My plan to fix Britain

Thanks to Brexit, we are now a free nation. But let’s not just talk about the opportunities that follow: let’s take them. If a young boy who came here aged 11 without a word of English, can serve at the highest levels of Her Majesty’s Government and run to be the next Prime Minister, anything is possible.

The burden of tax is simply too high. As an entrepreneur and businessman, I know that lower taxes are how we create a thriving and dynamic economy. Taxes for individuals, families and business need to be lower – and will be on my watch.

Having been born in Iraq and fled the dangers of Saddam, I know that security, safety and freedom are things that we can never take for granted. That’s why defence spending needs to rise in response to the barbarism of Putin’s war in Ukraine. I will always put the defence of the nation first.

I will continue my education reforms that are improving schools across the country, keep pushing our schools revolution and deliver a great education for every child. I will also continue to focus on letting children be children, protecting them from damaging and inappropriate nonsense being forced on them by radical activists.

We, as Conservatives, must trust Britons to do what is best for themselves. Overseeing the highest tax burden since 1949 is not the Conservative way. We cannot tax our way into prosperity. I will guarantee that the next generation will be afforded the best education possible. Combined, this will begin the journey towards hope. A more prosperous nation, one which can provide the best opportunities to its next generation. A nation where your only ceiling is yourself – not the state, or society. The only thing that can hold you back is the limits of your imagination. We know it is not Labour or the Lib Dems who offer the country solutions. The only solution can be empowering the British people, regardless of where they live or where they come from; what matters is where we are going. I will be talking more about my vision for our party and the country in the next few days and weeks – but for now, there is work to be done.

This is an edited extract from a speech that Zahawi is due to deliver on Monday

Latest: Zahawi, Javid & Hunt declare, Wallace out

Nadhim Zahawi, Sajid Javid and Jeremy Hunt have declared their candidacy this evening. Ben Wallace, who had topped the poll among Tory activists, has announced that he won’t be standing in the Tory leadership race. Rishi Sunak is now leading the field in both MPs’ endorsement – he has 24 – and bookmaker’s odds (below). Sajid Javid has announced his candidacy and Liz Truss will on Monday. Trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan is backing Tom Tugendhat and Justin Tomlinson has quit as deputy chairman to support Kemi Badenoch.

Keep track of the latest developments below:

10:10 p.m. Sajid Javid declares his candidacy in Sunday Telegraph interview 

Fraser Nelson writes… ‘We cannot afford not to have tax cuts,’ he says (a dividing line with Sunak). ‘You can’t have growth until you’ve got the tax cuts’. He’s mulling a ‘significant’ cut in fuel duty. ‘The long way out of this, the better way, is to turbo growth. I’ve always believed in free markets, in low taxation, in light regulation, as the conditions that are necessary for growth. It was true 20 to 30 years ago, it was true under Margaret Thatcher and it’s true now. Because it’s how economies grow and how they work.’

9.35 p.m. Jeremy Hunt declares

Fraser Nelson writes… He says he would cut corporation tax from 19 per cent to 15 per cent, so clear blue water with Sunak who wants to raise corporation tax to 25 per cent. Hunt’s pitch: ‘I am the only major candidate who has not served in Boris Johnson’s government. I called out what was going wrong long before any of the other major contenders and I have not been defending the indefensible. So by choosing me, the Conservative Party is sending a signal to those voters that we have listened to your concerns and we have changed.’

9:13 p.m – Who will be the continuity Johnson candidate?

Isabel Hardman writes… There are two attention-grabbing theories that have been doing the rounds all day about the Tory leadership contest. One is that Boris Johnson intends to stand again. The other is that this is a battle to ensure Brexit isn’t unpicked.

The former may well be something Johnson would like to do, given the psychological journey he’s ended up on this week. His resignation statement was hardly one that suggested he was done with frontline politics – or indeed that he thought anyone else could ever measure up to him in the office. But the rules of the Conservative party don’t allow someone who has resigned as leader to stand again. So that’s that. With Ben Wallace ruled out of the leadership, there is now a search on for the continuity Johnson candidate to keep that flame alive.

The second is more interesting, because it has already been promulgated by one of the declared candidates, Suella Braverman. It will appeal to her constituency within the Tory party, and will become a talking point at hustings and launches. The way it will largely be manifested in practice is through the Northern Ireland Protocol row.

6.20 p.m – Nadhim Zahawi announces candidacy

Nadhim Zahawi – who was appointed Chancellor by Boris Johnson on Tuesday and who told him to resign the next day – has announced he will run to be Tory leader and Prime Minister. 

5:49 p.m. – Shapps was a Johnson loyalist

James Forsyth writes… Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, is running. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he casts himself as someone competent enough to deliver what Boris Johnson wanted to – big infrastructure projects, more R&D. He says his aim is for the UK to be the biggest economy in Europe by 2050; a goal which is easier to achieve than you think when you consider population growth.

Shapps was a Johnson loyalist, the keeper of the famous spreadsheet detailing the views of every Tory MP, and attacks those who he says have been preparing for this moment for months. But, at the moment, it would be a surprise if he could generate big numbers given how many Cabinet members are running. He will also have to answer questions about his alias Michael Green.

5:46 p.m – Women With Balls

Nine MPs are now backing Suella Braverman. She joined Katy Balls on Women With Balls in March. Listen below:

5:32 p.m – Liz Truss will announce next week

Liz Truss is set to announce her candidacy next week, promising to reverse tax increases brought in by Rishi Sunak.

5:06 p.m – Grant Shapps announces candidacy

The Transport Secretary said he would end a period of ‘tactical government by an often distracted centre’.

He added: ‘I have not spent the last few turbulent years plotting or briefing against the prime minister. I have not been mobilising a leadership campaign behind his back. I tell you this: for all his flaws – and who is not flawed? – I like Boris Johnson. I have never, for a moment, doubted his love of this country.’

5:00 p.m – ‘Heaven and earth’

Suella Braverman has written in the Sunday Telegraph that as PM she would ‘get government spending under control’, cut VAT on energy and ‘reduce’ (but not cancel) ‘the planned tax increases that are putting off investment’. She added that she would not sacrifice the recovery ‘on the altar of Net Zero’. and double down on the Rwanda deportation plan saying that her parents ‘decided to come here safely and legally.’

4:33 p.m. – Endorsements and launches imminent

Steerpike writes… The Tory rumour mill is in overdrive amid expectation that several leadership bids are set to be launched in tomorrow’s Sunday newspapers. Sajid Javid, who has three public backers thus far, looks set to defy suggestions he support Rishi Sunak by throwing his own hat in the ring. Nadhim Zahawi’s campaign is revving up too, with his former PPS David Johnston announcing his support today. And of course the elephant in the room is Liz Truss, who many fancy to reach the final two. When will she show her hand?

Elsewhere the talk is of big name endorsements. Tom Tugendhat is expected to gain the support of a senior Leaver tomorrow. And the decision of Ben Wallace to pull out of the running means he will be one of the most prized endorsements of all, alongside Lord Frost – the only member of the cabinet to quit over Covid regulations. Some think now is the time to put their cards on the table, given the planned 1922 meeting on Monday. Chris Skidmore has suggested that a 10 per cent threshold be introduced for candidates: with 358 Tory MPs this would mean the endorsement of 36 colleagues necessary to run for election.

Somehow Mr S suspects Sir Bill Wiggin and John Baron will struggle to reach that figure…

4:26 p.m. – How Kemi has shaken up the contest

Katy Balls writes… The events of the past 24 hours are showing just how unpredictable this Tory leadership contest will be. As James Forsyth says on Coffee House, Ben Wallace’s decision not to run means that one of the favourites is out of the picture. That means a bloc of MP nominations for other candidates to sweep up. But perhaps the bigger upset relates to Kemi Badenoch. The Tory rising star was seen as a key endorsement by various leadership contenders; now she is running herself. What’s more, she is sweeping up nominations from the 2017 intake. That means other contenders on the right of the party have their work cut out competing and drumming up the numbers for the first few rounds.

3:21 p.m. – A gamble on Badenoch could pay off spectacularly

Damian Thompson writes… There’s only one candidate for prime minister with the guts to dismantle the self-loathing culture of identity politics that is destroying Britain. She’s uniquely qualified to take on the challenge because she’s a black woman raised in Nigeria who studied for her A-levels while working in McDonald’s. And she may succeed because, in addition to a passion for knocking heads together, she has a startlingly clear understanding of how our politics and culture are poisoning each other in a left-liberal suicide pact.

Read Damian’s full piece here.

2:35 p.m. – Javid declaring tomorrow

Fraser Nelson writes… Sajid Javid is expected to declare his candidacy tomorrow, having secured the numbers. One of his closest allies, John Glenn, has just come out for Rishi Sunak – raising speculation about Javid’s support. The campaign is at an interesting stage with all kinds of rumours swirling. Interestingly I’m hearing reports that some Tory candidates have taken out ‘black ops’ researchers to attack their rivals. The games, the games…

2:32 p.m. – Who will win the military vote?

