A Tory leadership race for prime minister is much like watching one of those horror movies where the monster keeps multiplying. You think you’ve got rid of one of them and then nine more burst their heads through the door.
This feeling has only been heightened by the fact that this time the outgoing leader is Boris Johnson. Finally ridding the country of the liar-in-chief is certainly something to celebrate, but it becomes somewhat muted when you realise who is coming up behind him.
In a merciful bid to speed up the process, the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers has announced the leadership hopefuls will be quickly whittled down to two by Thursday next week. As I write, there are 10 candidates standing – a motley crew of extremists, fools and people who would sell your grandma for a chance at power. Or deport her. The options are endless and not in a good way.
The current favourite, Rishi Sunak, is running on a platform to “rebuild the economy” (just wait until he finds out who’s been running the economy for the last two years, he’s going to be livid).
Then there’s Liz Tru … – sorry, I refuse to believe Liz Truss is a real-life candidate to be prime minister and not just a fever dream after too much cheese. (Don’t worry Liz, it’s British produced.)
In the last hour, Priti Patel tragically ruled herself out of the running. It was rumoured her campaign team included a lobbyist known for helping to prevent the extradition of the Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet to Spain to face trial for human rights abuses. I suppose you could say it is a credit to her would-be leadership skills that she hired people with relevant experience.
Listen to the details of their pitches and it doesn’t get much better – rather, it’s a bizarre and toxic blend of economic libertarianism and social authoritarianism. Every candidate, bar Sunak, is running on cutting tax. Considering past scrutiny of their own, and their families’, tax affairs, I suppose it’s nice they want to help us pay less tax too.
The chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, wants to cut every government department by 20% while “protecting children from damaging and inappropriate nonsense being forced on them by radical activists”. Presumably the Department for Propaganda will be immune from the cuts.
The culture war queen, Kemi Badenoch, has made a pitch for a “strong but limited government focused on the essentials”. Forget libraries, youth clubs and disability support, hers sounds like a government that will just about keep the lights on* (*not a guarantee).
Suella Braverman – also known as the attorney general who propped up the first prime minister in British history to have been found to have broken the law – is calling for Britain to leave the European convention on human rights.
Penny Mordaunt, we can only imagine, is still dealing with the backlash to making a campaign video so soaked in blitz nostalgia you were half expecting her to bring out the reanimated corpse of Dame Vera Lynn. Paralympic sprinter Jonnie Peacock later asked to be removed from the video, understandably feeling he was better off out of it. If only we all had that option, eh?
It feels as if the Tory party is occupying an entirely different universe than the rest of us. Britain is facing the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation and our candidates for prime minister think the answer is a smaller state with a side portion of culture war. It doesn’t help that the entire electorate has to hand over the reins to 200,000 Conservative party members, a group more representative of a Saga cruise than the general population. It is not as if we can rely on Britain’s rightwing press to hold them to account, still busy hankering for Johnson like a toxic ex (“I just want u back, babe”).
As the pandemic hit, it was often remarked that Johnson being in Downing Street meant having the worst leader, just at the time we needed the best. It was entirely true, of course, but we hardly find ourselves in a better place now. Ambulance waits are so long they are putting patient lives at risk. Climate change is resulting in scorching summer heatwaves. Wheelchair users aren’t leaving the house because energy prices mean they can’t afford to charge their chairs. But the biggest threat facing the country is apparently transgender people. The sight of the candidates throwing a marginalised group under the bus in recent days in order to gain power is one of the grubbiest things British politics has seen since … well, last week. Never has the political class been so ill equipped to meet the challenges of the day. If the second world war got Churchill, the cost of living crisis will have the Churchill dog.
In the coming weeks, we will be forced to watch candidates contort to get the Tory faithful on side, offering them an ever-decreasing standard of public service with increasing extremism. Policies that previously only the fringe hard right of the party would have supported – deporting asylum seekers, withdrawing from human rights institutions, scapegoating LGBTQ+ people – are now being propagated by practically every leadership candidate. Whoever wins, the result will likely plunge Britain into a new era of austerity and culture war, with the NHS, schools and social security tossed aside. Johnson may be gone by September, but his populist heirs are only getting started. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
• This article was amended on 13 July 2022 to correct the spelling of Jonnie Peacock’s first name, and to clarify that the final two candidates are expected to be announced by Thursday next week, not this week.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
