How the Conservatives can come back from the dead

Only one candidate is right for the task – Rishi Sunak, writes Clare Foges. Picture: AFP

In the 19th century, the businessman Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, opened several explosives factories and made a lot of buck for his bangs. He was mooching along happily until a life-transforming error was made. When his brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper printed an obituary about the wrong brother. Thus Alfred - very much alive - was able to read his own obit.

It was ugly. “The merchant of death”, he was dubbed, a man enriched by developing new ways to “mutilate and kill”. Horrified to think he would be remembered this way, Alfred left his vast fortune to create a different legacy: the Nobel prizes. A name once linked with war is now synonymous with peace.

A mid-life obituary can be a gift, a course corrector, and in recent days the Conservative Party has also had a foretaste of how it might go down in history. With the polls dipping as low as 14 points, obituaries are being written, and they are ugly: incompetence, ineptitude, lying, loafing, recklessness, selfishness, squabbling, careerism-before-country.

Like Nobel, the Conservatives have been offered the gift of regrouping while still alive politically; while still in government. Will they take it? Or will they continue on this death spiral, cast in perpetuity (and unelectability) as merchants of destruction?

Boris Johnson’s departure is a giant step back from the brink. In his last speech as prime minister he compared himself to Cincinnatus, the Roman statesman who returned to his farm after his political fall before being “called from his plough” to lead again. The fact that Johnson was called not from his plough but from ploughing through the all-inclusive buffet on a Caribbean holiday while parliament is sitting says it all.

Boris Johnson delivers a farewell address before his official resignation at Downing Street. Picture: Getty

If 22 weeks of official holiday time is not enough, it is hard to see how he could have found the time required to deal with the omni-crisis he helped create. Besides, as he learnt from his Bullingdon Club days, what’s the fun in making a mess if you have to clean it up yourself?

To anyone remotely sane, Johnson was never the answer to the Tories’ current question. Nor is Penny Mordaunt, determined to demonstrate her woman-of-the-people credentials. “I’ve been there,” she says. I admire Mordaunt’s back-story, but if having “been there” is the central qualification, then around 20 million of her fellow citizens might also lead the country.

Penny Mordaunt. Picture: Getty

Only one candidate is right for the task and my hunch is that by the time you are reading this, sense will have prevailed in the shape of Rishi Sunak. Even if there is a race, I am confident that Tory members, stung by the Truss disaster, will make the right decision this time.

But what then? How can Sunak begin to rewrite the Conservatives’ obituary? For Nobel the challenge was to associate his name with peace instead of war. For the Tories it is to show they can put the national interest ahead of their own. Over recent years we have been subjected to endless musings about how the Conservatives might win power again and very little on what they will do with it, the party seeming to forget that its ultimate job is not to save a dozen seats in the red wall but to improve the lives of millions.

Sunak must decisively draw a line under this and govern in the national interest. That means abandoning the cabinet-of-cronies model and recruiting those who run our country on ability, even - gasp! - reaching across party lines. It means keeping Jeremy Hunt in post and implementing whatever balance of tax cuts and spending restraint is necessary to stabilise the economy, regardless of the electoral pain this inflicts on the party. It means ditching the culture war rhetoric that may arouse some voters, but changes nothing. It means actually making some of those “tough decisions” long banged on about to improve social care, the NHS, housing and education.

Jeremy Hunt is seen at the rear of Downing Street. Picture: Getty

And that is not all. For any party that genuinely cares about the national interest, one issue matters long term more than any other. It is the elephant rampaging around the room, the box that politicians dare not open: the fact that Brexit is far from “done” in a way that works for our country.

Our current chaos has roots that run seven years deep. The arrogant “don’t ask the experts” approach of the mini-budget: Brexit. The elevation of politicians whose central talent is to bluster and boast: Brexit. The idea that you can replace a coherent plan with slogans: Brexit.

And of course, a significant portion of our economic malaise comes down to Brexit. Yes, Covid and the conflict in Ukraine have played their part. But the fact is that in 2016 the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s, and now it is less than 70 per cent. The fact is that, since Brexit, business investment has been growing in all other G7 countries but not in the United Kingdom. Facts, not “remoaner” fear-mongering.

The political class (including Sunak) knows all this. Those who backed Brexit dare not admit their misjudgment. Those who were against it rarely speak out either, for fear of being portrayed as anti-democratic elites. And so we have a conspiracy of silence - or cowardice - that to sensible people around the world looks weirdly self-injurious.

As the US commentator David Frum put it: “The problem with the UK Tory party is not the personal defects of the captain. The problem is that you’re not eligible for the captaincy unless you agree it was a brilliant idea to scupper the ship in 2016 - and can convincingly act baffled why it has been sinking ever since.”

Breaking this conspiracy of silence will be costly, but any leader who cares about the national interest must recognise the single most important thing that can be done for our country’s fortunes long-term: to move back towards the great trading bloc just over the water. This does not have to be a “reversal of Brexit” but a rethink about its form. No one voted to leave the single market or the customs union. In the long term we must seek to rejoin them.

Alas, I doubt Sunak will grasp this nettle. Sir Keir Starmer has already written off rejoining the single market. Yet if either of these future prime ministers were to have a Nobel moment of their own - standing back to think about how they want to leave our country - they would not be keeping silent on this act of self-sabotage, but working to fix it.

Public opinion is not to be feared, for it has shifted. Millions of us watching the farce of recent months desperately want our nation to be better than this. We remember when Britain was still seen as serious, responsible and respectable, and we want to redeem that reputation. We want to be a leader, not a laughing stock. We want, to coin a phrase, our country back.

The Times