July 15, 2024 - 7:00am
It took 10 days for a senior Tory to write about the worst general election result in the party’s history. Unfortunately, that senior Tory is Liz Truss.
The most obvious feature of her article for the Telegraph on Sunday is a complete absence of contrition. We’re expected to believe that her errors as prime minister don’t even merit a mention, let alone an apology. And yet in her short time at Number 10, she spooked the markets and tanked her party’s poll ratings.
Nonetheless, it’s worth moving past the denial to her main argument, which is that the Tories were “ejected by an electorate angry at too many years of successive administrations failing to implement Conservative policies”.
In other words, she thinks the Tories lost because they weren’t Right-wing enough — and that’s in the low-tax, low-regulation, libertarian-lite sense of the term. However, one can’t help but notice that the combined Conservative-Reform UK vote share was just 38% in this month’s election. In 2019, when the Conservatives stood on a notably non-libertarian platform, they won 43.6% all on their own.
It’s hard to reconcile Trussite theory with these results. There are further inconvenient truths in new research from More in Common. According to Luke Tryl, this reveals that Labour “gained support from right leaning voter segments, but lost it on the left”. If, as Truss claims, the voters were upset by a Tory failure to roll back the “agenda pursued by the Blair and Brown governments”, then voting for Keir Starmer seems an odd way of showing it.
It’s true that the Conservatives bled support — mostly to Reform — over their failure to restrict immigration. But wasn’t it the Truss government that planned to lift immigration caps in order to promote economic growth? Indeed, isn’t the free flow of cheap labour completely consistent with her philosophy of radical de-regulation?
She also takes aim at “unaffordable Net Zero targets”. But if she imagines that these contributed to the Tory defeat, can she explain why true-blue seats were lost to the Green Party? It also seems to have slipped her mind that when she ran for the Tory leadership in 2022, she was herself in favour of Net Zero.
But the worst thing about Truss’s account of the last 14 years is that, so far, it’s the only one to be offered by a top Tory. With all eyes on the new Labour government, there’ll never be a better time for leading Conservatives to think out loud.
Certainly, there can be no recovery without a no-holds-barred reevaluation of the party’s past performance and future purpose. But apart from the Truss non mea culpa, the party has only produced the chaos surrounding the election of the new 1922 Committee and a series of rows and leaks involving those now jostling for the leadership.
What we haven’t had yet is a single serious interview, inspiring speech or thoughtful essay. The leadership contenders have been busy jockeying for position, but are yet to provide a compelling account of what they believe in. Admittedly, the whole intellectual rigour thing hasn’t been a hallmark of the last fourteen years but now, perhaps, it’s time for a change.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeThe worst PM in the party’s history has commented on the worst defeat in the Party’s history. Fair enough, I suppose.
What about May; Heath; Chamberlain?
Are you looking for Arthur Balfour in 1906 ?
I’ll give you Heath (played 4, won 1, lost 3).
It pains me to be excusing May, but she did technically win in 2017 (well, certainly not lose).
Chamberlain’s domestic record as Chancellor and PM up to 1939 is actually pretty good. Since he never got to stand for election as PM, we can’t credit him with an election loss or infer any damage to the Conservative party which continued in government through the wartime national government.
The comment was “the worst PM…:”. I grant you Balfour, though he was not that bad; Heath was a dreadful PM not quite as bad as May. Chamberlain was pretty incompetent as PM, not a bad Chancellor, but like my other nominees was a pretty dislikeable personality. All of them were appallingly arrogant.
Chamberlain was most certainly NOT incompetent as a PM.
He recognised that Germany had a valid case with regard to the Sudetenland; it had a majority German population which wanted to be part of Germany as in free determination of peoples agreed after WW1. He acted accordingly. Incidentally France did not want a war over the Sudetenland and any action against Germany most certainly required France to agree.
