-right tag attached to it after 1945 by a left desperate to avoid fascism and communism being treated as two sides of the same coin. In April 1945, when communist partisans shot Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci after their capture at Lake Como, those with him included his old friend Nicola Bombacci, a founder of the Italian communist party and member of the Soviet Comintern, who had been his closest adviser in the last two years of the war. Bombacci’s last words before a communist partisan firing squad shot him dead beside the lake were: ‘Viva Mussolini! Viva il Socialismo!’

The fascists did not believe, as the communists did, in the nationalisation of the means of production, or the abolition of private property, but that the state should run the economy in partnership with owners and workers via corporations – the so-called corporate state. Among early manifesto pledges was the abolition of the monarchy.

Fascism also had its own variant of the class war, this one between producers of whatever class, and parasites of whatever class. It introduced the welfare state. Mussolini – at the same time as Lenin – had realised that only a political party – not trade unions, still less a parliament – could enact the revolution. And he rejected Marxist dogma which gave a decisive role to the proletariat. The role of the party, the revolutionary vanguard – or priesthood – was to instill and maintain faith. The role of the proletariat was to believe, which it would do only if the revolution was national, not international.

Fascism quickly attracted nationalists who were both right and left-wing and whose roots went back to Giuseppe Mazzini and Italian reunification in the mid-19th century. Futurist artists who eulogised speed, the machine, and war as a cleansing force, played a significant early role, as did revolutionary syndicalists. The poet-warrior and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio provided inspiration with his March on Fiume (Rijeka) in 1919 and his electrifying speeches delivered from balconies – and known as dialogues with the crowd – which earned him the title the first Duce and which Mussolini would emulate so effectively.

Mussolini’s new newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia – partly financed in 1918 by British secret service money to keep Italy in the war – paid homage to all who had fought calling them the aristocracy of the trenches – La Trincerocrazia – many of whom would form the fascist revolutionary vanguard. The genius of Mussolini was to create fascism, not just as an armed political movement, but as a religious cult with him as a sacred leader who transformed politics into a daily act of collective faith. This is, of course, what the leaders of the French Revolution did as well.

In each town, the fascists built their party headquarters in the main piazza, complete with a belltower to summon the faithful, which often stood opposite a real church – always uneasily. Despite making temporal peace with the Vatican in 1929, fascism remained a rival of the Catholic Church in the battle for control of the minds, if not the souls, of Italians. It was not just its demolition of democracy, or its waging of war, that doomed fascism. The Duce was not Jesus, nor even Pope.

If you had to choose one book that Mussolini regarded as a Bible, it would not be Marx’s Communist Manifesto or Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but Gustave Le Bon’s huge best-seller, La Psychologie des Foules, published in 1895. Le Bon, an anthropologist, defined the epoque in which he lived as ‘the era of the crowd’ because the crowd was ‘the last surviving sovereign force’ but he predicted that the result would not be democracy. As others had noted, universal suffrage necessarily means the tyranny of minorities by the majority. For Le Bon, the ‘sub-conscious’ majority in the form of the crowd now wielded power, not ‘conscious’ individuals. But the subconscious crowd is tyrannical and driven by irrational impulses, untempered by reason. And yet, without a charismatic leader able to instill a religious sense of mission, such a crowd is impotent.  

In 1932, the German journalist Emil Ludwig asked Mussolini: ‘You have written that the masses do not have to know but to believe. Do you really think that this Jesuit principle is practical?’ ‘Only faith moves mountains,’ replied Mussolini, ‘not reason.’ A month before his death in his last interview, he said: ‘I did not create fascism. I extracted it from the unconscious of the Italians. If it were not so, they would not have followed me for 20 years.’

The closest there is to a fascist manifesto is the Dottrina del Fascismo, an essay Mussolini co-authored with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, published in 1932, in which we read: ‘The fascist conception of life is a religious one’ that aims to create ‘a spiritual society’. Fascism ‘accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state.’ The state is ‘all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist… Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian’. That fascism regarded the state as the solution for everything, not as the problem, defines it as completely different from the Anglo-American, conservative and libertarian ‘bourgeois’ right for whom the opposite is the case. The fascist state dominates the life of the individual both at work and outside.

