The Conservative party is in danger of reducing politics to a prank on the public. In the course of the next seven days, Britain will have a new Tory prime minister – the third in two months. The favourite to take over is Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor. His main rival among cabinet ministers is Penny Mordaunt. However, the contest is in danger of being surrendered to the spectacle of Boris Johnson jetting back from his Caribbean holiday. Voters are more likely to be repelled than amused by the return of the clown to the political circus.
Mr Johnson is not the solution to the Tories’ woes – he is the prime cause of them. When he left office in July, he was only a smidgen less unpopular than Liz Truss. His administration was marked by incompetence, lies and U-turns. He had been fined for law-breaking Covid parties, earning the distinction of being the first serving prime minister to be sanctioned by the police. He may even lose his seat if he is found guilty of misleading parliament over the Downing Street gatherings.
The former prime minister is no longer a vote-winner, having lost byelections with record swings against the Tories. Mr Johnson attempted to submerge his shortcomings under endless distractions and trivialities. But the public saw through the act, which is why he had to go. Mr Johnson was not the only one to blame. Mr Sunak was his chancellor, and also received a fixed-penalty notice for attending lockdown parties. Many Tory MPs will not forgive him for his role in bringing down Mr Johnson.
In any case, Mr Sunak’s programme – of aggressive, front-loaded public spending cuts and tax rises – has shaped the current chancellor’s budget. Such ideas are the exact opposite of what is needed. An increasing number of people are unable to afford to renew their mortgages, pay spiralling rents, feed their families or heat their homes. The government should step in to shield people from the costs of a crisis they had no hand in creating. But thanks to Ms Truss’s ineptitude, and the unwillingness of the Bank of England to support fiscal interventions, austerity risks becoming baked into economic management. So does the headlong rush into a fiscal package that will define the rest of the parliament.
No prime minister can reasonably expect to take power next Friday and then have the chancellor set out a budget on Monday. Britain would benefit from a pause. The public did not absorb or align with the slogans that the last leadership race threw up. Polls suggest that the competition only heightened the contempt that voters held the Tory government in.
A leader can only define what a general election means if they have won one. Ms Truss lacked a popular mandate, being voted into office by 81,000 Tory members – just 0.17% of all voters. Until this week, the betting was that the party grandees would prevent the membership from having a say – and let MPs decide on the new leader. Instead, candidates have until 2pm on Monday to find 100 backers in the Commons, with party members making the final choice from a shortlist of two put to them by MPs.
This gives Ms Mordaunt a chance. Despite being an effective Commons performer, her inexperience counts against her in an economic storm. The next prime minister is unlikely to last very long. Labour is way ahead in the polls. After five leaders, four general elections and a prolonged Brexit crisis, factional infighting and rebellions have become habits that have proved hard to break for Tory MPs. Parliament cannot produce a stable, functioning government. The next prime minister should be chosen by voters, not the members of the Conservative party.