He also recognised that Britain could not win a short war nor afford a long one…and so it proved. That is precisely why he tried to avoid war until it was inevitable but in the meantime re-armed Britain.
None of the above can be called incompetence. You seem to have fallen for that disgraceful tract “The Guilty Men” written by one Michael Foot…and the editor of the Daily Mirror, neither of whom were likely to sympathetic to a Conservative PM.
Incidentally the portrayal of Chamberlain in the film “Finest Hour” was also disgraceful. He fully supported Churchill as PM.
Whilst this analysis makes a few pretty obvious points, a lack of “intellectual rigour” could be levelled at the article too.
It’s perfectly obvious that the percentage vote share for Tory/Reform in 2019 was due to the desire to get Brexit over the line. Citing the 2024 fall in vote share without mention of the disgust felt in the Tory failure to follow through (despite Covid) isn’t exactly politically astute.
That, by the way, isn’t a Left/Right issue in the traditional sense; more about competence.
Not sure I understand the “failure to follow through” you refer to. Britain is, in fact, out of the EU.
But complies with all EU regulations
Which was largely always inevitable as our we do the most trade with them. the idiocy of thinking otherwise still astounding.
And submits itself to the European Court of Human Rights and subordinates its legal and political sovereignty to European Convention on Human Rights. In key respects UK is not out of the EU, including these two key elements.
GDPR cost UK business £8billion to implement. When was the last time you ‘managed your preferences’? Or never?
There has been no effort whatsoever to ditch any of the mountains of costly and pointless regulation inherited from the EU. In fact, under New New Labour we’re likely to adopt a whole lot more.
The Green Agenda is now even greater than within the EU.
Yes, but it is the British Parliament which decides it. There is no longer automatic application of EU regulations.
Two points – it is not unusual for a party to lose after 15 years in power because they become tired and have few new policies.
– The sheer indiscipline of the Tory MP’s in Parliament from 2015 onwards showed their contempt towards the electorate and they got the payback at this election. The very old saying that ‘ A house divided against itself cannot stand” that means everyone involved must unify and function together or it will not work out. Labour will face the same problem
“However, one can’t help but notice that the combined Conservative-Reform UK vote share was just 38% in this month’s election.”
Precisely. 38% would have been a large enough vote share to win under FPTP. Remember, Labour got slightly under 34%.
And that’s without factoring in all the Tories who simply stayed at home. Remember, the Conservative total vote dropped from 14.0m to 6.8m – less than half. Of that lost 7.2m, fewer than 4.1m voted for Reform UK.
Franklin is plain wrong in his analysis here. There was a possible route to a majority of seats with the 2019 policies if these had been implemented and maintained.
I’m not saying that would have happened, simply that it was a real possibility and that the reasons it didn’t were not necessarily ones of policy but rather of implementation, inconsistency, incompetence and poor leadership.
When asked what sort of thing was most likely to blow governments off course, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan famously replied, “Events, dear boy, events.”
The response to covid exacerbated existing problems, distracted the government from implementing the promise of the Johnson election manifesto and torpedoed Johnson himself through a failure (common enough in the circles he moved in) to take the restrictions noisily supported by all parties and the MSM sufficiently seriously in practice because in truth there was a lack of real belief that they were as necessary as was proclaimed.
The Labour Party won because many people came to believe the Conservatives didn’t have a grip on things and declined to vote for them despite the fact that the Labour vote actually fell from the Corbin years. Farage provided a cogent critique that resonated with many and drained away many natural conservatives.
I suspect for the foreseeable future every incumbent will lose in a similar landslide. The gulf between the elite and the electorate has become unbridgeable and no real choice is on offer. What alternative is there to rejectionism?
What were the policies you think could have been implemented that would have made the difference? One suspects most of the policy agenda was underbaked even before Covid. For example did Bojo ever have a real well thought out Levelling Up strategy that went beyond a few slogans? Did they have any Policies on addressing workforce problems that would allow the removal of reliance on migrant workers? Did they have a Policy for pivoting Univ funding away from overseas student cross-subsidy reliance?
