Trapped in an exhibition match
Trapped in an exhibition match
Truss' collapse looks like an open goal for Labour but reading the press reveals otherwise.
Previously: Gilty men
… and women. The commentators and papers who talked up Liz Truss will be allowed to get away with it again.
The most telling paragraph in The Sunday Times this weekend was buried in the middle of its leader column. After suggesting — or rather demanding — that the Tories kick out Liz Truss in favour of Rishi Sunak (the paper’s first choice during the leadership contest), the piece sketched out the next part of the strategy:
After the immediate crisis has passed, the Tories must call an election. Britain cannot tolerate a further two years of instability, and it would be more strategically astute for the Conservatives to let Labour confront the economic challenges of the next few years if they are to stand a chance of returning to power in the near future.
That’s not a triumph for Labour; it’s being set up as the fall guy, the replacement for a lead actor in a long-running series with tanking ratings. Once the UK is finally cancelled due to lack of interest, newspapers like The Sunday Times will place the blame firmly on faded matinee idol Keir Starmer.
Another indication of why Daily Telegraph columnist, bowtie connoisseur and noted builderphobe Tim Stanley ended his piece on the Labour Party conference last month by cheerfully noting that he is “no longer terrified of Labour,” comes courtesy of Patrick Maguire’s Times column today. Under the headline, Keir Starmer knows he must not scare the voters, Maguire writes:
Quietly, the leader’s office has begun a minesweeping exercise designed to weed out the sort of expensive pledges that risk derailing any election campaign. Shadow cabinet ministers have been instructed to tell the public that a Starmer government will neither break the bank with borrowing nor spend big to fix crumbling public services overnight.
If you’re looking for a pithy summary of that strategy, try singing “things can only get worse now”. And that headline concern about “scaring the voters”? If you pop on your They Live-branded sunglasses, you’ll see it decoded as “terrified of upsetting national newspaper leader writers and columnists”.
That approach is further revealed in the description of Starmer’s ‘overhaul’ of the party:
Having all but expelled Jeremy Corbyn, rigged parliamentary selections to exclude the left, wrapped himself in the Union flag and foreclosed any route to rejoining the EU, Starmer’s closest confidants say he is ready to seize the moment and steal the Conservative mantle of fiscal credibility.
Maguire’s conclusion points to the same trap that the Sunday Times editorial was so keen to spring:
When Jeremy Hunt comes before the Commons with a package of spending cuts in a fortnight, the shadow chancellor will face a choice: back the government, or chart a course of clear red water. We are about to learn what caution really means.
For now though, in the Year of the Four Chancellors — Tacitus didn’t have to keep an eye out for push notifications while he was writing — the focus is on Liz Truss, the PM who is definitely not under a desk. Twenty-four days after The Daily Mail splashed on the headline At last! A TRUE Tory Budget (over a story written by Jason Groves), the paper screams In Office, But Not In Power (over a story written by Jason Groves).
Like the rest of Fleet Street, Groves luxuriates in Penny Mordaunt answering Labour’s urgent question on behalf of the (physically, emotionally and psychically) absent Truss:
Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt denied that the PM was the victim of a ‘coup’ as the Chancellor tore up her plans.
And she provoked laughter in the House when she insisted Miss Truss was not hiding ‘under a desk’ to avoid scrutiny by MPs.
The implication is that Mordaunt tripped up but politicians don’t usually repeat attack lines in their answers to opposition questions. Truss sending Mordaunt to deputise for her was like asking Regina George from Mean Girls to present your book report; she knew exactly what she was doing.
What’s true, however, is that Mordaunt, a former magician’s assistant, entirely failed to explain the Prime Minister’s vanishing act. After she repeatedly claimed that Truss was not present because of “a very good reason”, it transpired that the Prime Minister had been meeting with Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, as part of her bid to beg backbenchers not to bin her (yes, I know that’s too much alliteration).
The ‘verdicts’ of Times writers on the events in parliament yesterday reiterate two lines of political hack thinking: 1) Jeremy Hunt is a “safe pair of hands” whose push for further austerity cannot be questioned 2) We should “feel sorry” for Liz Truss.
Iain Martin claims:
[Hunt] was blunt but never cruel, stressing the need to restore orderly policy-making and market confidence while emphasising that cuts will be difficult. His manner was akin to that of a nice vet delivering tough news about a pet who has got into one tangle too many.
Rachel Reeves had fun welcoming the fourth chancellor in four months and landed good lines, but Hunt will be tougher to handle because he deploys reasonableness as a weapon in debate. After almost an hour of drama, the heat gradually went out of it.
If Hunt is the vet putting down our beloved family pets, Reeves will do the same but tell us they have gone to live on a farm.
Jenni Russell continues the Hunt hagiography:
Jeremy Hunt was on his feet, fluent, energetic, sober, engaging, commanding; swiftly retracting every pillar of Trussonomics… The message was this: the clowns will not be allowed to run the circus again.
Any with a functioning memory will remember Hunt’s previous performances in the big top and looking closely you can still see the grease paint on his grinning face.
The call for sympathy came from Matthew Parris, The Times’ in-house ‘good Tory’, who concluded his assessment by saying:
I have run marathons. By the final mile you are so clobbered that you cannot lift your head to respond to shouts from the crowd. Eyes cast down, Liz Truss looked like that. For the first time, I felt sorry for her.
Truss entered the race of her own accord; that she attempted to run it in clown shoes, with her hair on fire thanks to lighter fluid supplied by the IEA, is entirely down to her.
In the Telegraph, Stanley compares her to “Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko [after] they pumped him full of drugs and dragged him out of his hospital bed to vote in a fake election” while its leader column concludes:
The country has spent years living beyond its means. The reckoning will soon be upon us, regardless of who is prime minister.
The consent manufacturing machine is working hard to lock in a conclusion that there is only one set of viable policies, whoever is in government.
We’re expected to treat the collapse of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party’s rising poll lead as the results of a real contest but what we’re actually seeing is akin to the Washington Generals facing defeat by the Harlem Globetrotters1; it’s a rigged contest in which the real winners remain the same.
The reason we’re being served up columns like William Hague’s effort in The Times today (Ideology is dead: it’s competence we need now) is to further lock in the assumptions about what and who we can afford to help. Even as the Conservative Party crumbles, Hague can convincingly write that “Labour’s sandwiches are all being eaten by the Tories.” It’s because the Overton Window has been remodelled to a peephole; the number of acceptable policies shrunk to a pocket thesaurus of miseries.
Thanks for reading.
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Thanks to JH for this metaphor.