Reams of commentary will be written about the battle for the Tory leadership, because newspaper pundits confuse blowing hard on cold ashes with real manual labour. But if reading it all seems too much like hard work, then this column is for you. Today’s piece won’t be about “What the Conservatives must do to become fit for government”, since I don’t want them back in government, ever. No, the purpose of our inquiry is to suss out what kind of opponent the party’s next leader will be: the fights they’ll pick, the parliamentary votes they’ll force and the hurdles they’ll heave into the path of better politics. And I believe the best way to do that is with a game involving two words. As you glance across the contenders, ask yourself this: are they a moron or a bastard?
I am not in the business of throwing insults, but using two technical terms with specific definitions that draw upon three decades of rightwing history.
“Moron” you may remember from the autumn of 2022, when Liz Truss became prime minister and announced the biggest tax cuts in half a century, promising more to come – much more. It was what markets wanted, apparently – until markets plunged into turmoil and demanded the UK pay penalty rates to borrow, inevitably dubbed the “moron premium”.
Moronism is shorthand for a particularly toxic strain of rightwing supply-side economics. It dominates the fringe of any Tory conference, where hobgoblins fresh out of university talk moistly about Laffer curves, planning deregulation and Pinochet’s Chile, but it has grown ever more virulent within the parliamentary party over the past decade.
And “bastard”? For that our source is John Major. Normally as mild as soap, as prime minister he was caught on tape admitting that the Eurosceptics within his own cabinet had overrun him. The anti-Brussels headbangers were simply too dangerous to sack. “We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there.” That was 30 years ago. By the early 2010s, the Tory bastards had Brexit in their sights, while a decade later they chunter about immigrants, transgender rights and woke police officers, and can start at least three culture wars over breakfast.
Four candidates are left in the Tory leadership race, but ideologically they fall on one of two sides: those for whom libertarian economics comes first, and those who speak golf-club identity politics. There was a time when Tories could blend the two, as Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell did, but the globalised economy makes that impossible today. For one branch of modern Conservatism, “socialism” is the main enemy (a cunning codeword for the welfare state and workers’ rights); for the other, it is open borders. Each will nab the other’s language, of course, but ultimately their positions are incompatible. Anti-statism or the nation state, free capital markets or closed labour markets, globalisation or anti-globalism: in the end, as the young people say, you’ve got to pick a lane.
In all of Westminster there is only one example of a front-rank politician who successfully manages to be both a complete moron and an utter bastard, and his name is Nigel Farage. His ability to sport the dual faces of contemporary rightwing politics is part of his siren appeal to the Tory base. It means the greatest unifying candidate in Conservative politics leads a rival party. But the public schoolboy turned tribune of the working class is rarely held to account on his policies. The rightwing press do not ask him to explain how he can triple the tax cuts dreamed up by Truss and scrap NHS waiting lists. The BBC treats him as a panel-show pony rather than a politician. But no one heading the most successful political party in democratic history will be treated with such chuckling indulgence. Whether they want to or not, each Tory candidate has to pick a side.
Robert Jenrick This is the guy who had himself filmed at 4am watching Albanians get rounded up and flown to Tirana. The video mainly showed him nodding his jowls at each deportation, presumably thinking he looked like Churchill. Yeah, Churchill the dog. Obviously a bastard.
Tom Tugendhat He gets labels like “liberal” and “centrist”, perhaps because he’s the nearest thing the Tories have to George Smiley, wearing heavy glasses and looking rueful about the trajectory of his career. In reality, he’s happy to leave the European convention on human rights and wants more cash for the army and the police. He’s also the MP who, after Putin invaded Ukraine, demanded the UK “expel Russian citizens – all of them”. Bastard.
James Cleverly The anti-bastard, he’s the only contender who recognises that rightwing voters didn’t just flood towards Farage: they also opted for Ed Davey and Keir Starmer. This leaves the former Brexit supporter urging “deregulation” and quoting Thatcher, that “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. Well, the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people’s assets to flog, which is partly why Britain is now in so deep a hole. Moron.
Kemi Badenoch Talks like a bastard but walks like a moron. When her mentions have gone a bit quiet, she links Rachel Reeves to Chairman Mao or claims it was no big deal for Britain’s economy that it ran the largest empire in history (perhaps it was all for charity). Look at her platform, however, and the former protege of Michael Gove is primarily about ever freer markets and ever more capitalism. Moron.
Playing Moron or Bastard? has helped me do more than clarify where each candidate really stands. It’s also shown up the gaps in our politics. There is no big party now defending fiscal conservatism; the nearest is the one led by Starmer. The next Tory leader might well play havoc opposing Labour’s spending cuts. While the Conservatives have always traded as the party of business and property, the game we’ve just played shows how ideologically fractured the business lobby is today. Even as the CBI hymns Labour’s green energy plans, the hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall buys the Spectator. Just as Donald Trump can still count on Silicon Valley, so the British right is propped up by the shadow bankers and loophole merchants.
But that’s me falling back into high-fibre columnism. We might as well enjoy a free show. The final bout for who leads His Majesty’s Opposition will be a moron pitted against a bastard. My money is on the last two being Kemi v Robert. What you might call Bad Enoch v Sad Enoch.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 12 September 2024. An earlier version incorrectly referred to “Her Majesty’s Opposition”, rather than His Majesty’s Opposition.