James Forsyth writes… One of the subplots of this leadership contest had been the battle for the military vote. With Ben Wallace not standing, Tom Tugendhat and Penny Mordaunt are left as the former service folk in the race.

Tugendhat will be hoping to pick up a chunk of those who would have backed Wallace. He has already succeeded in stealing a march on Jeremy Hunt as the One Nation candidate and if he can gather more support he could outperform expectations in round one in a race in which momentum is crucial. But the challenge for Tugendhat is persuading people that his first job in government should be as PM.

2:00 p.m. – MP endorsement update

As of 2pm today, this is the state of the Tory leadership race:

Rishi Sunak – 18

Suella Braverman – 9

Tom Tugendhat – 6

Liz Truss (undeclared) – 6

Penny Mordaunt (undeclared) – 6

Kemi Badenoch – 5

Jeremy Hunt (undeclared) – 2

Nadhim Zahawi (undeclared) – 2

Sajid Javid (undeclared) – 1

Read the full list here.

1:54 p.m. – Are the Tories ready for a contest?

Fraser Nelson writes… Will this leadership contest provide a debate? The Tories got into this mess because have spent years asking who can bring them power, rather than what they stand for or who has the best ideas for the country. The leadership contest should come in two stages: first discussing what has gone wrong and then next who best to remedy. So far, this is my test for the candidates. Have they said anything that moves beyond platitude and cliche? Do they show any signs of being thoughtful? Do they recognise that there is a fight ahead, and that they are prepared for that fight?

Read Fraser’s full blog here.

12:47 p.m. – Wallace’s endorsement will be heavily sought

James Forsyth writes… Ben Wallace is not running for Tory leader. Despite surveys showing that he would beat every other candidate in the run-off round, the Defence Secretary has decided not to enter the contest.

Wallace’s political stock has soared in recent months with his handling of the Ukraine situation. He was prescient in his warnings about Putin’s intentions and he broke through resistance in the system to ensure that the UK sent weaponry to Kyiv before the Russians invaded. If he had entered the contest, he would have become the favourite despite the fact little was known about his views on a host of domestic issues.

It is hard to think that any candidate would not offer Wallace a job in their cabinet. He would either be kept as defence secretary or promoted further. His endorsement will be heavily sought in the coming days.

12:34 p.m. – Wallace not running

11:42 a.m. – Battles begin for influential backers

Steerpike writes… More than 50 Tory MPs have now made public endorsements – just shy of 15 per cent of the parliamentary party. Campaign teams are anticipating more over the weekend, with Rishi Sunak, the frontrunner, expected to stagger his over the forthcoming days.

Already there are some interesting battles going on within the party. On the right, the ‘anti-woke’ vote is split between Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, whose launch last night has attracted much online attention. The two look poised to battle for the votes of European Research Group and Common Sense Group, who boast many of the same members. Braverman got the big name backing of ‘Brexit Hardman’ Steve Baker while Badenoch won CSG chairman John Hayes’ support.

Mark Harper, Baker’s colleague in the Covid Recovery Group, has instead preferred to go for Rishi Sunak – a sign perhaps that he’s seen as the driest, most fiscally responsible candidate thus far. Several big names, most noticeably Nadhim Zahawi, Liz Truss and potentially Sajid Javid are yet to declare, with Team Rishi reportedly attempting to woo ‘the Saj’ to back their man as part of a ‘dream ticket.’

They say two heads are better than one – could that be true of ex Chancellors too?

10.30 a.m. – Baker folds, Badenoch stands

James Forsyth writes… A boost for Suella Braverman this morning with Steve Baker folding in behind her campaign. Thus makes Braverman the clear ERG candidate in the race.

With Baker giving her a clear run, Braverman now likely has enough support to make it through the first round with ease. The challenge for her will be transferability, how able is she to pick up support from other candidates as they get knocked out.

The other big news this morning is that Kemi Badenoch, the former equalities minister and Spectator alum is joining the race. Badenoch is running on a free speech, free markets platform. She’ll attract support from those who relish the clarity of her views. But it is a massive step up up go from being a junior minister to prime minister.

8.46 a.m – Will Sunak’s polished campaign harm his chances?

Robert Peston writes… Rishi Sunak has launched a slick, well organised leadership campaign very early. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that he has been preparing his leadership pitch quietly for weeks and months. Will this hurt or harm him? There may be some Boris Johnson loyalists who will accuse him of disloyalty – although Johnson did not manifest much fealty to Theresa May when she was PM and he foreign secretary.

Read Robert’s full blog here.

Shinzo Abe and the long history of Japanese political violence

Shinzo Abe, perhaps the most significant Japanese politician of the last 50 years, has been assassinated. The killing was carried out by Tetsuya Yamagamu, a youngish and apparently disgruntled former employee of the Japan’s Maritime Self Defence Force. 

It was a brutal and sordid end to what was an important if not uncontroversial life. Shinzo Abe was the dominant politician of his era. Forced to give up the prime ministership after just one year in 2007 because of ulcerative colitis, a congenital condition, Abe came back to win landslide elections for the Liberal Democratic Party in 2012, 2014 and 2017. In an era when many Japanese prime ministers have served for little more than a year, Abe was prime minister for a record eight years and 267 days. Abe would almost certainly have served for longer had it not been for a return of his illness in 2020.

No wonder then at the genuine worldwide shock. ‘Japan has lost a great prime minister’, said President Macron. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, whose country has been strongly supported by Japan in its ongoing tussle with China for sovereignty, recorded that ‘Taiwan has also lost an important and close friend.’ 

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 9 July would be a national day of mourning. Modi’s reaction is no surprise. During a brief first term as prime minister in 2007, Abe brought India into a four-way security alliance including the US and Australia. Former US President Barack Obama, a willing partner, was equally effusive, saying that Abe ‘was devoted to both the country he served and the extraordinary alliance between the United States and Japan.’ 

The Quad, as it is known, has become the cornerstone of a mutual security agreement aimed at keeping China’s Asian maritime ambitions in check. Often criticised domestically for his vigorous foreign policy, Abe, after his second term in office starting in 2012, nevertheless pushed through annual increases in defence expenditure. To the annoyance of China, Abe, through his personal charisma, revised and expanded the role that the Japanese Self Defence Forces could take in global conflicts. As Donald Trump has rightly commented, ‘Few people know what a great man and leader Shinzo Abe was, but history will teach them.’

However, the eulogisation of Shinzo Abe has one major fault line. Geopolitical necessity required the western powers to gloss over the fact that Abe was an ultranationalist holocaust denier – the Chinese holocaust that is. 

Abe was a longstanding member of Nippon Kaigi, a 38,000-member organisation including 40 current and former ministers, which is dedicated to the restoration of Japan’s wartime imperial constitution. 

Coincidentally, Abe’s maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was the mastermind behind the economic enslavement of millions of Chinese for the industrial militarisation of Manchuria. Later, Kishi signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941. After the war Kishi, an A-list war criminal, escaped prosecution and became a founder of the LDP, serving as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. 

Not surprisingly, in 2013 Abe caused a storm of protest throughout Asia when he visited Yasakuni Shrine where Japan’s convicted war criminals are buried. Even at the end of his time in office Abe was unreconstructed in his attitudes to Japan’s wartime atrocities. In August 2020 Abe acolyte, Shuichi Takatori reported that he had delivered a message from Abe at the Yasukune Shrine, paying ‘his respects from the heart to the war dead and prayed for the rest and permanent peace of their souls.’ For Abe and the LDP hierarchy the Japanese soldiers found guilty at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals were heroes, not criminals.

For convenience or perhaps laziness the West tends to ignore the mythologisation narratives spun by the Japanese establishment in the post-war period. It is a pattern of behaviour that has been evident since General Douglas MacArthur who became Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in post-war Japan. By giving Emperor Hirohito a free pass during the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, MacArthur embedded a false narrative in post-war Japanese history. 

As the French judge at the trial, Henri Bernard, noted, Japan’s wartime atrocities ‘had a principal author [Hirohito] who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present defendants could only be considered accomplices.’ The result was that whereas ultranationalism became toxic in post-war Germany, in Japan neo-fascism — centred around the figure of the emperor — retained its allure and became mainstream albeit sotto voce within Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party. 

Japan’s post-war mythologisation also applies to the prevalent idea that the country is a lacuna of peace and stability. For instance, the BBC report on the death of Shinzo Abe noted that ‘This is a country not used to dealing with political violence.’ Nancy Snow, Japan director of the International Security Industrial Council, told CNN that Japan would be forever changed. ‘It’s not only rare,’ she said, ‘but it’s really culturally unfathomable.’ Facile evidence of this ‘unfathomableness’ is given by quoting of the number of guns in Japan, 0.3 per 100 people versus 120.5 per 100 people in the US. 