I don’t think so. They had Bojo Boosterism and that was only ever going to get so far.
The policies they were elected on in 2019 (as I said). The ones that got the support of 43% of the electorate – rather than Starmer’s 33.7% or Sunak’s 24%.
The key point here is that you do not need to pursue policies that always enjoy over 50% public support in order to get elected under FPTP. And nor should you.
But Peter Franklin appears to fall for this fallacy.
If every party took the view that it had to pivot to policies that enjoyed majority support, you’d end up with the ridiculous situation for a democracy that any policy with under 50% support would have no representation by the major political parties. In other words “uniparty”.
Quite apart from that, public opinion is not static over time and what appears to be a majority view one year can easily shift to a minority a few years later.
At some point, you need to have some fundamental underlying beliefs and not just opportunistically chase the “centre ground”. The Conservatives are not going to regain public trust and respect without demonstrating something more than opportunism (which is part of the vibe I get from people like George Osborne – a man I rather hoped we’d seen the back of).
Some of that entirely concur with.
My point was supporters of Bojo 2019 election win kid themselves he had a well worked up set of Policies. He didn’t. He had a set of slogans. So the claim the failure of the 201924 elected Govt is they didn’t implement the Policies on which they were elected falls apart under scrutiny. They didn’t deliver a good number of their slogans because they were built on sand would be a fairer interpretation
A ‘well thought out Levelling Up strategy’ has to include either a major reform of the housing market or a dramatic reduction in immigration. That’s not ideology, it’s simple maths. Neither party can do either of those things (or fix the universities) because both depend on the middle class boomer vote. The class divide will continue to widen until renters outnumber property owners to such an extent that they once again become the dominant political force.
Karl Marx would not be in disagreement HB, and would have added the drift to ever more rentiers pre-ordained.
I’m not quite there though. I think many Boomers need good health services and social care, and got kids and grandkids struggling. They also increasingly sense, in sufficient numbers, growing inequality not in anyone’s interest. Who wants a tax cut for example when not enough prison places for serious criminals etc. But there is a bit in your point too.
Jacob Rees Mogg has been frank and candid in his analysis of failure on his GB News show.
Not really. Like many Tories, and Reform-ists, he avoids ever outlining which industries would have to make do with less migrant supplementation, how that would be managed and what trade offs might ensue. Whilst in the background around the Cabinet table they signed off the visas. He is still being fundamentally dishonest.
As are you, repeating this trite nonsense.
There’s a fundamental paradox at play. There was no need to start importing hundreds of thousands of people per year. Now that we were stupid enough to do so the economy can’t cope It’s now working against it, Higher dependency rates, failing infrastructure and poorly run over subscribed services. Got it, you want us to continue with this totally discredited policy until when, total collapse?
Is that what you what JW? Be honest just for once, you can do it.
If you’re saying that bringing in migrants has created reliance on migrants then I agree with you. However, I don’t think there’s much general understanding of that concept at all.
We can’t train people fast enough, build houses, roads, hospitals or prisons quickly enough. Budgets have been cut (or over spent) year on year but we still import c300k people p.a. and the government refuses to do anything about it.
Unfortunately you seem to assume two fallacies. Firstly the impact of legal migrants on services at least the same cost as the benefit they bring to the economy. Secondly that our demographics as a nation mean we can sustain living standards despite an increasing dependent aged cohort and fewer tax contributing younger people.
All the economic evidence on the first is they contribute more than they take out. In fact though that has reduced a bit post Brexit as the EU workers tended to need fewer services and were also more likely to return home later. The numpties who supported Brexit switched that for more Africans/Asian migration which comes with greater family pressure. Plus I guess you haven’t factored in the cost of us training more of our own
On the second unless you are proposing to extend the retirement age and start taxing pensions you are living in a dream world, which will probably finally shatter when you are old and need more care, and find yourself without anyone to do it.
JW the fallacies are entirely yours. Repeating nonsense trotted out by idiots such as Johnathan Portes, Rob Ford, Jonty Bloom, Oliver Kamm and David Aaronovitch does not make it fact. Ideology is not evidence.
It appears no matter how times your posts are debunked you hold on to them like a flat earther or someone who thinks the moon landings were faked.
What is it, some loony gnostic utilitarian utopia that you’re holding on to because that is the only explanation here.
That’s an awful lot of assumption for a very short sentence and doesn’t deal with the point I made, which was basically as below –
Imagine an organisation, say the NHS, starts to employ oversees doctors or nurses, as the migrant workers are cheaper. Gradually, as more and more migrants are employed, NHS wages fall. Working conditions likely fall as well as migrants will accept worse conditions as well as lower wages. Govt and taxpayers are happy.
But people that want to be doctors and nurses aren’t so happy with the reduced wages and poorer working conditions. So they choose to do something else instead, or emigrate. (In this particular example, the BMA actually decides to only train 80% of the doctors we need.)
So now the NHS is dependent on migrant workers. Many people will say this means we need more migration, or at least to continue at current levels, and if you look only at the short term, we do. But this ignores that the fundamental reason why the NHS is dependent on migrant workers is the previous employment of migrant workers.
Perhaps this is fine. But what happens if, for whatever reason, the NHS becomes a less desirable place for migrants to work? We will have an NHS that struggles to cope as it is understaffed and it takes a long time to train doctors and nurses.
(This ignores the issues with taking doctors and nurses away from poorer countries).
You know, I just get very fed up of people calling Brexit voters ‘numpties’ or whatever, and ignoring their actual reasons. The working class, ‘red wall’ voters voted for Brexit because they could see competition from EU migrants depressing their wages.
HGV drivers are a good example. Here’s an article from the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-58552349.amp showing the effect of leaving the EU. If you’re a HGV driver that is now getting higher wages as a result of Brexit, why are you stupid for voting for that?
I don’t deny that migration helps the economy to grow. I just don’t care as the benefit of that growth goes to someone else.
Having said that UK GDP per capita has stagnated since the mid 2000s – the same time EU migration really picked up. Now I’m not saying EU migration is the cause of that, though it may be, but it’s hard to argue migration has helped growth when when the data suggests the opposite.
The retirement age is extending, despite migration. I’m Gen X and have known for a long time that retirement will be much less pleasant for me than for the generation above. Migration won’t change that.
Modernisation, investment, measures to increase productivity of the existing workforce including proper pay levels and productivity related remuneration. It’s not difficult, but bad government and weak management and short term investment horizons do the damage
Agree with all of that. Question of course why the Tories, and the proponents of Brexit, never did or demanded this?
But the question now is how long the investments may take to come to fruition? And of course how we free up the money for the training investments? It’s not easy or quick is it and we should have started some years ago.
The Tories lost primarily on character and competence. Policy was not a useful discriminator between the parties – LibLabCon were all versions of Blair.
An absence of integrity and a disregard for honesty. An absence of ideas and no ability to address serious issues of importance.
No Tory yet has come out clearly and commented on the fundamental – ‘large elements of Conservatism are not compatible with Neo-Liberalism’. This division has been hidden by the migration crisis, yet of course it part caused the migration crisis. It may be that opening this fissure properly to debate is just too difficult, and too dangerous for some of the candidates – the members only half understand the fissure and will vote for who promises the undeliverable again.
As regards Truss reconfirming how dreadful she was, the real reflection for the Tories is how they ever fell for her in the first place. Not just that it was her vs Sunak, when she was always likely to win, but how on earth she got to that position in first place. It’d been obvious for years she wasn’t up to it. The point being she kept saying what they wanted to hear and that worked, and thus they must share the blame for what happened.
