This June, it will be 30 years since John Major launched one of the most mocked ideas in British political history. Proposed by a man thrashing around in the economic doldrums, the traffic cones hotline was just a phone number for angry motorists to ring up and moan about roadworks. Yet something about its spectacular banality means it has passed into Westminster shorthand. Every failing government now seemingly has its cones hotline moment, where it suddenly becomes obvious that the ideas cupboard is worryingly bare. And this week’s cabinet meeting on the cost of living sounds as if it was positively bursting with such moments.
Boris Johnson had reportedly asked for proposals to tackle the cost of living emergency without spending any actual public money, a question that inevitably raises some questions of its own. He is apparently interested in an old Liz Truss proposal for cutting childcare costs by allowing childminders to look after more than six children at once. Ministers have reportedly joked that if Jacob Rees-Mogg can look after his six simultaneously, surely childminders can go one better, while simultaneously delivering a high-quality early-years learning experience and having eyes in the backs of their heads. No word on whether they’ll be allowed a nanny for backup, like the Rees-Moggs.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, reportedly suggested making MOT tests biennial instead of annual, allowing those drivers who can still afford to run their cars to drive around on balding tyres for a bit longer, at an annual saving to the motorist of a whole £55 – unless, as motoring organisations swiftly pointed out, failing to pick up a small fault early just means a bigger garage bill later on. This was, someone solemnly told the Telegraph, the kind of “bread-and-butter policy that shows that the Conservatives are on your side”. Like the cones hotline, this sounds less like a policy and more like a cry for help.
Four in 10 British households will be forced into fuel poverty this autumn if nothing changes, according to the big energy companies. Food banks are braced for unimaginable levels of demand, and even the ingenious money-saving expert Martin Lewis says he’s running out of ideas to help people make ends meet.
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will almost certainly have to provide more help with fuel costs before autumn, and hinted as much in a Mumsnet webchat this week. This good news was promptly buried when he also told a disabled Mumsnetter, who is already struggling financially now, that it would be “silly” to do anything sooner, before it’s clear how bad things might actually get. At the weekend, Sunak was photographed in £600 Prada trainers walking his labrador. Nobody has yet advised letting poor people eat cake, but then the local elections are still a good week away.
No wonder wiser Tories are starting to worry, as Theresa May’s former chief of staff Gavin Barwell tweeted recently, that the cost of living emergency will hurt them more at the ballot box than Partygate, or even the news that an anonymous MP was caught watching porn on their phone in the chamber. It’s not that people have suddenly stopped being angry about pandemic rule-breaking – if anything, this week’s court ruling that it was unlawful to shunt hospital patients into English care homes without testing them for Covid-19 has only rubbed salt into the wounds – or come to believe that misogyny doesn’t matter. But when you’re frightened of not being able to pay the rent, there isn’t room for worrying about much else.
Lisa Nandy, the shadow minister for levelling up, is said to have warned the shadow cabinet recently that Labour shouldn’t concentrate overly on Partygate at the expense of the cost of living, and it’s a fair point. This isn’t about letting Boris Johnson off the hook, but understanding what the hook is for many people, and how to hang everything else from it. People can forgive a surprising amount of bad behaviour from a government in good times, but will judge it much more harshly once they start to feel personally worse off, and that’s the context in which Labour should now try to set all the admittedly juicy scandals consuming this government.
Where Labour needs to address sleaze, it should argue that all this just goes to show that Tory minds are not on the job: that they are too busy knocking back the cheese and wine to realise how bad things are getting, or too busy watching porn instead of working. It’s obviously creepy for an MP to sit pawing through this stuff in full sight of his poor female colleagues. But it’s also frankly contemptuous of the people he is there to serve, whose lives may be shaped by debates to which he seemingly isn’t paying attention.
Concern about inflation now tops the list of voters’ worries, according to the pollster Ipsos Mori, as it hits its highest level in three decades. The coming fear now is a potential rise in interest rates, which means mortgage payments going up. The cost of living crisis obviously still hurts the poorest most, but it’s creeping up the income scale, reaching more of the middle earners who voted Tory in 2019.
YouGov now finds Labour level pegging with the Tories on the question of who is most trusted to manage the economy, once a reliable predictor – along with perceptions of the party leader – of electoral outcomes. And while sleaze may have faded somewhat from voters’ memories by the next election, every economic forecast suggests that living standards will loom larger, especially if ministers keep responding in ways that suggest they don’t get it.
At prime minister’s questions this week, Keir Starmer asked why forecast growth in Britain is so low and inflation so high compared with its competitors. It’s a reasonable question, even though Labour doesn’t yet dare articulate the full answer, which is that every country faces the unavoidable consequences of a pandemic and war in Ukraine, but only Britain has simultaneously also attempted Brexit on top. It was Johnson’s response, however, insisting that employment is rising by record amounts, that was interesting – a bit too reminiscent of “you’ve never had it so good” for comfort.
What ultimately kills long-serving governments – and the Tories have, through various changes of leader, been in power now for nearly 12 years – is often not one failure, so much as the pervasive sense that the country has big problems but that the incumbents have got nothing left in the tank. If it wants to see this government out of office soon, Labour needs to start hammering home the idea that it’s not just out of touch but out of ideas, imagination and energy too.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
