I know I have written this before, but what a week it has been! On Thursday, after just 44 days in office, PM Liz Truss was forced to resign after a meeting with the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee Sir Graham Brady. She thus becomes the shortest serving PM in history. Today at 2pm it was announced that Rishi Sunak has been chosen by – according to BBC estimates – around 193 Tory MPs (.00028 % of the population) to be our next Prime Minister. It is not entirely clear on what platform Sunak was elected. Yet, based on what he had to say during the leadership campaign over the summer and based on what happened since, we can expect an orthodox economic policy. It is quite likely Sunak will keep Jeremy Hunt as a chancellor who will present his fiscal plans on October 31st as planned. Compared to a couple of weeks ago, the markets have steadied somewhat as a result. Following the announcement of Sunak’s selection, the pound traded higher against the US dollar.
On the flip side, we can be pretty certain that we will now be facing a new phase of austerity, which some commentators expect to tougher than the one Osborne imposed on the country from 2010 onwards.
It is also not clear how long the relative stability will last. There was a certain show of unity around Sunak’s candidature over the past few days. Thus, Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman backed Rishi Sunak rather than Boris Johnson. Braverman justified her choice by arguing that it was no time for ‘indulge in parochial or nativist fantasies,’ which seems like an astonishingly honest and cleareyed summary of the policies she normally stands for. Yet, the fundamental divisions in the party remain and nothing suggests it has become any more unleadable than it was a few months ago. In this context, it is interesting to try and understand what new phase Sunak’s premiership may imply for Brexit Britain.
The end of the reign of terror?
Interestingly, various commentators were trying to make sense of what was happening to the Tory party by likening Brexit to a revolution. Thus, German public broadcaster ARD’s London correspondent Annette Dittert talked about the ‘the Brexit revolutionaries in the Tory party.’ Former Tory MP Rory Stewart considers the Tory party as a whole – purged of any moderates – to have become a ‘revolutionary party.’ The Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner wrote last week of the ‘revolution in the British economy’ that Leave campaigners promised, but that now goes the way of every revolutionary movement by ‘eating itself.’ Andrew Marr, writing in the New Statesman agrees. The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf considered that Trussonomics marks the point where “the Brexit Revolutionaries over-reached.”
To be sure, each revolution is unique, deeply grounded in its historical context, and contingent on a myriad of unpredictable and unrepeatable actions by historic figures. But if we accept the Brexit revolution analogy for a moment, one may wonder whether the current phase of Brexit could be seen as equivalent to the beginning of the Thermidorian reaction during the French Revolution. In the latter case, the revolutionary movement arguably culminated on 9 Thermidor, year II (July 27, 1794). That day, the National Convention had Maximilian Robespierre and other Jacobins’ arrested and then executed, thus ending the ‘Reign of Terror’ that had seen the Revolution become ever more extreme and paranoid over the previous eleven months. What followed was the so-called Thermidorian Reaction that ended the grip of the Jacobins and the working class ‘sans culottes’ on the Revolution.
On Thursday – for a few hours – it seemed like the prevalent mood was that Brexit had reached its 9 Thermidor. Indeed, Truss’s resignation was followed by a short period of fairly wide-spread agreement that her downfall may spell the end of the most extreme phase of Brexit. Anette Dittert wrote that Truss’s failure to deliver on the “pure right-wing libertarian doctrine” the “Brexit revolutionaries” wanted her to deliver might spell the ‘beginning of the end of Brexit [GER]’. The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland too, expected Truss’s demise – and thus according to him the biggest humiliation of Britain since the Suez Crisis in 1956 – to sound the death knell of the ‘delusion of sovereignty’ that drove Brexit. Brexit, he writes ‘broke the link between governance and reason, between policy and evidence,’ which made ‘the current great unravelling a political death foretold.’
Truss and Kwarteng’s ERG-supported and Tufton Street-inspired economic extremism having crushed the British economy in less than a month, the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor ten days ago already foreshadowed that more moderate (or reactionary) forces would now take over control; announcing a more boring and unspectacular phase of the revolution. As such, Truss’s short premiership may indeed be the Brexit-universe equivalent to Robespierre’s reign of terror. Like Robespierre’s reign of terror, Truss’s reign of extreme libertarianism ended up turning public opinion against the revolution. In Truss’s case shifting the public’s preferences away from the utopia of free markets, towards a longing for stability (of prices and mortgage rates for starters).
Project Lazarus
Yet, any short-lived hope on Thursday that Truss’s demise would lead to a phase of stability were quickly dashed when Boris Johnson’s voice made itself heard from his Caribbean holiday resort suggesting that he was keen on having another go at running the country. While still dismissed by Paul Goodman – the editor of the Conservative Home – on Thursday, over the following days it increasingly looked like Johnson might still enjoy a significant amount of support among Tory MPs. Indeed, the slogan Bring Back Boris (BBB) started trending very quickly. For a few days, it became doubtful whether bookmakers’ favourite and runner up in the summer leadership contest Rishi Sunak would have a clear run on the leadership, or whether Johnson would be able to find enough supporters to force an election by the party membership.