This is bunkum. Assassination, the sneak attack, ambush, are completely embedded in Japan’s political and military tradition; hence the sneak attack on Russia’s Port Arthur in 1904 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Violence has always been one of the means of finding political solutions. The most famous exemplar in Japanese culture is the story of the 47 Ronin (unattached Samurai). After a powerful court official, Kira Yoshinaka, forced their master to commit Seppuku (ritual suicide by self-disembowelment) the 47 Ronin disguised themselves and carried out a bloody revenge. They too then committed seppuku. Japanese culture regards these assassins as heroes.

Japan’s violent political culture carried over to a modernising Japan during and after the Meiji Restoration. Samurai were resistant to changes that undermined their traditional role in society. Assassination by these regressive Samurai became rife during this period. 

Okubo Toshimichi, who became the post-Meiji strongman, was murdered by seven samurai as he made his way to the Imperial Palace (Edo Castle) in 1878. Some 18 years earlier at virtually the same spot, the Sakurade Gate, Ii Naosuke, the Tairo (effectively prime minister) of the Shogun was cut down and killed by 17 Samurai; his crime was the promotion of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce which had opened the hermit kingdom to the United States. 

Other reasons for assassination came as Japan’s economic and imperial power expanded. Hara Takashi, the first commoner and Christian to become prime minister was assassinated in 1921 by an ultranationalist railway worker who resented the increasing power of the Japanese Zaibatsu (business conglomerates).

The high watermark of assassinations arrived in the 1930s as the Japanese armed forces became imbued with a toxic mix of a pseudo-Bushido code and national socialist philosophies that arguably predated the rise of fascism in Germany. In November 1930, Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi, who was blamed for the London Naval Treaty, a battleship limitation agreement which was viewed as a national humiliation, was shot by a member of Aikokushu (Society of Patriots) and died of his wounds nine months later. 

Over the next six years there followed the assassination of three more former or current prime ministers as young naval and army officers, often supported by their seniors, effectively ended democratic government in Japan in two episodes of bloodletting aimed at political and economic figures. 

On 15 May 1932, 11 naval officers, including some members of ketsumeidan (the League of Blood) organised four hit squads. One group went to Prime Minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi’s house, where they politely removed their shoes before shooting him. However, they missed their other target, Charlie Chaplin, who was staying with Inukai; luckily for Chaplin he had gone to watch a sumo wrestling tournament. 

Then an attempted coup d’état by about a 100 young army officers in 1936, known as the 26 February Incident, ended the lives of two other former prime ministers, Takahashi Korekiyo and Saito Makato as well as a host of other establishment figures. At the end of the Pacific War fanatical young officers sought to capture the Emperor Hirohito to prevent his surrender and assassinated all who got in their way. In the last 160 years, nine Japanese prime ministers or their equivalents, current and former, Abe included, have been assassinated. That compares to four US presidents over the same period. 

The post-war period may only have seen the assassination of one former prime minister but there have been other political killings. In 2002 Koki Ishii, a democratic party politician, was stabbed to death by a yakuza from the powerful Yamaguchi-gumi crime gang; similarly in 2007 the Mayor of Nagasaki was murdered by a gangster. But in perhaps the most horrific murder of the post-war era, in 1960 Socialist leader, Inejiro Asanuma, was run through with a wakizashi, a short sword worn by Samurai, while he was engaging in a televised debate. In a familiar Japanese pattern, Inejiro’s murderer Otoya Yamaguchi, was martyrised by the ultra-nationalists when he committed suicide.

Throughout the 20^th Century, ritual suicide was used as a violent political act. In 1970 the great Japanese novelist and political activist, Yukio Mishima and followers, who denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his divinity, committed seppuku in the offices of a commandant of the Japan Self Defence Force (JSDF). He wished that the JSDF be returned ‘to the Emperor.’ His closest English friend, Henry Scott-Stokes, the Financial Times correspondent in Tokyo, relayed Mishima’s explanation that ‘the reason they (Samurai) preferred to die in the most excruciating manner was that it proved the courage of the Samurai. This method of suicide was a Japanese invention and foreigners could not copy it.’

Political violence in Japan has been mainly but not exclusively the preserve of the ultra-right. However, post-war Japan has also had its own indigenous left wing terrorist group, the Chukaku-ha (Central Core Faction). This breakaway from the Japan Communist Party undertook a series of terrorist acts throughout the 1960s and 1970s, often aimed at the prevention of infrastructure. The development of Narita Airport in Chiba prefecture was a particular target. Indeed, the killing of the head Chiba prefecture’s Expropriation Committee, delayed the area’s development. Even the Chukaku-ha became subject to violence. Its leader, Nobuyoshi Honda, was himself assassinated by a rival extreme left faction in 1975.

Chukaku-ha’s most spectacular attack took place in 1986. On Sunday 4 May, the terrorists launched rocket bombs at the state guest house where G7 leaders, including President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were present. They missed by a mile… literally. Instead, the first two rockets scored a direct hit on my apartment building in Aoyama Itchome where I was enjoying a bibulous lunch with friends on my terrace. We were showered with shrapnel. A third rocket landed in the street and a tennis ball-sized splinter nearly decapitated me. 

When we look at the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe therefore, we should not be deluded into thinking that Japanese society is the island of calm that some Japanophiles imagine. Underlying this seemingly rigidly controlled and conforming society, where the levels of crime are a fraction of the West, there is an undercurrent of extreme violence that has long historic roots. 

Shinzo Abe’s life, family history, beliefs and even his death exemplify this pattern. Japanese people are not always the mythologised polite bowing caricatures depicted on television. It is a country and people that cannot escape the fact that its history and culture since the Meiji Restoration in the late 19^th Century is drenched in blood.

Why the Tories should gamble on Kemi Badenoch

There’s only one candidate for prime minister with the guts to dismantle the self-loathing culture of identity politics that is destroying Britain. She’s uniquely qualified to take on the challenge because she’s a black woman raised in Nigeria who studied for her A-levels while working in McDonald’s. And she may succeed because, in addition to a passion for knocking heads together, she has a startlingly clear understanding of how our politics and culture are poisoning each other in a left-liberal suicide pact.

As soon as I read Kemi Badenoch’s article in this morning’s Times, I thought: this is a risk worth taking. The last gamble didn’t pay off, but then Boris Johnson was always too distracted and self-absorbed to assemble his maverick ideas into a political philosophy. Cameron and May, meanwhile, were almost completely subservient to ‘the Blob’.

Badenoch, not coincidentally, was a minister under the man who coined that term: Michael Gove, the most successful reforming secretary of state for decades. But, unlike him, she ticks boxes that leave liberal power-brokers squirming over the etiquette of criticising her. It’s an agonising dilemma, because make no mistake about it: this charismatic, streetwise and rhetorically merciless black woman is out to get them.

In her article today, she articulates a patriotic, free-market political philosophy that addresses the specific malignancies of the 21st century (in which, born in 1980, she has now lived most of her life). Government has become ‘a piggy bank for pressure groups’, she writes, with the vehemence of a former equalities minister who was subjected to their entitled lamentations. As she puts it, ‘the fiercest proclaimers of “social justice” usually believe in the power of the government over the people, in the power of the bureaucrat over the individual, and have a distrust of people making their own decisions in the economic sphere just as much as the social.’

What Badenoch doesn’t say is that since 2010 her own Tory colleagues have worn out their knees genuflecting to these pressure groups. But she knows it: hence her reference to the Online Safety Bill, which she describes as ‘legislating for hurt feelings’. This plain talking, the like of which we haven’t really heard since Thatcher, will resonate powerfully with a broadly liberal and overwhelmingly anti-racist British public that is sick of being lectured by halo-polishing elitists obsessed with race, sexuality and claiming expenses.

As I say, electing Kemi Badenoch would be a gamble. But, on the basis of what I’ve heard so far, I reckon it could pay off spectacularly.

Listen to Katy Ball’s speak to Kemi Badenoch on Women With Balls:

Are the Tories ready for a real contest?

Will this leadership contest provide a debate? The Tories got into this mess because have spent years asking who can bring them power, rather than what they stand for or who has the best ideas for the country. The leadership contest should come in two stages: first discussing what has gone wrong and then next who best to remedy. So far, this is my test for the candidates. Have they said anything that moves beyond platitude and cliche? Do they show any signs of being thoughtful? Do they recognise that there is a fight ahead, and that they are prepared for that fight?

Sunak has done so, attacking ‘fairy tales’ offered by others – but hasn’t really elaborated on what difficult decisions he would take. Kemi Badenoch’s wildcard candidacy is on the basis that the party needs discussion – my guess is that she hasn’t really game planned this many moved ahead but I think she is right in that certain things need to be said. And this leadership debate is the time to say them.

Just 15 per cent of Tories have declared for a candidate so far and I can see why: this should not be a traditional stitch up with jobs promised to early backers. This is time to listen, to debate, to think, to hear what candidates have to say – then ask very difficult questions. And judge by the answers. That’s why I don’t right now have a preferred candidate: every candidate has serious flaws in my view. Tugendhat and Badenoch both lack Cabinet experience. Braverman needs to say more on how she’d cut tax. Rishi was brave on lockdown (the only cabinet member to challenge it when he had the power to do so) but he then pushed to break the manifesto pledge on raising tax (and introduced the windfall tax).