George Orwell, a revolutionary socialist who was also a patriot – as opposed to a nationalist ­– was one of the few on the left to understand and admit why fascism had mass appeal. In a 1940 review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he wrote:

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain… they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

Elsewhere, Orwell wrote that ‘the overwhelming strength of patriotism’ was the key to understanding the modern world and Mussolini, like Hitler, got and kept power ‘very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not’. Compared to this patriotism, he wrote: ‘Christianity and international socialism are as weak as straw’.

Fascism, unlike the Nazi version of it, was not explicitly anti-Semitic until Mussolini’s fatal alliance with Hitler in the late 1930s. Many Jews were fascists, as was Mussolini’s penultimate mistress Margherita Sarfatti. His anti-Semitic laws, introduced in 1938, were despicable, but no Jews were deported from Italy to the Nazi death camps until after his overthrow in July 1943 and his restoration as a Nazi puppet in the north. In the southeast of France, occupied by Italy between November 1942 and August 1943, Italian officers and officials saved the lives of thousands of Jews, primarily from the Vichy French, who were Hitler’s willing collaborators.

To dismiss the Duce as a grotesque buffoon, as Anglo-American historians normally do, or a puppet of the bourgeoisie, as Marxist ones always do, cannot be right. Such definitions fail to explain why he was able to get power and keep it for more than two decades with relatively little use of the mass murder that characterises most dictatorships – especially communist ones. Nor why there was so little resistance to him until he began to lose battles in the second world war – or why he was so popular abroad.

The explanation is obvious: true, there were no opinion polls and no fair elections, but the only feasible answer must be that a critical mass of Italians was in favour of fascism, and a majority in favour of Mussolini. That fascism was wanted by so many Italians, not imposed, is something that the mainstream left still refuses to accept because it means accepting an uncomfortable truth: the Italians, not just the Duce, were to blame for fascism.

As his estranged daughter Edda – whose husband his regime had executed for treason in January 1944 – said when she heard on the radio that he had been shot at Como with Petacci, Bombacci and other fascists, and their corpses brought to Milan where they were strung upside down from the forecourt roof of a petrol station: ‘I believe you can really hate only a person you have loved… It was the final act of love of the Italians for him.’

The problem with Mordaunt’s trans conversion

Penny Mordaunt’s entry into the Tory leadership race was widely predicted and she has now become the first to throw her hat into the bin fire. I’m totally impartial in this contest. I think any Tory MP would be just as hopeless as the next. But there’s a point worth underscoring: if Mordaunt were to win, she would be the third liberal in a row to lead the Conservative party.

Now, when I say ‘liberal’, I mean liberal in a Tory context. Boris Johnson, the long-time social liberal, immigration liberal and, until 2016, pro-EU liberal, convinced the right to hoist him as its standard bearer when the time came to replace Theresa May. He won and proceeded to largely dodge the culture wars, oversee a marked increase in both legal and illegal immigration, and cut a deal that favoured Brussels’ interests over those of the UK in Northern Ireland.

Then his party dropped him, much to the chagrin of right-wingers who, having been kicked in the face by Boris, were furious to be deprived of the prime ministerial loafer. So they chose their next champion: Liz Truss, an economic and social liberal whose priorities were removing the cap on bankers’ bonuses and allowing even more immigration than her predecessor. All this bodes well for Penny Mordaunt, who is hoping to make it a hat-trick of Tory leaders at odds with the views of a membership that nonetheless insists on voting for them.

In the last Tory leadership election, several minutes ago, I noted Mordaunt’s previous strong advocacy for trans self-identification and how she had repudiated those opinions at the outset of her leadership bid. We’ve probably all held political views that seemed eminently reasonable at the time but which we now regard as faintly mad. Some of us actually voted to make Ed Miliband prime minister. But Mordaunt’s conversion wasn’t so much Damascene as delusional. Overnight she went from one of the most reliable Tory allies of the trans self-identification movement to claiming she had ‘challenged the trans orthodoxy’. She was Nikolai Yezhov except she was the one airbrushing herself out of the photograph.

