Divided they fall: can the Tories save themselves?

Seldom has support for a government fallen so far, so fast. Polls show that 24 per cent of the public would vote for the Conservatives if there was an election now, vs 52 per cent for Labour: figures that make 1997 look like a good result for the Tories. This is not just a one-off rogue poll, but the sustained average of six. It reflects what Tory MPs hear from voters appalled at the disgraceful shambles of the past few weeks. It won’t be forgotten in a hurry.

This magazine gave its verdict on the Liz Truss agenda in August: ‘To attempt reform without a proper plan is to guarantee failure,’ we argued. She lost no time in proving this point. But others are drawing wider and deeper – and rather dangerous – conclusions. Tory factionalism is rife, with various sides of the party claiming vindication, but they should be careful. The bell tolls not for just Truss, but for all of them.

One narrative is that a failed ‘libertarian’ experiment in trickle-down economics has trashed the UK economy and that its practitioners should never be allowed near power again. Some even see in the disaster a vindication of their opposition to Brexit, saying that the fault lies with the ‘disruptors’, who are being punished for ‘punk’ values. No British politician identifies as a ‘libertarian’, a term imported from America now used as a term of political abuse. But that aside, the narrative that tax cuts trashed the economy misrepresents what has just happened.

In the Tory leadership campaign, Truss proposed a modest tax cut – reversing the National Insurance rise. This would deduct £14 billion from an annual government tax take of about £900 billion. Her theory was that any unfunded tax cut, no matter how small, would elicit a strong reaction from Rishi Sunak’s camp. Her hope was that he would overreact by emphasising the risk of her tax cuts. The real weakness, however, was that her package was too small to deliver the economic growth she spoke of.

Things went according to Truss’s plan, but when she won, it left her with a problem: she had promised growth, but had no real way of achieving it. Even her mini-Budget, which in a panic threw in a 1p cut in income tax and abolished the 45p tax rate, would have come nowhere near generating the 2.5 per cent annual growth that she pledged. Such a step change was never feasible: there was simply not enough fiscal room for manoeuvre. The best she could have promised was to shorten the recession.

To be sure, her tax cuts went far further than she had indicated they would. But what tipped things over the edge – the single largest item in the mini-Budget – was the £10 billion-a-month bailout for energy prices, bigger even than the furlough scheme. The market might have funded this at a push, but not when taken together with the surprise tax cuts and the absence of any repayment plan. Suspending the Office for Budget Responsibility analysis was perhaps the single most damaging aspect, because it signalled that Britain was no longer in the business of trying to make sums add up.

It’s important to disentangle all this, because the Tories could sink themselves for a generation if they come to the wrong conclusions. Truss’s furlough-sized energy bailout was bigger than any tax cut. Yes interest rates surged – but that was part of a worldwide trend and most of it would have happened anyway. Charlie Bean, a former Bank of England chief economist (and a Truss critic), estimates that between two-thirds and three-quarters of the UK rate rises are due to global factors. Surging mortgages are causing misery around the world.

The mayhem caused by Truss made matters worse, but even if Sunak were PM we would be seeing inflation at 10 per cent, Bank of England base interest rates heading to (at least) 4 per cent and pain all round.

It suits Labour to pretend that none of this would have happened were it not for the Trussite madness. But why would Tories repeat this narrative? The Tory left may see in all this a chance to attack the Tory right. But most voters are oblivious to these distinctions and just see the entire Tory party as a disgraceful, feuding mess.

The UK was always going to be exposed to a global rate rise, for reasons Sunak identified early last year. A quarter of all UK government debt repayments are inflation-linked: a far higher percentage than any other G7 country. Our pension funds are exposed to the expensive needs of inflation-adjusted final-salary pension schemes: a historic peculiarity of our system. And Britain is dependent on foreign buyers for about a quarter of all government debt issuance: for Germany and Japan, almost all of it is domestic.

There are big economic factors at play that are not under political control. If the Tories have any collective survival instinct, they will try to make this point. But if they join Labour in saying the original sin was an attempt to cut taxes, then what future is there for a Conservative party? Having taken taxes to a 70-year high, what is their election message: that they are the party of competence?

There is urgent work to do. Reforming welfare and planning, finding the children who vanished from schools in lockdown, standing by Ukraine. There is still, at the bottom of this mess, a Tory agenda. So the MPs have a choice: to fight each other to the death, or unite to salvage what they can.