My ideal candidate is not running in this race. But what I fervently hope is that the Tory party abstain from the stitch-ups and have a broad and productive debate about who they are and what they stand for. If they squander this opportunity for self-reflection then renewal in office will prove impossible. Unless they can collectively and credibly answer that question – why the Tories? – without using platitudes, then deposing Boris will look more like suicide then regicide.

Jolyon makes a mess of it (again)

Oh dear. It seems that Britain’s favourite kimono-wearing, fox-murdering, bat-wielding loudmouth lawyer has done it again. The Conservative party is shaping up for a leadership contest between the most diverse range of candidates ever, including five MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds (Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak, Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid). There are also four women (Braverman, Badenoch, Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt) –  more than the prospective number of straight white men (Tom Tugendhat, Ben Wallace and Jeremy Hunt).

But that’s not enough for Jolyon Maugham, the right-on Remainiac best known for losing cases and killing foxes. The one-man pest control unit – known as the ‘Babe Ruth of the bar’ –  has decided to display his right-on credentials by weighing in on the Tory party race. Maugham responded to Rishi Sunak’s launch video yesterday by asking snidely ‘Do you think the members of your party are ready to select a brown man, Rishi?’ Such, er, insight does ignore the fact that Sunak has spent the last two-and-a-half years holding the second highest political office in the land and regularly leading membership polls for the most popular minister in the cabinet.

After an outcry, Maugham, the fearless hero that he is, opted to delete the tweet but claimed he would take ‘no lectures’ from a party led by that irredeemable racist Boris Johnson. He of course was the man who appointed Rishi to the cabinet, as part of the most diverse ministry in British political history. Perhaps the last word should go to Education Secretary James Cleverly who told Maugham: ‘Do us all a favour and stick to murdering urban fauna and separating left-wing fools from their money.’

Game, set and match to Cleverly.

Russia is militarising its economy

The ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine isn’t a war – there’s a law and a possible maximum sentence (though no one seems to have faced it yet) of 15 years in prison to stop you claiming it is in Russia. Yet Russia does seem to be inching towards a wartime economy, for all Vladimir Putin’s recent bullishness.

At the recent (if rather sparsely-attended) St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin struck a triumphalist note, crowing that ‘the economic blitzkrieg against Russia never had any chances of success,’ and ‘gloomy predictions about the Russian economy’s future didn’t come true.’

That’s both true and not true. There has been no meltdown, not least thanks to eight years of conscious sanctions-proofing in Russia, and down to the financial wizardry of technocrats like Central Bank chair Elvira Nabiullina. Yet economic war, like the mills of God, grinds slowly.

Already, Russia is heading for a year-on-year decline in GDP of up to 15 per cent, and inflation has hit 17 per cent. Although it is easy to be mesmerised by the huge sums of money still heading to Moscow, largely thanks to its exports of oil and gas, the problem is that Russia cannot necessarily buy what it needs, from microchips to spare parts, thanks to sanctions. It is in much the same position as consumers in late Soviet times, with rubles in the pocket but nothing on which to spend them.

Does Putin realise this and is simply putting on a brave face with his breezy claims that ‘like our ancestors, we will solve any problem’? Quite possibly not. Are his economic advisers any more willing and able to tell him hard truths than his foreign policy specialists and generals were, back in February?

After all, facing the facts doesn’t seem to be his strong point. When Nabiullina told him that the war was ‘flushing the economy down the sewer’ during a video conference, he apparently simply ended the call.

In any case, others do seem to be noticing, and this past week, the Russian parliament has rushed through two bills that, in effect, will mean that ‘special military operations’ will, to all intents as purposes, be considered like wars for the same of economic mobilisation.

Admitting that they were driven by the need to support the military in a time of ‘colossal sanctions pressure,’ Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov admitted that it was necessary ‘to temporarily focus our efforts on certain sectors of the economy’ in order ‘to guarantee the supply of weapons and ammunition.’

Behind this bland language are measures which would not only allow the government to open up mobilisation reserves, but also force workers in strategic industries to work overtime and prevent companies from refusing to take on state contracts.

Of course, the laws still have to be signed by Putin, but there is little doubt that the initiative came from the Kremlin in the first place.

On one level, it represents a grudging acknowledgement that while Russia has weathered the first few months of sanctions, things will get tougher. Even close Putin allies such as Sergei Chemezov, CEO of state-owned defence conglomerate Rostec, have begun warning that the Russian economy is going to take a serious hit.

It also represents an ideological victory for the hawks. Right after the invasion, they began talking about the need to militarise the economy, and at first Putin seemed willing to let them have their way.

However, the technocrats, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Nabiullina, and Presidential Administration head Anton Vaino managed to persuade him that this was a mistake and instead he opted to hand them control of the economy.

They have been trying to preserve as much as possible of the old, liberal market economy, but as it becomes more and more clear that this war will drag on for months – and that sanctions may well remain for years – this is looking less viable.

Hawks such as Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev have thus returned to the attack. His vision appears to be akin to that of the Bolsheviks’ ‘war communism’ policy adopted in 1918 amidst civil war. Industries were nationalised, workers brought under military discipline and food rationed. It was brutal, but it worked.

Patrushev and his allies are by no means leftists though; this looks like war communism, but without the communism.

Can the next Tory leader save Boris’s broken Britain?

Whatever else will be said about him in the days and years to come, Boris Johnson will leave No. 10 having achieved the full extent of his policy ambitions: become Prime Minister. After a little under three years in office, Johnson has been reduced to the status of squatter in Downing Street, pottering about with a cabinet consisting of Nadine Dorries and pocket lint, grumbling about leakers and betrayers.

Having successfully weaned itself off foxhunting, the Conservative party meanwhile is preparing for another bout of its favourite triennial bloodsport. The latest leadership contest promises to be as pleasingly brutal as the last few, and the candidates are already engaged in the traditional events of networking, spinning, and desperately distancing themselves from the government they were very happily serving in until last week.

Whichever candidate wins will have a tough act to follow: Boris swept to office with a massive majority and proceeded to squander it on protecting badly behaved MPs, handing Brussels control of Northern Ireland, and achieving nothing of actual note. The next leader will be expected to pick up the pieces, and make the party electable again.

While Westminster obsesses over the runners and riders, Britain continues to become a steadily worse place to live. House prices are rising at the fastest rate in 18 years, with the average home now costing nearly £300,000. Energy bills and food prices are soaring, wages are stagnant – in real terms, we’ll still be earning less in 2025 than we did in 2008 – and young graduates are set to face marginal tax rates of 50% from next year as the government once again dips into young people’s pockets to subsidise the triple lock.

The NHS is collapsing under the weight of its various backlogs, its £136 billion budget no longer able to keep pace with the various demands of an ageing population and ongoing Covid cases. Police forces have given up investigating burglaries in order to spend more time burnishing their figures by nabbing people for mean tweets online. In the rare event that the police do take the time to extract themselves from the piles of paperwork burdening their desk to investigate your complaint, and through some miracle of CCTV availability catch the perpetrator, you can look forward to kicking your heels for a year or more as the case works its way through the waiting list for a courtroom.

Britain is in a dire state, and while it may not be entirely Boris Johnson’s fault, he certainly didn’t do much to help matters. Whoever is unfortunate enough to win the leadership contest will need to fix things, fast. Fortunately for our next Prime Minister there are policies they could introduce tomorrow to make Britain a better place to live.

A dream to-do list would start with housing. With about two years until the next election, there probably isn’t time to introduce the sort of large-scale planning reforms that would see Britain finally achieve its ideal form of a towering London megacity surrounded by wilderness. That doesn’t mean there isn’t time to tinker around the edges. Introducing small policy changes like the flexible right to buy or street votes would free up or create housing in the most productive parts of the country, giving an immediate boost to GDP while making everyone involved – from council tenants to homeowners – better off.

Next, no government does well when food and energy prices are going through the roof. While an inflation crisis is great cover to introduce longer term supply side reforms like cutting corporation tax, nobody realistically expects these to play out before prices start coming down. Fortunately, there are other steps we can take to make things cheaper. Inflation may be a problem of too much money chasing too little output, but some costs are entirely voluntary; tariffs on food and drink do little more than make our weekly shops more expensive.

Equally, no British government does well when the NHS is visibly struggling. Lifting artificial caps on the number of doctors and nurses trained domestically would be a sensible longer term step, but in the immediate future we need to find ways to make more efficient use of the talent we already have. A simple way of doing this would be hiring more bureaucrats. NHS doctors currently spend large chunks of their days phoning to chase results, copying out drug charts word for word, printing blood stickers, and handling the administration of discharged patients. NHS doctors also cost considerably more per hour than secretaries.

What matters for patient service isn’t the number of doctors, but the number of effective doctors. You can increase the latter by letting them offload their bureaucratic task onto dedicated support staff. This isn’t just easier and faster than putting a cohort of medical students through university, it’s cheaper and more efficient too. Doctors would love it, patients would come to love it, and you might just go down as the Tory prime minister who saved the NHS.