The inconsistence between ‘Neo-Liberalism’ and ‘Conservatism’ is an incredibly complex and contested question. It would take much more than an essay in the paper or an interview on a podcast to articulate the pros and cons of this argument.
Can’t help feeling that a hit piece on Truss is not helping matters along. She was elected by the wider Conservative membership and was immediately undermined by the Parliamentary party and the Blob.
Who knows… her Premiership may have failed, but it was never allowed to try. Perhaps that goes some way to describing the reasons for the collapse in the Conservative vote?
And she *was* chucked out by the voters in her own constituency, who thus evidently didn’t see her as The Voice Of True Conservatism.
I’ve read Truss’s latest book – which despite some obvious faults and a certain amount of tin-earedess, is actually excellent.
I bought it because I wanted, specifically, her own view on exactly why her mini-budget failed as opposed to the very-obviously-politically-driven diagnoses from her political enemies, and sadly the book is still quite light on this. I am still trying to work out exactly how Liability-Driven Investments – LDIs – actually work, but my understanding is that they were a market response to the conditions after the 2009 banking crisis, when the falling interest rates driven by BoE policy resulted in government bonds having a negative real rate of return.
This meant that pension funds and other investors had less appetite for their purchase, but of course the government couldn’t possibly risk anything like a bond strike, so it leant heavily on the pensions industry to maintain demand for government debt. (This is not a claim in Truss’s book, it’s something I read a few years ago in the Speccie, which partly answered my own curiousity as to why anyone would keep buying government debt at under 1% return in an economy with 2% inflation).
I do not know what measures the government took to apply pressure to the financial sector, but it is clear, at least, that the financial sector responded in much the same way it did to the same problem of government pressure prior to the banking crisis: it tried to minimise and redistribute risk. LDIs were the technique used to do this after 2009, but of course they were no more proof against deteriorating conditions than were the credit default swaps used by the banks pre-2009. The CDSs were a house of cards exposed by the crystallisation of credit risk in the form of US homeowners being unable to afford mortgage repayments, while in 2022 it was the need to raise interest rates in response to rising inflation that blew up the LDIs.
The great irony in this is that in 2009 the crisis was the result of incompetent government policy but the banks ended up taking the blame, while in 2022 it was the central bank’s failure to manage internal risk properly but the government of the day ended up taking the blame.
Truss wanted to open legal migration but close illegal migration. Why does the writer feel the need to present this in such a misleading way? As it doesn’t make any significant contribution to his main arguments I can only assume it is for the purpose of demonisation, which is cheap and tacky journalism.
That’s true but irrellevant.
Legal migration makes up the vast majority of total migration. It is also vastly easier to stop – you simply grant fewer visas.
Most of the dislocations associated with large scale migration are driven not by illegal migration but by the much larger legal kind. Truss’ policy is therefore precisely the wrong one.
A better policy would be to manage the asylum backlog properly and simultaneously, address the real question which is, why the British economy is so critically dependent upon legal migration? Since that is a long term problem, it would also be sensible to focus on the actual friction caused by migration – principally in the field of housing.
One of the key statistics not being mentioned is that twice as many people who were eligible to vote did not bother to vote than voted for Labour.
The Tories do need to rediscover what conservatism actually means and then develop some conservative policies that they will deliver on – ie what they fail to do in the last 14 years.
Seems to me people voted for the Tories because they wanted social conservatism, particularly because of migration. They didn’t deliver in this area. It was precisely the continued neoliberal destruction on top of this that made conservative rule unbearable, I suppose. People are not looking for some kind of Thatcher rip-off. In fact, they might be waking up to the idea that many of the problems started in the 80s.
I have listened to several of her interviews and she does accept that she made mistakes. And she is determined that those following her, in the Conservative Party
, are forewarned so they can avoid repeating the same mistake. She even wrote a book about it!
That seems to me to be a much better, more constructive option, to continuing to say sorry to the liberal-left, a mob that will only take an apology as fuel for their cause.
