Nye Bevan famously said that “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism”. For the Tory leadership contenders, that language is also the religion of conservatism right now, with each trying to appeal to the party faithful with policy announcements that signal just what kind of prime minister they want to be.
Boris Johnson’s new £10bn tax cut plan is a clear message to the Tory rank and file that he’s a low-tax champion. But his proposal to raise the 40p income tax threshold to £80,000 tells the rest of us just where his priorities really lie. First, ‘ending austerity’ can’t be among them, because it’s difficult to see how you could pump big sums into public services and offer huge tax cuts at the same time. Second, the winners of this policy would be a small chunk of the population, including better off public sector staff like head teachers and doctors and, er, MPs themselves.
The other telling bit about this plan is that it’s not a plan as such. It is one sentence in Johnson’s Telegraph column, though bulked out by a briefing to the paper on it being funded by £26bn of ‘fiscal headroom currently set aside for no-deal preparations’. The IFS’s Paul Johnson says that claim is absurd, as tax cuts are funded by higher borrowing or lower spending.
Andrea Leadsom points out Boris’s tax cut wouldn’t command the votes to get it through Parliament. Yet it’s more about virtue signalling (yes the right does it as much as the left) than actual policy. Hunt wants £20bn more on defence, Raab wants £30bn in tax cuts, Gove wants to abolish £140bn-a-year VAT. In a deliberate contrast with the Tory front-runner, Matt Hancock sets out his own priorities today by saying a hike in the minimum wage of the lowest paid is what really matters most.
The other big money announcement Boris Johnson made this weekend was also more about positioning than reality. When he told the Sunday Times he was ready to withhold our £39bn ‘divorce bill’ if the EU didn’t play ball, he knew Emmanuel Macron was ready to hit back (as his office did via Reuters) and declare that would be a ‘debt default’. A nice row with Macron is perfect for Johnson right now. The much bigger problem for him is what he does when Parliament forces him to request an extension beyond October 31. We revealed on Friday that the popular beat combo known as Boles-Letwin-Cooper are getting the band together again.
Some Johnson supporters privately do think an October general election is where we’re heading, but how many Tory MPs will really relish that prospect? Fears of that election could be the factor that deters backbenchers from joining the Boris bandwagon. This weekend, we saw repeat warnings from people like Max Hastings and Matthew Parris that Johnson was untrustworthy and incompetent. Last night, former minister Steve Norris added “I just don’t think he’s got the seriousness and bottom to do the job”. I’m in the ABB camp, anybody but Boris.” Amber Rudd says ‘bluster’ is not a way out of Britain’s Brexit paralysis.
Which brings us back to Bevan. He ended his speech almost exactly 70 years ago (it was to a Labour conference on June 8, 1949) with this thought: “The argument is about power … because only by the possession of power can you get the priorities correct.” If Johnson insists on refusing to be bound by a Parliament set against ‘managed no-deal’, he will have to change the make-up of that Parliament by winning a majority in an election.
The risk, of course, is that he loses both the election and Brexit. The prize is defeating Corbyn and Farage at the same time (some Boris fans really think he can pull this off), then delivering Brexit. Boris may be up for that huge gamble. Will the Parliamentary Tory party? Let’s see how many MPs he has declared for him at 5.30pm today, when the 1922 Committee announces who has met the minimum threshold to formally enter the race.
Michael Gove knows that his confession to taking cocaine means that every single one of his supporters and potential supporters will have to defend him. His own defence yesterday on Marr was shaky to say the least. It veered from the contrite (“I was fortunate”) to the arrogant (if I become PM, a small matter like filling out an immigration form won’t stop me going to Washington). Given all the focus on May’s emotional state recently, I note no one has written that Gove ‘was close to tears’ during yesterday’s interview, even though some would argue he certainly was.
Few on Gove’s team will be surprised that Sayeeda Warsi has now said he should step aside from the leadership race. But hypocrisy is indeed a toxic charge, and many MPs will be nervous about whether or not more details will emerge (not least whether Gove did indeed declare his drug us to the US authorities). And Amber Rudd didn’t only declare for Jeremy Hunt, she this morning said that ‘it was up to other people to judge’ whether Gove was fit to be PM.
The whole issue has actually laid bare just how MPs and ministers (paid for by taxpayers) are treated differently than other public sector workers (paid for by taxpayers) on drugs. While civil servants are required to be vetted formally (especially those working with access to intelligence), MPs do not have to fill in any forms on drug use. If the spooks are unaware of any such conduct, they are powerless to advise a PM on the blackmail risk or otherwise of someone in line for promotion.
If and when Boris Johnson finally submits himself to scrutiny in a live media interview, he will have to give a more credible answer than his previous jokes about sniffing cocaine and not knowing if it went up his nose. Will he admit, as Gove did, to committing a crime? Did he inform the US authorities correctly of his past conduct? In his Sunday Times interview, Johnson said he had not taken drugs “to my knowledge”. at which point his spin doctor interrupted to say: “The answer is no!” Will we get the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
Meanwhile, Gove still plans to go ahead with his own leadership launch this afternoon. It can’t go much worse than his 2016 launch when a tiny number of MPs bothered to turn up to a tiny Policy Exchange venue and Gove then paraded his lack of personal charisma as a form of virtue.
Jeremy Hunt is one of the big winners from the Michael Gove revelations, as he looks more than ever a safer repository for the anti-Boris contingent of MPs. With Amber Rudd a possible first female Chancellor, plus some prominent Brexiteers in other posts (could he even manage to today get Penny Mordaunt on board, having secured Liam Fox?), his bandwagon is beginning to roll with a momentum to challenge Johnson’s.
Hunt risked losing support yesterday with his views on lowering the abortion limit, though Rudd suggested he would not stand in the way of fresh attempts to change the law in Northern Ireland to bring it in line with the rest of the UK. “If that is the way this current parliament wishes to take the law I would not expect Jeremy to be in the way of that,” she told Today. The real difficulty for Hunt was Rudd’s frank admission that on Brexit a delay looks inevitable. “It’s a real challenge..It’s not just about getting it done, it’s about doing it right.”
Still, the quieter contenders could also benefit from Gove’s instability. Sajid Javid has won the key endorsement of Ruth Davidson this weekend and has won Home Office ministers Victoria Atkins and Caroline Noakes. Javid, who has not taken drugs, can play to his strengths on that issue too. The battle between Javid and Hancock (evidenced by a jazzy launch) as the moderniser candidate is sure to hot up in coming days. Dominic Raab has his own launch this morning, but he’s going to have to shout loudly to get heard above the Hunt noise.
Well, this is spooky. Watch this clip from a 1950s US TV series set in the wild West - in which a certain Mr Trump tries to con a whole town by saying they need to build a wall.
A reminder of the real world came today with our report that the UK’s poorest regions could lose hundreds of millions of pounds of funding to London and the South East after Brexit. Communities in Charge, a coalition of community leaders and charities, has an analysis comparing UK government spending on economic development with the distribution of so-called EU structural funds. Treasury funding reveals significant regional differences between the way in which the EU and the UK allocates funding for economic development. Meanwhile, a coalition of northern newspapers have called for much more action to end the north-south divide.
It’s Tech Week and Theresa May (yes she is still in post) has a speech today at an event praising UK firms in the sector. The headline this morning is that Britain is creating more unicorns than any other country in Europe. No, that’s not a Brexit reference, it’s the term for tech firms that have a valuation of more than £1bn. Honest.
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