It’s not possible to bring crime down overnight. Hiring more police officers would certainly help, although it might be difficult to persuade certain vertically challenged candidates that spending money is ever worth it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t shorter term measures the government could introduce to put dangerous offenders behind bars. A national CCTV register so coppers can easily find footage of crimes where available, strong sentences for repeat offenders on a pathway for escalation, and freeing up prison space by scrapping ineffective short sentences would all work to set things in the right direction. Equally, it might not be possible to end the court backlog in the next year, but giving barristers a much overdue payrise would help stop the profession bleeding out talent.

Finally, growth isn’t everything, but it is a lot. It’s certainly easier for people to put up with a period of bust if there’s a period of boom before or after. Some of the easiest and most effective pro-growth measures would be as simple as scrapping some of the more damaging policies left over from Boris’s agenda: the Online Safety Bill which sets out to kneecap Britain’s tech sector, and the corporation tax increase set to go through next year.

All of these policies are designed to work in the short term, with the assumption that winning the next election is possible. If instead the lucky winner of the leadership contest finds the damage done by their predecessor insurmountable, then they will have the opportunity to pass long term laws for the good of the country without having to worry about re-election – in which case, could we start by scrapping the triple lock?

‘They call him the tunneller’: meet the new head of the Met police

Dressed in full uniform and clutching a clipboard, Mark Rowley walked out of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, down the steps and towards a row of microphones. It was January 2014. An inquest into the fatal police shooting in Tottenham of Mark Duggan had just concluded with a verdict of ‘lawful killing’ and the Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner had a statement to make. As he began to speak, there were shouts from a group of Duggan’s supporters nearby. ‘Murderers, liars, racists, scum!’ they screamed, drowning out the officer’s words. One man came up to him, just inches from his face, and hurled abuse, but Rowley carried on.

That incident sums up the character of Sir Mark Peter Rowley (he was knighted in 2018), who has just been announced as the new Met Commissioner. Some police officers might have gone back inside once the crowds started to gather. Others would have made their remarks in the safer surroundings of New Scotland Yard. Not Rowley. He is not afraid of confrontation or delivering difficult messages and he doesn’t always do what convention and common-sense dictate – even if that sometimes risks creating trouble. 

Rowley, 57, grew up in Birmingham and studied maths at Cambridge, before joining West Midlands Police where he worked as a beat cop in Digbeth and later as a detective. He could have stayed in his local force, climbing the ranks as other bright and ambitious officers did, but his interest in wider aspects of law enforcement led to him taking a job specialising in covert techniques to combat organised crime at the National Criminal Intelligence Service. He later moved to Surrey police, where he became Chief Constable, and then joined the Met in 2011, following the riots sparked by Duggan’s shooting. 

There, Rowley oversaw Scotland Yard’s investigation into the disappearance in Portugal of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, handling the knotty international policing and media issues with intelligence, diplomacy and sensitivity. In 2018, after an unsuccessful bid to be Commissioner, losing out to Dame Cressida Dick, he retired from the service. At that point he was in charge of counter-terrorism, having been the public face of the national policing response to five attacks in six months. He returns to the Yard now after taking on a series of strategic advisory roles, co-authoring a crime novel, The Sleep of Reason, and after making trips to Mount Everest and a yoga retreat in the Himalayas.

Colleagues say Rowley has extraordinary drive and will reform the Met after taking time to understand the problems from the inside. In his previous policing posts, he would seek out different points of view before acting. ‘He listens,’ says one former colleague. ‘He genuinely wants people’s ideas and then takes decisions.’

Another retired officer who worked closely with Rowley says he built a reputation for getting things done and not wasting time: ‘He’s not interested in bureaucracy.’ So impatient was he for change that at times he would go ahead with a plan without bringing everyone with him or considering all the consequences. ‘He was called the tunneller,’ says the ex-officer. ‘He dug a tunnel so fast that everyone behind him had to try and hold it up.’ 

One project to suffer a disastrous collapse was Siren, which was designed to modernise Surrey Police’s computer systems for recording custody admissions, criminal cases and intelligence. The programme started in 2005 and continued while Rowley was in charge of the force; by the time it was abandoned, eight years later, costs had swelled to £14.8 million. A scathing report from auditors Grant Thornton said it had been ‘beyond the in-house capabilities and experience’ of the constabulary and the police authority. The report listed a catalogue of failings and said the scrutiny offered by chief police officers, among others, was ‘not sufficiently probing or robust’. Although none of the individuals responsible was named in the document, Rowley didn’t duck the criticism, saying, ‘I’m sure that all those involved in leading this project as officers or from the Surrey Police Authority share with me regret and disappointment that Siren did not realise the benefits for the public we sought.’

Rowley has always taken a keen interest in IT and the opportunities for law enforcement to use data science. He’s expected to make it a priority when he takes over at the Met. He has chaired the force’s Info Tech group, drawing up a strategy to provide officers with real-time information and enable them to work remotely. More recently he’s been involved in two technology companies, though one old colleague says he has a tendency to go ‘gooey-eyed’ in the presence of tech. ‘I hope he brings some outside people in, when he re-joins,’ he says.

As well as embracing technological advances, Rowley has already made clear that his mission is to ‘renew’ the traditional principle of ‘policing by consent’, where the service derives its legitimacy from the respect, cooperation and support of the public. ‘The founder of British policing, Sir Robert Peel, said in 1829 “the police are the public, and the public are the police”, and that principle is as true today as it was nearly 200 years ago,’ Rowley said in a speech in 2018. Since then confidence in the Met has dropped sharply, particularly among black people. While leading the fight against terrorism, Rowley saw how information from the public had helped save lives. Under his watch, there will be a huge push to rebuild trust between communities and the police.

It is arguably his most important task and one of the metrics by which he will be judged. To have a chance of success, and to lift the Met out of ‘special measures’, Rowley will have to re-shape his top team and impress on officers the need to get better at the basics of policing. The danger for him is that he will be blown off course, as his predecessor was, buffeted by scandals old and new, spending days on the back foot, apologising for mistakes and misconduct. The newly-appointed Commissioner – grounded, thoughtful and approachable – is acutely aware of the risks. But he will need to be at his most resilient as he starts the greatest challenge of his career, far greater than facing angry anti-police protestors outside the Law Courts.

Will Sunak’s polished campaign harm his chances?

Rishi Sunak has launched a slick, well organised leadership campaign very early. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that he has been preparing his leadership pitch quietly for weeks and months.

Will this hurt or harm him?

There may be some Boris Johnson loyalists who will accuse him of disloyalty – although Johnson did not manifest much fealty to Theresa May when she was PM and he foreign secretary.

Per contra, Johnson’s many critics may want to reward Sunak for quitting as chancellor last Tuesday and triggering the crisis that led on Thursday to Johnson announcing he was stepping down. So it is not clear to me whether Sunak will be rewarded or punished for contingency planning for a bid to become PM while in theory there was no vacancy at the top.

What will matter much more is, one whether the still-dominant Brexiters will back him (and the endorsement of eternal Brexiter Liam Fox won’t harm Sunak) and, two, whether the polls show he or someone else is best placed to reverse the surge in support for LibDems in the South and the lesser forward momentum of Labour in the Midlands and North.

If Sunak looks the best candidate to recreate the coalition of voters that took the Tories to their decisive victory in 2019, he’ll be on his way to becoming the first person of colour to be UK prime minister.

What the Tories should look for in their next leader

The Conservatives are selecting a new leader, who will become Prime Minister. What sort of a person should that be? It needs to be someone with the spark or edge of a leader, able to carry others with them – not just a clubbable ‘Yes Man’ type. It needs to be someone able to press a vision and policy agenda across a range of issues, not just something narrow like finance, defence, international relations or legal issues.

It needs to be someone able to convey an optimistic message, but have a serious mode that can be turned on when necessary. Someone who is willing to be unpopular, taking tough decisions when necessary with the confidence that vindication will come later, who trusts that the truth is the Conservative’s greatest political friend.

The above personality traits are necessary, but personality should not be the defining matter at this election. The party is in government, and governments (unlike oppositions) ultimately succeed or fail on policy not personality.

When it comes to policy, the first requirement is to have some answer to the great issue of the day: inflation. They to declare he or she will take responsibility for controlling inflation, not simply spend taxpayers’ money to try to mitigate its effects. That doesn’t have to mean promising to get it down instantly. But it does mean accepting that controlling inflation is the government’s responsibility – unlike Boris who seemed determined to blame inflation on anyone or anything else.

Next, they need to express a commitment to cutting public expenditure and then keeping it down. Boris and Sunak created a legacy of boosting spending as the answer to every challenge or crisis. We need to see spending come back down.

A Conservative leader should believe in markets. Market mechanisms – households and businesses taking their own decisions, guided and constrained by regulation – should be the first port of call for policymakers. That doesn’t necessarily mean mass deregulation or empty talk of a ‘bonfire of red tape’. It means genuinely using markets, rather than (as Boris often did) seeing them as populated by rapacious capitalists. It also means not being afraid of market mechanisms in the public sector.