Amazingly, supporters of BBB included some who only a few months ago considered him unfit to govern. Most strikingly, Nadhim Zahawi, who only three months ago wrote to PM Johnson, imploring him to resign, now decided to back him in the new leadership race. On Sunday, the Telegraph published an article online penned by Zahawi entitled ‘Get ready for Boris 2.0 the man that will make the Tories and Britain great again.’ In another twist, minutes later on Sunday night, Johnson announced that he would pull out of the race!
While the BBB movement has ultimately been unsuccessful, we should not normalise what happened this week with Johnson’s averted comeback. In his statement announcing his withdrawal from the contest – full of the usual Johnsonite bluster – he claimed that he had the backing of 102 MPs and would probably win a members vote. The first part of that statement most probably was not true (incidentally, it seems quite fitting that Johnson’s comeback attempt should end with another lie). But even serious sources speak of 57 backers amongst Tory MPs, which given the fact that Johnson by any standard is unfit for high office is flabbergasting.
The fact that a former PM who had to leave office only a few months ago in utter disgrace – a man that observers can openly call a liar and lawbreaker, because that is established beyond doubt – was considered by many conservative MPs a viable option to become PM again shows the utter moral bankruptcy of the Tory party. Worse still, some voters in Johnson’s Uxbridge constituency seemed to seriously consider to vote for Johnson again in a next election.
One MP called the possible return of Johnson as PM – the greatest comeback since Lazarus. I remember a passage from Swedish literature Nobel Prize laureate Pär Lagerkvist’s novel ‘Barabbas,’ that describes the moment when Barabbas – the thief who according to the legend was spared the cross instead of Jesus Christ – visits Lazarus of Bethany in his house after he has been resurrected by Jesus. Barabbas describes the encounter as creepy, and Lazarus as having an unhealthy skin colour and accompanied by a smell of death. Had Johnson indeed managed to return as PM only a few short months after his disgraceful departure from office, it would have stunk to high heaven.
By setting the bar for leadership nominations at 100 MPs – a very high bar compared to this summers’ contest when the backing of only 20 MPs was needed for a nomination the party averted a possibly disastrous second Johnson premiership.
Indeed, very senior Tories including former party leader William Hague and many relatively moderate Tory MPs consider a Johnson return the worst possible idea. Around a dozen Tory MPs had threatened to resign the whip if Johnson were to return. Moreover, the ongoing partygate investigation by the Privileges Committee could mean that even if he had been elected leader for a second time, he could still have been suspended from the House of Commons and hence forced to step down as PM again. Paul Goodman on the Conservative Home web page wrote that “conservative members may not grasp the extent to which their party is becoming a joke – here and abroad” for “[…] forcing out Johnson, replacing him with someone worse and then bringing him back again […]”.
The Thermidorian reaction
By setting the bar at 100 MPs for leadership nominations, the party sought to make sure only one candidate would reach the required number, thus making a vote by party members unnecessary. This was important to shorten the process and also avoid that the public eye turned on some of the procedural issues related with the selection of a new Tory leader, such as the possibility of foreign interference in a likely online vote or the exclusion of a large number of Tory members without access to online voting. In the end, Sunak reportedly achieved the backing of 193 Tory MPs, while Penny Mordaunt’s number of backers was said to be around 24, leading her to drop out minutes before the 2pm deadline for submitting nominations today, thus leaving only one candidate and making a members vote unnecessary.
With Johnson’s comeback averted and Sunak now PM, it may indeed look like we have reached 9 Thermidor in the Brexit revolution. Sunak will bring some stability and reassurance to the markets. Despite the fact that he is a leaver, given the economic pressures the country is under, his premiership is widely expected to be marked by more pragmatism including regarding the UK’s relationship with the EU. But it will also mean that the fiscal orthodoxy of balanced public finances that returned with Hunt is here to stay, implying also that the return of austerity is inevitable, inflicting more pain and suffering on households already struggling to pay their bills. Indeed, it is hard to see how Sunak’s expected economic plan will lead to anything else than massive popular discontent. Austerity has been tried before and does not work. There is no money left for ‘levelling up’ – leaving large parts of the country fending for themselves during one of the direst economic situations the country has experienced in decades.
Recoupling not rejoining?
The simplest and most obvious way in which some of the economic pressures could be eased would be to abandon the hard Brexit strategy and rejoin the Single Market (SM). Indeed, as Geoff Hodgson puts it aptly, hard Brexit is a form of self-imposed austerity. Rejoining the Single Market would be an obvious way to ease some of the pressure. Yet, such a policy - if Sunak the leaver could bring himself to adopt it out of pragmatism - would immediately lead to tensions with the hard right in the Tory party assembled in the European Research Group. Rejoining the SM would mean accepting free movement of people, opening up the government for devastating attacks from the anti-immigration Tory right or from a revived anti-immigration party led by Farage.