I don’t agree with Penny Mordaunt, or rather the old Penny Mordaunt, on the trans issue; though to be honest I’m not so sure on the new Mordaunt either. I can respect people who believe in gender identity theory, especially those who do it from within a party where it is not a popular view. What I struggle to respect is the cynicism that allows you to stand as a minister at the despatch box and say ‘trans men are men and trans women are women’ and then distance yourself from your erstwhile allies at the first whiff of power. It’s not as if Mordaunt’s views evolved over time, either. Her Commons recitation of the gender identity mantra was just last year.

Like I say, I don’t believe in self-identification. I want trans people to be safe; to be accorded the same rights as everyone else; to be protected from violence and discrimination; to receive much timelier access to gender-related healthcare; and generally to live their lives on their own terms. I want them to be treated with respect, compassion and love. I just can’t bring myself to pretend that biological sex doesn’t exist, or is irrelevant, or can be overcome by assertion. Nonetheless, it leaves a bitter taste to see people embraced or pushed away depending on the political expediencies of the moment, especially a group often said to be particularly vulnerable. It also makes me wonder what other people or causes could fall victim to Mordaunt’s ruthlessness.

When she stood last time, a number of right-wing commentators objected that she wasn’t a Tory at all. Having read her book, Greater: Britain After the Storm, UnHerd’s Will Lloyd concluded that she ‘tacks to the centre but ends up on the managerial left’. As they have already shown, Tory members are willing to overlook a bit of social liberalism but the perception of centre-left inclinations might be less welcome. Or maybe it would be to her advantage. The polls say the country wants a Labour prime minister. Penny Mordaunt could be the Tories’ opportunity to give them one.

What’s Rishi Sunak’s pitch?

Rishi Sunak has passed the 100 publicly-declared supporters which, it if is converted to nominations when Sunak officially declares, will meet the threshold required to make Monday’s MPs vote. Boris Johnson (like Sunak, not yet officially declared a candidate), is somewhat behind at around 70. Penny Mordaunt, who officially declared on Friday, is further back, in the mid-20s. There are a lot of MPs yet to declare, but as things stand it is looking plausible that either Sunak is the only candidate to make the nominations threshold or that it is a Johnson vs Sunak run-off.

In that event, it seems very likely that Boris would win. Tory members were not happy that Boris was deposed, and are likely to have taken a very dim view of their chosen successor to him, Liz Truss, being so badly undermined by her own MPs through her brief and infelicitous stint in office. Sunak would have very little time to create any new message to change any minds.

If Sunak did have a message, it might have to be that he was the favourite of MPs and in the end the MPs have to back the policies of whoever the leader is. That is, of course, a compelling reason for not having members participate at all in choosing the leader, especially when their party is in office and that leader has to implement policy. But the 1922 Committee has agreed on the procedure we have, so members will have their say even on this occasion.

Sunak’s message along such lines might not be terribly compelling anyway. When Liz Truss became leader, backers of her opponents immediately started attacking her even more venomously than their Labour or SNP competitors. She was totally undermined from the start and forced to U-turn on her entire agenda. Sunak is not going to have a majority of members of the House of Commons back him for Tory leader. So if he’s to carry a majority in the Commons, he’ll need Tory MPs that backed other candidates to row in behind him and back him in what will be very difficult times ahead. Yet he will be asking them to do that even though MPs that backed him did not remotely extend that same courtesy to Truss. What was sauce for the Truss goose – disloyalty on an epic scale – is apparently not to be sauce for the Sunak gander.

Backers of other candidates may take a different view. It seems unlikely that whichever of Sunak or Johnson wins (assuming it is one of those two) will be able to command anything close to a consistent majority in the House, and will have to navigate the period up to the next general election through some skillful placating of different Tory factions and occasional inducing of Labour, Lib Dem or other opposition support.

That period is scheduled to be more than two years. It may in practice be more like weeks. This is the Tories’ last chance. If they can’t back whoever wins the leadership this time, to the hilt, so as to enable (presumably) him to implement his agenda whatever it is, it’ll have to be an imminent general election and Labour taking over.