Having left the EU the UK has set out on a path into the wider world, with new trade deals and collaborative pacts with Australia, Japan and New Zealand, with close collaboration with Canada on many questions as well. The next PM needs to commit to continuing down that path, rather than dragging us back into parochial regional interests in Europe.

This leadership election may determine whether wokeness becomes a consensus issue in British politics or a dividing line across the parties. A new Conservative leader ought to be clearly and unequivocally anti-woke, but without that spilling over into harshness or unpleasantness.

A slew of new tech is coming: AI, autonomous vehicles, commercial exploitation of space, lab-grown meat, new cancer vaccines and many others. A new leader needs to be a tech optimist, with a desire to see Britain lie at the forefront of these advances.

A new leader needs pragmatism and realism on green issues – neither pretending climate change can be wished away nor imagining that curtailing economic growth is an answer, and making a geopolitical virtue of having a range of sources of energy. We need to combine mitigation with adaptation, and to use market mechanisms rather than prohibitions to help get us there.

Britain has long been a country open to immigration, and a new leader ought to welcome that continuing, but be resolute, determined and unapologetic in getting illegal immigration under proper control once again.

A Conservative leader needs to be determined to make Britain an entity worthy of Scots and Northern Irish folk wanting to belong to. The fundamental way to preserve the union is not to make concessions to nationalists. It is to make Britain attractive and worthy enough that nationalism is defeated.

Such a policy agenda would command very widespread support across the Conservative party. It would not always be popular with the media and some elements would attract passionate opposition. A Conservative Prime Minister cannot be too needy of adulation.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the above agenda would win the next general election. But a new leader will have a little over two years left to make a difference, leaving her or his mark by doing the right thing.

Be worthy, and trust the voters. That is always the best play, but it is really the only play from here.

How the Tories can avoid a leadership election stitch-up

Boris Johnson’s resignation has fired the starting gun on yet another Conservative leadership election. The race to succeed Boris is the fifth to have been fought under the rules introduced by William Hague in 1998. But there’s a problem with the way the contest is run: it forces MPs to second-guess the Tory membership – who ultimately pick the winner – rather than simply back the best candidate.

Should he stand, Jeremy Hunt is quite likely to make the final cut again this year. Why? Because Hunt would lose to every other major contender among the 200,000 or so strong membership, according to the latest polling. That is a clear sign that the broad view of Conservatives in the country is that Hunt is not someone who should make the final two in the ballot, but the system gives MPs the perverse incentive to ensure that he makes the final two, along with their favoured candidate.

In a three-way race between, for example, Penny Mordaunt, Ben Wallace and Jeremy Hunt there will be supporters of the first two tempted to vote for Hunt in order to knock out the more significant rival among the membership. This means it is far from guaranteed that the two most popular candidates will face-off against each other.

From the same polling of Tory leadership candidates, it’s clear that Ben Wallace would comfortably beat all of the other choices among members. This might persuade supporters of rival candidates to gang up with the aim of eliminating him early on. But how absurd that being competent and popular only serves to put a target on your back. Choosing a party leader, let alone a prime minister, should be done in a slightly more sophisticated manner than mimicking the final rounds of the Weakest Link. After all, tactical arrangements and stitch-ups rarely produce satisfactory outcomes.

Was there really any point in 2019 bothering to consult the members once the final two were known to be Johnson and Hunt? The dogs in the street knew it was a rubber-stamping exercise. Despite awareness of Johnson’s personal shortcomings, he won two-thirds of the vote. Would he have won such a landslide against another Brexiteer such as Michael Gove? At least, wouldn’t the debate have been more interesting than a Leave/Remain rehash?

There was an almost direct parallel in 2001, when the final round was contested by Ken Clarke and Iain Duncan Smith, hardly a substantial figure at the time. IDS won comfortably with 60 per cent of the vote, a result always likely given the broad Euroscepticism of the party. MPs choosing to eliminate Michael Portillo in the previous round was a grievous error which resulted in the near-certain election of a poorer candidate.

There’s also the danger that one of the candidates might not be acceptable to the bulk of MPs. Due to the self-immolation of the Johnson and Gove partnership, we ended up with the slightly ludicrous situation of Theresa May facing off against Andrea Leadsom in the final round of the 2016 election. Not only was it unlikely that these were the two strongest available candidates, but there was genuine nervousness among MPs that Leadsom (as a Brexiteer) might actually win among activists. This would have had distinct similarities to Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, resulting in wide support among the membership, but hardly any among the MPs who are expected to follow that leader.

But there is a better option for the Tories in choosing who to replace Boris. The party should return to the pre-1998 system of allowing MPs to select the leader from among their number with no direct involvement of the membership (although local parties could definitely make representation to their MPs). The added benefit of this approach would be that a new leader could be in place within days not weeks or months. Unfortunately it is unlikely that the membership would relinquish their privilege.

Another alternative is for the party to recognise that its leadership system is entirely backwards. It would be far superior for activists and members to put forward a small slate of candidates and allow MPs to make their choice from that list. The members would be more engaged, there could be a much broader debate over policy, and members could suggest candidates that might not have made it through the early rounds of horse-trading at Westminster. Candidates that are unacceptable to the majority of the membership would simply not be an option.

It is too late to make official changes to the system now. Given the situation facing the party, MPs should opt for an informal pact that whoever comes second will simply withdraw to allow a rapid coronation. Whatever the outcome, and despite the overflowing inbox that awaits them, the new leader should find time to instigate reform before it becomes critical again. It is simply too important a matter to leave unresolved.

Ready for Rishi? Sunak launches leadership bid

Rishi Sunak has this afternoon confirmed that he is running to be the next leader of the Conservative party. In a launch video published on social media, the former chancellor begins by telling the story of his grandmother coming to the UK from East Africa and starting a life here as he declares that ‘family is everything’ to him.

Sunak – who has also launched a leadership website under the name Ready for Rishi – has adopted the slogan: ‘restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite the country’. In a taster of what to expect from Sunak’s campaign, he suggests that he will prioritise fiscal discipline over immediate tax cuts – unlike some candidates: ‘Do we tell ourselves comforting fairytales that might make us feel better in the moment but will leave our children worse off for tomorrow?’

So, why has Sunak decided to move now? It’s no great surprise that he is running – but many of the senior figures expected to enter the race were planning to wait until next week to declare. While a handful of candidates have come out so far – including Suella Braverman and Tom Tugendhat – Sunak is the biggest name to announce his bid. It follows that it could give him a first-mover advantage over some of his former cabinet colleagues.

However, any move comes with risk. The slick video and campaign website suggest that Sunak has been thinking about this for a while – as opposed to coming up with the idea only this week. Sunak’s team has also managed to get a number of MPs to immediately come out and say they back the former chancellor. This includes Red Wall MP Jacob Young as well as Leader of the House Mark Spencer. Spencer is an interesting move given he was viewed as a Johnson loyalist.

Despite coming under pressure over his wife’s non-dom tax status and use of a green card, plenty of MPs believe Sunak is a serious contender in the contest and has a good chance of reaching the final two. However, he faces two obstacles. 

First, as he alluded to in the video, Sunak is associated with high taxes rather than tax cuts and will be arguing for patience. That could be a hard sell if other candidates promise tax cuts immediately. Secondly, there are still Boris Johnson loyalists left in the party. Many of whom regarded Sunak with suspicion from early on – and feel that even more strongly after his decision to resign. It follows that there are plenty of MPs who would like to see Sunak fail.

The Tory leadership race is wide open

Westminster is strangely quiet today. Most MPs are back in their constituencies. But the place will feel very different next week when there’ll probably be two rounds of voting in a Tory leadership contest. The speed of the contest – the 1922 executive is likely to propose having the parliamentary rounds wrapped up by 21 July – will mean that momentum is all important. Whoever is seen to outperform in round one will get a big boost.

Another key factor will be transferability, how able are candidates to pick up support from others as the contest goes on. No one is going to be close to 120 votes, what you need to guarantee making it through to the members’ round, on the first ballot. The field remains very open. But the shape of the race will start to become clearer over the weekend.

How Boris Johnson changed my life

Over the coming weeks we will be regaled with dozens of personal recollections, from around the world, of the man who has dominated British politics this last half decade. Some of them will paint him as a foolish clown, others as a flawed genius, others will see him as Leaver saint or Brexiteering Satan, but my Boris Johnson story might be the only one involving medically dangerous levels of masturbation. So it needs to be told.

About eighteen years ago I got horribly addicted to internet porn – free online porn then being an innovation – to an extent that I went days without sleep, became perilously run down, and then got taken out with a suppurative form of tonsillitis. I actually ended up on a drip, badly dehydrated, in hospital.

As I lay there, feeling sorry myself, as well as totally absurd, I realised that the whole forlorn experience was surely worthy of a Spectator article, on the dangers of this new, insidious form of pornography.