Her husband told her that the situation was irretrievable, and that was before we knew the Bank of England, that apolitical organisation, full of experts, ambushed her. She proposed restarting fracking and encouraging North Sea Oil exploration. No wonder she was ambushed by the Managed Decliners.
The leadership contest was so drawn out: it had similarities to the Brexit Referendum hustings, where the Establishment could bide their time, putting out government policy, while the Discontents used up all their resources, not only enthusiasm, but time to think through policies with knowledgeable, like-minded, people. This time, it worked a treat, as did the second attempt to elect the right person.
Revisionist nonsense. She wanted to borrow a load of money for tax-cuts and fuel subsidies and wouldn’t say how that was going to be funded. She got the same ‘market’ reaction to what would have happened if Labour had done the same to fund public services. As a result she put up most people’s mortgage payments. And pathetically then tries to shift the blame.
She was also politically ‘tone-deaf’ to how a country suffering a cost of living crisis and increasing inequality felt about tax cuts for the Rich, Clueless. And this before any real national plan for growth too.
And finally just go back and look at how she came across when answering any questions at the time? Utterly wooden, hopeless and out of her depth. Car crash stuff.
Thing is Bojo knew she’d fail, and hence why he discretely in background he got his supporters to support her instead of Sunak. He thought she’d not last too long and he’d get to return. Only he underestimated how dreadful she’d prove and how quickly she’d be gone. You couldn’t make it up.
You’re making it up!
“But the worst thing about Truss’s account of the last 14 years is that, so far, it’s the only one to be offered by a top Tory.”
Precisely. Sunak, Dowden, Hunt: you are all definitely not in the running for the leadership, you are all free of cabinet collective responsibility, so let’s be hearing from you.
Personally, i don’t want to hear a peep out of either of those ever again!
Truss seems to have forgotten that she proposed writing a blank cheque to cap household energy bills, meaning that her government was prepared to assume all the market risk in order to protect households from the energy market.
An absolutely bizarre article that suggests the author is as disconnected from the bulk of the right-of-centre electorate as the supposed Conservatives are. Of course Truss is correct… unless you think child mutilation, women with penises, uncontrolled borders, the explosion of genders, removal of civil liberties, the Marxist indoctrination of children, expansion of the state etc etc are somehow right-wing. I would suggest that the author spends less time in London.
I can’t believe my UnHerd subscription keeps funding Mr Franklin to write this sort of rubbish. It’s intellectually lazy to lump the Tory and Reform vote shares together as representing a right wing bloc. The Tory manifesto was anything but right wing and the Reform economic programme was anything but small state, low tax.
The old Left/Right paradigm no longer works. Any party that dares talk about limiting immigration is labelled right wing, or more likely far-right, even if their economic policies (e.g. the Brexit Party and Reform) are very statist. Reform is the only party currently offering a socially conservative prospectus, the popularity of which is proving very unnerving for our governing class.
Can’t they fire this guy? Mr. Franklin has written a number of lazy analyses that are shallow and easily repudiated. Definitely not up to the quality that the likes of Mary Harrington has brought to UnHerd.
And didn’t Truss and her allies lose swathes of Middle England by alienating ‘NIMBYs’?
The Tories lost because they screwed up massively from Cameron onwards. their infighting, frequent changes from one useless PM to the next, failure even to attempt to address the migration crisis, general adherence to left-wing policies (e.g. Net Zero) and their recorded as the administration that facilitated the imposition of Woke repression are the reasons why people from all political persuasions kicked them into the long grass. They wasted the trust placed in them by the electorate and had to be removed. The British people are, generally reasonable as well as being tolerant, and recognised Tory incompetence and arrogance for what it was. Many Tories either refused to vote, or voted for alternative parties. What a damning indictment of the Tory time in power from the time of John Major (he who introduced political correctness) to Sunak. It will be hard for Starmer to be much worse. He will be just as bad in his own way.