The Fall of the House of Tory
Why Liz Truss's Crash and Burn is Both Symptom and Disease
Many years ago I was on holiday in Formentera on 16 September 1992, the date that has gone down in history as ‘Black Wednesday’. As many readers may remember, that was the date when the UK government failed to meet the minimum exchange rate that would have enabled it to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), after the pound came under sustained attack from currency investors.
It wasn’t a particularly black Wednesday for me. On the contrary, part of my enjoyment of that holiday derived not just from Formentera’s translucent, almost Caribbean sea and pristine white beaches, but from the daily experience of cycling into the local town to buy El Pais and watch the next instalment in the downfall of John Major’s government.
It was schadenfreude, but there have been many times in the last few decades when schadenfreude was the best you could get. Even then, after twelve years of seemingly unassailable Tory rule, we still had to wait another five years before Labour came to power.
Nevertheless it was clear, even in September 1992, as I watched the Major government frantically administering CPR to the gasping pound, that Tory Britain’s days were numbered.
And now, thirty years later, I have just spent another holiday in Spain, watching a Tory government writhing on a stake that it had placed in its own path.
But this time the schadenfreude feels more like karma. Or a punishment from the gods for the sin of hubris in a Greek tragedy acted out out by vindictive Smurfs injected with methamphetamine. It’s not just the scale of the calamity. Black Wednesday cost the UK Treasury £3.3 billion. So far Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s calamitous ‘mini-budget’ has cost the Treasury £65 billion and counting.
That’s a lot of schadenfreude right there, albeit tempered by the realisation that the cost of this disaster is most likely - as nearly all Tory-inflicted disasters are - to be borne by the people who did not cause it and who are least likely to be able to to bear it.
But it is pleasing to watch the Truss government destroying itself in record time, and destroying itself not because of the actions of others, but entirely because of its own dim-witted incompetence, its ideological fanaticism, and the narcissism and inexplicable arrogance of its leaders untethered to even the most basic notions of integrity and the common good.
This is a government led by the dimmest of the dim; a Prime Minister who pitifully appealed to her own party yesterday to tell her what to do, after weeks in which she had resolutely ignored warnings about the real-world impact of her tin-eared showboating reactionary policies.
All governments see their power erode, sooner or later, but never has a British government so completely imploded in such a short space of time.
Within hours of landing back in the UK (I don’t take credit for this), Liz Truss had sacked the Chancellor with whom she jointly signed off on the tax cut package that has brought her government to its knees. Hours later she gave a press conference wearing black - a suitable colour to wear for your own political funeral.
Gone was the Iron Lady cosplay and the Instagram videos. This was the Duchess of Malfi facing her executioners - assuming that any dramatist could ever have come up with a tragic heroine so utterly lacking in tragic dignity, gravitas, or self-awareness. No wonder Truss cut it short, leaving her audience gaping at the empty podium in which nothing had just been replaced by a yawning black hole.
By that time Chris Philp - a politician so insignificant that History will not even remember his name long enough to forget it - had quit his post as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Philp is so consumed by ambition and so devoid of honour and self-respect that he accepted another post, but he will find that some people that you meet on your way up, you might meet ‘em on your way down.
Trussian Roulette
I suspect that Philp will experience this sensation sooner than he expects, and Jeremy Hunt may also come to regret playing Trussian Roulette in a cabinet where the pistol always has more bullets than you think when it comes to saving the Prime Minister’s worthless skin.
It’s impossible not to take satisfaction from this, or remove the Benny Hill ear-worm that plays whatever Liz Truss does, and whatever any member of her cabinet says. But my pleasure isn’t personal, because this Tory gotterdammerung isn’t simply a question of personalities, as contemptible as they genuinely are.
It’s true that Truss is experiencing a moment that used to occur in many old cartoons, when the cat runs off a cliff and finds its feet flailing in thin air before gravity takes its course. But the entire Tory Party finds itself in exactly the same position, and there is nothing - for now - that it can do about it.
It can try. It can present Jeremy Hunt as a ‘safe pair of hands’. It can pressure Truss to renounce her ‘mini-budget.’ It can try and paste a veneer of seriousness on a government spinning round in its own maelstrom, but none of this gambits are likely to steer this leaky ship of state to a safe harbour.
Everyone knows this, and this is why the polls point towards the near-obliteration of the Tory Party in the event that the government falls and concedes an election. Tory MPs know this - the ones with eyes to see their own seats at least. The famous ‘grandees’ know it too, and every time they meet Truss or hear her speak in public, they become even more conscious of the yawning abyss beneath their feet.