I sent off the idea. The editor of The Spectator at that time, Boris Johnson, commissioned the piece. I did the job, wrote the piece – but as I wrote it, I included a ridiculous, outrageous but entirely true sentence – a sentence which I presumed would not make the editorial cut. I did it for my own entertainment. And yet, when the article came out I saw that, to my surprise, the sentence remained in the published article. The same article caused a bit of a stir – indeed the article, and that exact sentence, went on to change the course of my life.

Flash forward many years, to mid 2021. Britain was in the firm grip of the pandemic. I was sitting in my London flat watching TV and I saw Boris Johnson looking absolutely shattered. Even if I didn’t agree with his politics, even if I lamented his failings as PM, I could recognise a tired human being, trying to manage a global plague. I felt pity for the man inside the job, and I then remembered what he did for me, with that internet porn article, back in the day.

So I decided to try and cheer him up. By sending him this letter:

Dear Prime Minister,

It occurs to me that in these troubled times – from plague to recession, climate change to global conflict – you might be in need of some cheering news.

To that end I’d like to explain how you, personally, improved my life immeasurably.

Nearly two decades ago I was a jobbing hack earning very little money, and earning even less money as a novelist: probably because my then agent was a septuagenarian alcoholic without an email address. To make matters worse, I was also addicted to internet porn.

When my addiction was beaten, I pitched an idea to you, as the editor of The Spectator, on my travails – and the perils of porn addiction. You commissioned it, I wrote it. And in the article I included the line ‘this is it, Sean, you’ve wanked yourself into hospital’ (a true story, as it happens).

When I wrote this line I did it for my own amusement, I assumed any editor would strike it out. But you did not. You let it run. I do not believe any other significant editor in the UK at the time would have had the audacity to do that.

That line, ‘I wanked myself into hospital’ changed my life. It was spotted by a brilliant agent at William Morris Ltd, Eugenie Furniss, who wrote to me out of the blue, saying it had made her laugh out loud and did I want a new agent.

Obviously, I said Yes. Eugenie became my agent. Within a year, under her guidance, I published a mildly bestselling memoir, since then she has turned me into an affluent thriller writer, with my very own London home, and a very nice lifestyle. And all because I wanked myself into hospital.

Much of the credit for this must go to you, Prime Minister. If you hadn’t commissioned that article and published that one sentence, I would probably still be an impoverished freelancer, scrabbling for work, owning one table and a dodgy toaster. But I am not. I am wealthy. Clearly. I had to do the original wanking, but you had to do the editing.

And so, in these difficult times, I just want to say Thanks. Really.

Best Wishes,

Sean Thomas

I printed out the letter and sent it off, and – to be honest – I largely forgot about it. Perhaps it might amuse an intern at Number 10, perhaps it would get all the way to the PM for a few moments, and it might raise a chuckle. Job done.

A few weeks later, heading out of my home, I noticed an unusually stiff envelope lying in my hall. On the front it said THE PRIME MINISTER. On the back it said DOWNING STREET. I opened it up: it was a signed, handwritten letter from Boris Johnson, PM.

10 Downing Street

London SW1A 2AA

www.pm.gov.uk

Dear Mr Thomas,

Thank you for your kind and amusing letter. I am very glad I have played some small part in your literary success and will look out for your novels with interest!

Best Wishes,

Boris Johnson

What did that say about Boris Johnson the man, that he had taken time out during a plague to respond to my letter, when he presumably had more pressing matters? As I strolled out of my hall, into the sunshine, I wasn’t sure. But it made me laugh, in the middle of a plague. And that’s no small thing.

The Tory leadership candidates’ tax cuts promises won’t be enough

What does Boris Johnson’s resignation mean for the economy? The pound started its rebound yesterday from a two-year low against the US dollar after Johnson resigned. A few economists were quick to point out though that it had dropped so much, there was only one place it could really go: up. 

Had Johnson managed a few more months in the role, we would have almost certainly seen some deficit-financed tax cuts, led by the new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi. ‘We were 24 hours away from reversing the corporation tax hike,’ one minister tells me, which will rise from 19 per cent to 25 per cent for large companies. There is heavy awareness in the Prime Minister’s circles that he will be leaving office with the legacy of having taken the tax burden to a 72-year high (take a look at Michael Simmons’s write-up of Johnson’s premiership in seven graphs here). But all such plans are now on pause, after a slew of ministerial resignations led to Johnson stepping down as Conservative leader – a series of events kicked off by the man who, until this week, had the keys to the Treasury.

Both Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak were pushed over the edge by No. 10’s handling of Chris Pincher and knowledge of his behaviour. But as I reveal in the magazine this week, Sunak was especially fed up with the Prime Minister’s economic philosophy of ‘cake-ism’ – insisting that higher spending and meaningful tax hikes were possible at the same time. He was also pushed to leave by the prospect of the joint speech from No. 10 and Treasury that the Prime Minister wanted to do. Sunak struggled with the idea of feeding a feelgood rhetoric to the public with no economic substance behind it.

So now we enter a leadership race, and we’re going to hear a lot about tax cuts. Suella Braverman, the government’s attorney general, has kicked it all off. Throwing her hat into the ring on live television on Wednesday night she promised ‘proper tax cuts’ alongside sharing her family’s story about coming to the UK.

As I say in today’s Telegraph, voters have every right to be sceptical about tax pledges after Johnson broke his manifesto pledge not to raise National Insurance. It’s very likely this leadership race turns into a competition over who would cut taxes hardest and fastest, which is no bad thing. But simply announcing tax cuts will not be enough; MPs must say what spending they’d cut or how they’d grow the economy to make them sustainable.

And claiming tax cuts will ‘pay for themselves’ (i.e. deficit funded tax cuts) is a big red flag. On Thursday the Office for Budget Responsibility announced debt levels are on track to reach 320 per cent of GDP in fifty years’ time, tripling from where they are now. Political spending promises weren’t sustainable even before Covid hit, and they’re definitely not sustainable now.

The Conservative party must start addressing this difficult truth: as desirable as tax cuts might be, slashing them without a serious strategy in place (particularly for economic growth) is not a credible answer. This conversation should start in the leadership race.

Boris’s Tory assassins have learnt nothing from Thatcher’s downfall

John Stuart Mill once dismissed the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. When a reader queried the insult, Mill qualified it, but not by much. ‘I never meant to say that Conservatives are generally stupid,’ he wrote. ‘I meant that stupid people are generally Conservatives’. More than a century and a half later as the party implodes once again, today’s Tory MPs are still living up to Mill’s derogatory description.

Sitting securely with their huge parliamentary majority, and with at least two years to go before they need to face the voters again, the Tories are going all out to make sure that they lose. In doing so, they are not only condemning the country to a likely Lab/Lib/SNP coalition, but in all probability hastening the breakup of the United Kingdom. What is remotely ‘Conservative’ or sensible about such self-destructive lunacy?

Yet that is the prospect before us as the herd of Tory MPs accelerate their gallop towards the precipice. However bad the character of the Prime Minister, and however damaging his faults and flaws, the manner of his departure has shown the Tories at their collective worst. The act of regicide that they committed this week in taking out the leader who gave them their majority is now compounded by the chaotic aftermath of their botched coup.

A whole posse of MPs are vying to get their snouts ahead of their rivals as the struggle to succeed Boris Johnson intensifies. But with squabbles breaking out over the succession process – who should preside over it; how long should it last; who actually gets to vote, MPs and/or party members – it is becoming clear that the Tories who so eagerly brought Boris down have simply not thought through what happens next.

Former chancellor Rishi Sunak, for example, the man who played the same decisive part in eliminating Johnson as Geoffrey Howe did in 1990 in ousting Margaret Thatcher, demanded ‘serious and competent’ government in his resignation letter. But the chaos he has helped unleashed is the very antithesis of those qualities.

The naked ambition shown by Sunak in going after the man who plucked him from obscurity to the summits of power certainly demonstrates the ruthlessness necessary in anyone who aspires to the premiership. But Sunak forgets that such behaviour should always be allied to cunning and caution. As Michael Heseltine could ruefully tell him, he who wields the assassin’s knife often fails to inherit the fallen monarch’s crown.

It is not as if the Boris assassins had no warning in the modern history of their party of where their hastily launched conspiracy would lead. The plot that ousted Thatcher split the party, inflamed the festering divisions over Europe into gaping wounds, and ultimately led the Tories to years in the wilderness and futile impotence as Tony Blair and New Labour transformed Britain.

Nor is Sunak the only Tory to let personal feelings trump political sense. Two aged veterans of the Thatcher coup – Heseltine himself and John Major, the man who did inherit the crown from the PM who has promoted him, only to be rewarded with betrayal – waded into the plots against Boris with undiminished enthusiasm, despite still bearing the scars from their parts in the earlier 20th century Tory civil wars.

Like many members of their generation, Major and Heseltine are starry-eyed Europhiles. Their open disdain of Boris Johnson stems from the part he played in getting Brexit done. That is why Heseltine ludicrously suggested that getting rid of Boris means getting rid of Brexit, and why Major wrote to the 1922 committee advising them to throw Johnson out of Downing Street with no further ado. In both cases, the two elderly gentlemen have shown that age does not necessarily bring wisdom.

