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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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Good morning.
I look forward to seeing many of you at Inside Politics’ first ever pub quiz on January 31 in central London — hosted by yours truly. Register here for free. A crack team of FT colleagues has been assembled to compete. Spaces are limited — but if you can’t make it, there will be a newsletter version. Plus we are hoping to run future events elsewhere in the country.
Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Read the previous edition of the newsletter here. Please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com
In the balance
Why is the Conservative party in political trouble? Answer: geopolitical shocks. What’s the biggest reason why we should be cautious about writing off the Conservatives? Answer: geopolitical shocks!
At the last election, the Tory party’s manifesto contained a cocktail of irreconcilable promises: more money would be spent on the police, schools and hospitals, national insurance, income tax and value added tax would stay flat or falling, and debt would decline as a share of GDP.
After Boris Johnson’s victory in the 2019 election, Conservative outriders had all sorts of outlandish answers to this question. Whitehall reform, public sector reform — essentially a series of ways of pretending that the right set of choices could make two plus two equal five.
Had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, in practice, they would have done what former chancellor Philip Hammond did from 2017 to 2019: deliver expansionary budgets that gently increased the tax burden, spent more on public services, and at best saw the UK’s debt remain flat as a proportion of GDP.
But the Covid-19 pandemic forced the UK to borrow more. That forced the Tories into confronting those hard choices that the Tory party’s 2019 manifesto had ducked. Both the end of lockdown and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine helped increase the pressures on British households, all of which hurts the Conservative party.
As longtime readers will know, I think that Rishi Sunak took the brave and correct choice to face down his party’s ideologues and raise taxes to keep their promises on public spending. But as anyone who lived through the Liz Truss era will know, that bravery was not welcomed by Conservative members.
Essentially, the story of this parliament is of the government being hit by geopolitical shocks that would have tested any administration and responding to them in ways that have made voters even crosser, whether under Boris Johnson, with his lockdown-defying parties, or Liz Truss, with her radical fiscal event.
One question in the next election is whether Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will see any sort of reward for stabilising the country after the Truss experiment, or not.
But another is whether a further geopolitical shock — like, say, the UK becoming further involved in the regional conflict in the Middle East — might impact the struggle for power here in the UK. The US and UK have launched strikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in response to the militants’ attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea (Gideon Rachman’s latest podcast discusses the regional actors in the Middle East conflict).
I think it’s highly unlikely that such events will see what political scientists call a “rally to the flag”, like the surge in support for incumbent governments enjoyed by most administrations across the world in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic or in the period immediately following the end of coronavirus restrictions.
Maintaining the free flow of shipping lanes is an important objective — hence the broad range of countries supporting the strikes in one way or another — but not one that most people intuitively grasp or makes them feel well-disposed to the governments doing it.
But it is a useful reminder that events are what turned the Conservative party in 2019 from a triumphant force to a party that looks on course for opposition: and with at least 10 months between now and the next election, don’t rule out that events might yet give the Tory party a second lease of life.
Now try this
I saw Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Priscilla Presley. It’s a haunting depiction of a predatory musician — Jacob Elordi’s mesmerising and horrific Elvis — particularly if, like me, you rather enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s dazzling Elvis, a rather more ahistorical and sympathetic account of the musician. It’s very much worth your time in any case.
However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.