The commentators and cheerleaders who waved through a succession of cruel, destructive, and monstrous governments know it too, most of them at least. They know that this government is done. And unlike 1992, it is actually possible, for the first time ever, to imagine a future in which the Tory Party is done too.
I mean eclipsed, wiped out, annihilated, reduced to a marginalised bleating caucus, much like the Liberal Party after World War I, except that the Liberals were positively saintly in comparison with this dishonourable shower of ideologues and mediocrities.
Unlike the Liberals, the Tory Party has no one but itself to blame for the mess in which it finds itself. It came to power in 2010, led by a feckless charlatan who rode around on a bicycle and pretended to be Mr Modern Britain, before subjecting the country to years of cruel and pointless economic punishment. In 2016, Cameron resigned following the defeat in a referendum that he foolishly called, after a weak and lacklustre campaign that brought the darkest instincts of his own party to the surface.
Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, who voted Remain then cleaved to the hardest of Brexits, only to spend the next three years rowing away from her own red lines.
May was undermined and stabbed in the back by a man singularly lacking in any other qualities beyond an inane boosterism and an ability to tell his party what it wanted to hear.
When Johnson’s personal qualities - or lack thereof - began to threaten Tory seats, he was forced out and replaced by a leader who tacked even more ferociously than her predecessors to the libertarian right, only to find that the markets she and her-fellow libertarians and thinktanks extolled did not rate what she was proposing.
Throughout these years, politicians with experience, talent and integrity were driven out of the party and treated as traitors if they expressed reservations about Brexit or took notice of the real world, while politicians without any of these qualities were given ministerial positions that they had not earned and did not deserve.
In the same period the party became more and more extremist and more beholden to extremists, as it tried - and failed - to turn its Brexit fantasies into reality.
To understand how far the Tory Party has fallen, consider this tweet from the Bruges Group - one of the most fanatical libertarian lobbying groups in a crowded field - which attempted to account for Truss’s meltdown in the following terms:
Confronted with fever dreams like this, one’s natural instincts are to repeat in the calm, reasoned voice that you might use when dealing with a teenager in a ketamine K-Hole, ‘ There is no blob. The blob is not woke. There is no woke. Ministers cannot communicate with ‘the people’ without the MSM ‘filter.’ The ‘filter’ is not responsible for the markets’ response to the mini-budget’, etc, etc.
There would be no point of course, because the Bruges Group cannot hear, and even it it could hear, it would not listen, but we can safely say that these are not the adults in the room.
This is intellectual barrenness, a scorched earth desert where a forest might once have grown, where nothing matters but cutting taxes so that the rich get richer, even when the rich don’t want their taxes cut, and these are the people that Truss listens to.
And elsewhere, there are other remedies waiting in the wings, according to the Telegraph’s Christopher Hope:
There is no need to revisit the reasons for Johnson’s downfall to point out that if bringing him back is the Conservative Party’s only hope, then it really has no hope at all. Even if it forces Truss out, it can’t undo the damage that she has already done - or the memory of the damage she has done - which has produced such a spectacular collapse in public support.
If it keeps her, then the damage will be compounded by what can only be one of the deadest of dead duck governments. It it calls an election, it knows it will receive a historic punishment, and there are even some Tory MPs who recognise that this punishment will be richly deserved.
Of course, no one can underestimate a party whose survivability and adaptability have been demonstrated many times, but it is difficult to think of any period in which a Tory government has alienated so many people, including people who would normally be expected to support it, and where it has so few cards left to play.
It might please the basest sectors of the party by sending people to Rwanda. It might extract some more toxic juice from culture wars, and crank up the nationalist dimensions of the ‘anti-growth’ coalition. But even Brexit is losing its salience in a country where the mood has turned, and continues to turn, against the project.
In short, the Tory Party finds itself in a novel historical predicament, in which it is actually contemplating not just defeat, but political oblivion.
There are those who think that Conservatism would be better off out of government, and would like to leave Labour to deal with the monumental mess it has left behind.
Maybe. But the downfall of Liz Truss and her awful government can only be good news for the millions of people who have watched aghast at the terrible damage this party has done to British society and to the economy, to the country’s institutions and its international reputation, who have seen their hopes of becoming anything better repeatedly trashed and disregarded.
Whether Labour can live up to these hopes - or whether it can even repair the damage - is another matter.
But for now, I intend to relish every second of schadenfreude, ever drop of karma, and look forward to the moment when this rotten party finally collapses and receives the humiliation it so richly deserves, and a country that deserves better can finally begin to dream of better days.
Truss did promise to “hit the ground” on the start of her premiership, before the message was hastily revised to include the word “running”. And at least you can feel sympathy for Wile E Coyote as he hits the canyon floor.