Do those Tories who are playing these games give a moment’s thought as to how their little power plays appear in the eyes of the British public who will pass judgement on their frolics in two years’ time? Do the myriad MPs and ministers who resigned and then rejoined the government not see how deeply they are disliked for their irresponsible frivolity?

The behaviour of the Tory party at this moment is not just a bout of midsummer madness, but a symptom of a party too long in office and steeped in behaviour that can only be described in Mill’s word as stupid. Another 19th century political philosopher, Karl Marx, opined that when history repeated itself tragedy was followed by farce. If the misery that followed 1990 is not to be repeated in the coming years, ending with the same conclusion, it is high time to bring the curtain down on this long running Tory farce. Time, in short, for the Tories to get serious about governing or leave the stage to those who can.

Starmer cleared over beergate

Keir Starmer is in the clear over beergate. This lunchtime, Durham Police announced that both the Labour leader and his deputy Angela Rayner have been cleared of breaking lockdown rules at an event involving curry and beer.

When it comes to the event in April 2021, the police said there was ‘no case to answer’ as there was an exemption at the time for ‘reasonably necessary work’.

Responding to the news, a Labour spokesperson said:

‘Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have always been clear that no rules were broken in Durham.’

What does this mean for Labour? It means that Starmer’s gamble – of promising to resign if fined and thereby putting clear blue water between himself and Johnson – has paid off. It caps off an already good week for the Labour party given the Conservative turmoil. As the Tories prepare for a bruising leadership contest following Johnson’s resignation, the Labour party looks stable by comparison.

There are still potential pitfalls for Starmer. There were some in his shadow cabinet who thought a new leader wouldn’t be such a bad thing – they worry that Starmer has not connected with the public. If the Tories improve their polling with a new face, Starmer could find himself – once again – struggling to cut through.

The only thing stopping Nick Kyrgios is himself

It’s hard to watch Nick Kyrgios for long without the sense he wants the world to know he considers everything beneath him.

Clearly, journalists are beneath him and he treats them with open contempt at every opportunity, but so too are the officials he abuses, the opponents he mocks and even tennis itself.

‘I don’t really like the sport of tennis that much. I don’t love it’, he has stated publicly, claiming instead that his real affection is for basketball.

To say Kyrgios has failed to realise his talent for tennis is one of sport’s great understatements, and something he seems to accept. ‘I thought my ship had sailed,’ he said this week about the prospect of ever winning a Slam.

When he announced himself on the international stage aged 19 in 2014 by defeating then world number one Rafa Nadal in the fourth round at Wimbledon, having qualified by wildcard, he was hailed as the best young player since Roger Federer.

John McEnroe even described him as ‘the most talented player of the last ten years’ and the widely held view was his prodigious potential would soon see him blossom into a major force within the sport.

But that isn’t what has happened. In the eight years since, he’s won precisely zip when it comes to Grand Slams (an Australian Open doubles title notwithstanding), and only six ATP Tour titles.

As any armchair psychologist will tell you, a well developed superiority complex is almost always a coping mechanism for a deep feeling of inferiority. That’s because it’s easier by far to pretend nothing means anything than to admit you don’t feel worthy, or that you might have squandered your talent.

In 2020, Kyrgios went as far as announcing, ludicrously, that he wasn’t that bothered about winning the big tournaments every other player dreams of winning. ‘I don’t have a goal of winning grand slams,’ he said. ‘I just want to do it my way and have fun with it.’ Are we really expected to believe that’s true?

He’s also been fined – Kyrgios is the most fined player in ATP history – for tanking, which is the act of deliberately losing a game by not trying. It’s less humiliating to be beaten if you never set out to win, right?

But so much of what Kyrgios does on court indicates that he does care about winning very much indeed – to the point he is unable to control it. Spitting at umpires, smashing rackets, throwing water bottles and snarling insults at rivals who stand in his way are clearly not the actions of a man who takes part merely for the joy of playing.

‘Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate,’ he famously taunted Stan Wawrinka during their 2015 Rogers Cup match. Are these the words of someone at ease with the possibility of loss?

It seems obvious by now the endless bad behaviour is a deliberate ploy by which to divert attention away from a disappointing record as an elite player. It’s easier, perhaps, to live at the centre of a self-generated storm of controversy than to listen to talk of wasted talent and what might have been.

At Wimbledon this year, even by his standards Kyrgios has seemed particularly objectionable. Surly on court and glowering in press conferences, he has appeared hell-bent on intimidating everyone he encounters. After a third round match characterised by trademark unpleasantness, his opponent Stefanos Tsitsipas said he thought Kyrgios was a bully. ‘That’s what he does, he bullies opponents… he has a very evil side to him’, he said.

The Australian has also been more than usually vile to umpires and lines judges, and he appeared to smirk while refusing to answer questions put to him by journalists about allegations of physical abuse made by ex-girlfriend Chiara Passari.

This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen at Wimbledon, a tournament that has since 1877 existed as a kind of collective effort at shutting out for a fortnight everything that’s wrong with the world – a pristine paradise in which everyone is beautifully turned out, and where the players are always impossibly charming.

Now, thanks to an abdominal injury that has forced Nadal to withdraw from the semi-final, Kyrgios is into the final and stands on the cusp of claiming tennis’ greatest prize. It’s a match that many will feel they have to hold their nose to watch – a one-man negation of the spirit of SW19 taking on the always humble and gracious Novak Djokovic, one of the sport’s greatest champions (if Djokovic beats Britain’s Cameron Norrie today).

Kyrgios has repeatedly made clear in the past he doesn’t play for fans, but only for himself. ‘I don’t owe them anything. If you don’t like it, I didn’t ask you to come and watch. Just leave,’ he has said. It’s in this context, presumably, that he seeks to escape the twin pressures of expectation and, particularly, disapproval that will now only amplify ahead of Sunday’s showdown.

The irony is that despite all of his appalling behaviour, there is still affection for Kyrgios among tennis fans, most of whom realise his worst opponent has never been the guy on the other side of the net, but rather himself.

The disapproval, then, is not so much for his boorish antics, as grim as they are, but rather for his seeming cowardice in refusing to confront the demons that have so manifestly held him back.

Having apparently left it too late to deliver on his early promise, now comes an improbable last shot at redemption. Will he seize it without behaving like a pillock? Probably not. But perhaps by daring finally to find out how good he could have been – with none of the attendant histrionics and nonsense – he will discover that tennis isn’t beneath him, and emerge the better for it.

He might not owe that to the fans, but surely he does to himself.

Has Jeremy Hunt been left in the lurch?

Boris’s decision to quit yesterday fired the starting gun on the greatest game of them all: the Tory leadership race. Suella Braverman was first out the blocks on Thursday night before, er, Johnson had even gone. But it’s the launch of the second official candidate, Tom Tugendhat, which has attracted more interest. In traditional Tory style he began his campaign with an article in the Telegraph, emphasising his own personal values and the need to tackle Britain’s economic problems – a conscious effort to broaden his appeal beyond being pigeonholed as solely interested in matters of defence and foreign policy.

If Tugendhat is to reach the later stages of a leadership contest, he will need to win over as much support as possible from various blocs within the party. One fruitful constituency could be the One Nation caucus of the party, which represents about 50 MPs who are –  rightly or wrongly –  viewed as being on the centre or centre left of the party. Both Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt will also be seeking to woo this wing of the party. So it’s a potentially significant indicator therefore that Tugendhat has managed to bag five backers thus far, including One Nation stalwarts Damian Green and Stephen Hammond, who is chairing the campaign.

Tugendhat’s promising start will be bad news for Hunt, whose campaign is being overseen by Steve Brine. Colleagues of the former Foreign Secretary fear he did not emerge well from last month’s no-confidence vote. One Tory MP confided to Mr S that they thought Hunt was too much of a reminder of the past, given his involvement in the Brexit and Covid debates. Both Tugendhat and Hunt supported Britain staying in the European Union in 2016 but the latter featured much more prominently in the subsequent squabbles over Theresa May’s deal. One source within the One Nation camp says that ‘unlike Jeremy, Tom never got involved in all the Remain nonsense.’ Will that cut through with the members?

Tugendhat’s supporters are (naturally) desperate to portray him as both ‘sound’ on Brexit and the definitive change candidate. Some even view his total sum of ministerial experience (i.e none) as a positive, after the bitter disputes of the past six years. One MP who was a staunch Brexiteer and does not hail from Tugendhat’s wing of the party confided that ‘he’s the only one completely untainted by this government or the last’. An interesting way to spin a lack of office, perhaps?

As for Mordaunt, her decision to not resign from the Johnson government has perplexed some of those colleagues who did. She is expected to announce her own leadership bid in the coming days, run by fellow Brexiteer and former minister Andrea Leadsom. Like Tugendhat, she will emphasise her involvement in the Armed Forces – in her case, the Royal Naval Reserves. Will she be able to sink Tom’s chances? Or has the Afghanistan veteran outmanoeuvred his Tory colleague?