Rejoining the SM – let alone the EU – not an option, an alternative might be a less obvious rapprochement with the EU; a form of progressive and selective ‘recoupling’ rather than a more ambitious rejoining. Here the negotiations around the NIP could become a catalyst to achieve that.
Northern Ireland Protocol
Earlier last week, Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group wrote that the chaos in Westminster might have an unexpected beneficial effect, namely that even to the UK government it must now be obvious that the UK simply cannot afford to continue its confrontational approach and thus risk a trade war with the EU. While Rahman’s comments were made with Truss as weakened PM in mind, it is even more likely that a less ideological PM like Sunak will want to work towards a solution. Especially with rejoining the SM not an option, finding solutions to reduce non-tariff trade barriers that Brexit is imposing on UK companies may be even more important.
Here it is conceivable that Sunak may be eager to solve some of the issues that are purely ideological, e.g. the UK’s refusal to accept an agreement on sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) rules that would imply dynamic unilateral alignment with EU rules. Such an agreement would very considerably reduce the need for border checks between the UK and Northern Ireland – but would also reduce trade frictions at other UK borders. At the same time, an SPS agreement would also make exporters’ and importers’ lives much easier at no real cost – other than the fact that we are not ‘sovereign’ to decide our own SPS rules. The more the economic situation worsens, the less the British public may care whether the SPS rules that apply to UK imports and exports are the same as the EU’s or our own.
Yet, here too, the ERG’s maximalist claims may constitute a stumbling block. Indeed, Steve Baker – currently still Northern Ireland minister – threatened on Sunday to ‘implode’ the government if the next PM did not continue the current hard-line approach to the protocol. Sunak will face a tough choice between adopting a more pragmatic approach and risking the wrath of the ERG, or continuing a confrontational approach with the EU, which would risk a trade war and thus further economic pain to keep the ERG (and Unionists) on board.
This indicates that whatever relative stability Sunak will bring, will be fragile and most likely only temporary. Since the Brexit referendum, Britain has become unhinged and is experiencing a rolling political and economic crisis. It seems very unlikely that another unelected Tory PM will be able to put an end to that.
No regrets, no remorse, nothing learned
Still, we can expect relative calm for a while now, given that Tory MPs are probably as exhausted as the rest of us by the absolutely shambolic past few months. There may be a genuine feeling that things need to calm down if Tory MPs want to stand any chance of keeping their seats in the next election. Beyond pure self-interest, however, there is little evidence that Tories have learned the lesson from disastrous past choices and are ready to question the path the party has gone down since the 2015 General Election.
For instance, in their attempt to pretend that the economic mess Trussonomics has inflicted on the country is not their fault, even moderate, One Nation Tories still seem to let the Truss wing get away with the notion that her economic plan was merely ‘too far and too fast,’ rather than fundamentally wrong. Few Tories seem willing to reject unambiguously the libertarian economic strategy she sought to implement. Few openly say that the plan was simply wrong, no matter at what pace it was delivered. There is no acknowledgement that the problem was the direction, rather than the distance and the pace. While this may seem like a moot point now that she is gone and discredited, it does leave the door open for a comeback of those toxic economic ideas once the dust has settled and people start forgetting what happened after the mini-budget.
Similarly, Sunak’s economic plan most likely will reveal very clearly that nothing has been learned from a decade of austerity and the havoc it wrecked. Given his track record and past statements on ‘levelling up,’ it also seems likely that whatever is left of the ‘levelling up’ agenda is bound to be sacrificed on the altar of ‘sound public finances.’ The political outcome will be more anger and grievances in the poorest parts of the country. Inflicting austerity on already stretched public services and on people who are already struggling with rising living costs will have a much more devastating effect on the country than Osborne’s austerity of the 2010s. Tories seem perfectly happy to accept that price to satisfy ‘the markets.’ Countries around us, however, observing Britain from a distance, are increasingly worried about political instability in the UK. Sunak’s austerity will not solve that problem. Indeed, just like Osborne’s austerity, which – as Geoff Hodgson argues in a recent blog post – did not achieve its goals of reducing national debt and increasing growth, so will Sunak’s austerity only make things worse. It will spur further discontent which will make a Johnson or Farage comeback more likely, thus keeping the UK trapped in political instability and turmoil.
The Thermidorian reaction during the French Revolution managed to put a halt to the madness of the Reign of Terror, but it did not solve any of the underlying issues. Rather, it led to further disillusion with the First Republic and the Revolution and paved the way for the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and thus the demise of the French Republic. Sunak would do well to heed that cautionary tale…but he won’t.