Bad leadership

This week: some notes on Sunakism; a lazy transport masterplan; and I’ve been to LibDem conference and all I got was this lousy t shirt.

I thought Rishi Sunak sucked at politics before it was cool. I thought Rishi Sunak sucked at politics in 2020. 

I’m not claiming any special insight here: perhaps being one of the millions who did not qualify for a penny of emergency government money during covid enabled me to see him more clearly, but the more likely explanation is that I’m just bitter. Either way, though, the way he responded to questions about how freelancers with fewer than three years of accounts behind them were meant to eat and pay bills and stuff – by immediately reciting all the nice things he was doing for other people – spoke to me of a certain tin-earned-ness. I’m not sure if it’s a personal failing, or the insulation from reality that comes from such extreme levels of personal wealth, or merely the fact that he has an ultra-safe seat and came into politics in 2015 so has never had to stand on rainy doorsteps being told why someone thinks he’s shit – but whatever it is, this was a man who clearly could not talk to the voters. Yet everyone was talking him up as the saviour of both our wallets and the Conservative party! It was infuriating.

Anyway, I am always right about everything, of course, and lo, it came to pass. First came the anonymous briefings about how disappointed he was that the BBC or the OBR were not giving him credit for all the good things he was doing, and that if they didn’t change their tune he might run away to California and then we’d be sorry. Then there was the moment where he leant into his tech bro vibes and instructed the Royal Mint to create a government-backed NFT, literally weeks before the value of cryptocurrencies collapsed. Then there was last year’s leadership debates, in which he repeatedly talked over the other candidates and didn’t hide his annoyance that people kept asking him questions. (Yes, one of them was Liz Truss, but even so, not really in the spirit of the exercise.) 

And now we’re 11 months into his actual premiership, and he’s weakening environmental targets and trying to gut HS2, with breathless briefings suggesting there may be more bad news to come. From those same briefings, we understand that he expects to win credit with the voters for being willing to make the “tough choices” that Keir Starmer seems determined to duck; but why he thinks that “Thirteen years of Conservative government has left Britain unable to pay for anything” should be an election-winning narrative I’m not exactly clear. The desire to abolish the inheritance tax his own kids stand to pay doesn’t sound a lot like a hard choice, either. 

Let’s leave aside the actual merits of the policies: you can guess my thoughts, but the man’s a Tory, and a right-wing one at that, it is not that weird he would have views I disagree with. The thing that strikes me as really interesting is quite how badly he’s framing his ideas.

After all, there is an up-front cost to environmental policies, which the response to ULEZ suggests some people may be unwilling to pay. Whatever the merits of inheritance tax, in addressing inequality or raising funds, a lot of people, even on the left, consider it unfair. As to HS2, the reason its fans (hi!) get so het up about it is because so many people don’t understand why it’s necessary, and the words “white elephant” are never far away. Every one of these policies genuinely has potential to win votes and create awkward dividing lines with Labour.

Yet somehow Sunak, with his unerring political instincts, has landed on the most unpopular possible version of every single one. With HS2 he’s talking about cutting off the northern arm (thus making a mockery of levelling up), and the last five miles to London (thus making it a project that doesn’t work in the south either). The cost of environmental policies may be unpopular, but environmentalism in the abstract really isn’t, and he’s timed his attack for when the question before the voters is not “do you want to shell out for a new car” but “do you want the planet to boil” . 

As for inheritance tax, there may well be votes in raising the already high threshold, which is why people keep doing it. Removing them entirely, when you’re a quite literal billionaire? Not so much.

It’s tempting to suggest that there’s no such thing as “Sunakism”: that his favoured policies are just a grab bag of things he personally finds interesting. More maths. Replacing A-levels. Dealing with the threat of AI, which one ally describes as “his climate change”, as if his climate change wasn’t, like the rest of ours, climate change. Actually, though, I’m not sure that’s true. Sunakism is a style of politics in which your lack of contact with the actual electorate leads you to go for the least popular possible version of everything you ever touch. I can’t wait to see what he cooks up next.

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Notes on a housing crisis 

There were a couple of different reasons I did two days at LibDem conference this week. I’m conscious of having slipped into mainly being a comment writer, so have been trying to do more reporting out of a deep rooted terror I might wake up one day to find I’ve become Simon Jenkins. Also, frankly, I booked at a low point, when I just needed someone to be nice to me, and experience suggested that the people who attend LibDem conference would probably be pleased to see me. (They were! I even got a free t shirt.)

The actual, professional justification, though, was the conference’s big set piece bunfight. Labour’s annual conferences offer nods to party democracy, but everyone quietly understands actual policy is set by the leadership; the Conservatives don’t even bother to pretend. The Liberal Democrats, though, are a genuinely democratic party, with the manifesto written following votes on the conference floor, and its members capable of almost unnerving levels of passion over minor changes in wording. In the limited way that this can be said of anything involving the Liberal Democrats, what happens at LibDem conference matters.

Which is something that leader Ed Davey seems to have forgotten when he went on the BBC last week and pledged to drop the party’s target of building 380,000 new homes in England each and every year. 

There’s loads of this, but this is the key part.

This was all very well as an appeal to the sort of NIMBYs whose votes the party tries to win every by-election. But it didn’t go down well with the party’s own youth wing, the Young Liberals, many of whom were to be seen wandering round conference in t-shirts featuring the shamelessly-stolen-from-me slogan “Build More Bloody Houses”. (This is why I got a free t-shirt.) It was they who put forward Amendment 1 which meant, essentially, hanging onto the target after all.

The amendment.

And so, I wanted to be in the room. Partly because there’s something oddly compelling about watching policy being made in real time, through speeches and debates alone; partly because there was a fair chance the leadership would lose, and that this would be funny. But also, despite being a housing policy nerd of some years’ standing, I didn’t actually know what I thought about this one. So I decided that watching people arguing about it might be a good way of finding out.