Why hasn’t there been more fallout from the autumn statement? It was a miserable affair, after all, taking the tax burden to a historic high from which it is unlikely to fall for decades. The Treasury documents promised that whoever is in power after the next election will have to cut spending when public services are threadbare. But on Thursday, as Jeremy Hunt listed what he was up to, the Tory benches were as animated as the sedated animals at a scandal-hit safari park – and they’ve not perked up since. Given the party’s addiction to drama, this is more remarkable than the endless regicide and plotting of the past year.
A mere handful of backbenchers have said they want some changes and will be talking to their whips to make sure Hunt and Rishi Sunak are well aware, but there are no signs of a serious rebellion, just gripes. Even those who supported Liz Truss have largely accepted that the new government has done what it can with a difficult situation. The front pages of the newspapers in the days after have been difficult, but well within the realms of what the chancellor and prime minister were expecting as they prepared for last week.
What the sullen silence really tells us is that Tory MPs are all fixated on their fate at the next election. Some have already given up, others spent Thursday’s statement trying to work out if there might still be a way through for their party. Few were thinking about the announcements themselves. They were busy gaming the politics: what it meant for their own seats and for the future of their party.
A large group of Tory MPs already think they have lost the next election. They have been through the angry stage of the grieving process and so the latest announcements, annoying as they are to almost every section of the electorate bar pensioners, don’t represent the moment at which the party lost. To many, that moment was the disastrous mini-budget that will likely have such a long tail in voters’ minds that it will still be something they haven’t forgiven when they go to the polls in a couple of years. Others think it goes back further and that Boris Johnson managed to, in the words of one minister, “suck the soul out of the party”. Some of Johnson’s allies believe that the moment he was deposed was when the Tories’ fate was sealed. Whatever their version of recent history, though, they’re united in one thing: they can’t see how they’re going to stay in power.
The MPs who have reconciled themselves to defeat had consequently mentally checked out when Hunt was speaking because they have been devoting so much time to thinking about what they’d do if they lost their own seat. They’ve been contacting headhunters and have discovered that “it’s a cold world out there for an ex-MP for a party that’s just lost an election”. Many have been reminded of how difficult Scottish Labour MPs found it to move into gainful employment after losing their seats en masse in 2015. “I’d say that having MP on your CV is now a negative in a lot of situations,” says one Tory. “And if you’re from the party that’s lost power, you aren’t attractive to public affairs people as they’re not interested in building links with the opposition.” With two years to go until polling day, they’ve concluded that the best thing to do is to focus on making themselves a bit more employable. They barely paid attention to what was being said in the chamber.
Others now think there is a bit of a chance they could weather a tricky election campaign. One pro-Sunak minister says he’s “tired and miserable” but that he thinks the prime minister and chancellor’s show of competence last week means Labour are in a more difficult position than before. Another backbencher says: “The statement means people can see a tightrope could exist between now and a sort of win at the next election, whereas previously nobody could imagine it.” The Tory party has always been more pragmatic, more able than Labour to drop the policies it cherishes in order to win an election. Moving Britain to being a high-tax society is a stretch even for the most coldly pragmatic Conservatives, but these are desperate political times.
But even Hunt, who hoped that the autumn statement would at least make an election victory marginally less impossible, planned it in such a way that it would cause as much grief to the party likely to take over as it would to those in charge now. Loading the cuts until after the election means Labour has to decide whether it accepts the overall spending envelope as oppositions often do in order to appear fiscally credible. There is an animated debate within Keir Starmer’s party about this: refusing to sign up to the Tories’ spending plans in 1992 was a major factor in Labour failing to win that election, but backing them in 1997 did mean plenty of tearful fights once in government about cutting benefits for single mothers. Tory MPs, though, are mournful about this “trap” laid for their rivals: “Who cares if they sign up to it?” moans one. “They can just say they’re having to do this because we messed things up – and we’ve said it enough times recently to make it credible.” Indeed, clearing up the mess of the last Tory government is something Hunt has politely suggested he is doing. Labour will be rather less delicate in saying that any unpopular decisions they have to take are Liz Truss’s fault.
Besides, many of the announcements last week were the sort that a leftwing government would be more comfortable with than the Tories are. Many Conservative MPs have been deeply hurt by the repeated comparisons to Gordon Brown, taking them more personally than usual because they feel them to be true. It isn’t just the tax rises that are bothering them. Some cabinet ministers are concerned that their party has become too accepting of a big welfare state on top of an NHS that always seems to, in their view, need more money. At the final cabinet meeting of Truss’s premiership, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, warned that his party shouldn’t accept the premise of the accusation that by dealing with the growing benefits bill, the Tories were somehow attacking the vulnerable because, he said, some households earning £50,000 were eligible for universal credit. Other Conservatives go further, warning that their party has ended up offering what one says is “essentially a universal basic income” rather than a benefit. It’s not a view unfailingly held by Conservatives, of course: universal credit was designed by former party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who still feels it is the best way to target support for people who need it the most.
But the discomfort shows that some Tories feel their party doesn’t know what it stands for any more, to the extent that it will struggle to differentiate itself from Labour at the next election. “Why would you vote for us offering Labour-lite policies when you can get the real thing?” complains one senior rebel.
That worry about what their identity and values are is really dragging down the Tories. A number of ministers think it has been building ever since Brexit, given their party has spent 40 years being defined by its position on Europe and now has to find a new mission. One senior government figure says: “The party is lost. It doesn’t know which way to turn. Rishi gives them comfort because of professionalism and slickness but nothing deeper than that.”
Despite behaving like Romans watching a particularly bloody session in the Colosseum this year, most Conservative MPs accept that Sunak is the last leader they will have before the election. They can’t feed another one to the lions. But that doesn’t mean they will get behind him. If the polls don’t move, then their current sullen demeanour will change to rebellion and open bickering again. They will be back in their comfort zone of fighting one another, but this time the release valve from all the internal tensions won’t be the removal of another leader – it will have to be a general election. And that is why those MPs were all so quietly miserable last week. It’s one thing to be addicted to drama and internal leadership contests; it’s quite another to hit the rock bottom of an election defeat.
• Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator
