Grassroots members and supporters of the Conservative Party have been put back in their place by the party’s parliamentary elite, with Liz Truss ousted and an establishment premier likely to replace her.
Truss was hardly a staunch conservative given her strenuous support for Remain during the Brexit referendum, immediate postponement of any action against the EU over its behaviour in Northern Ireland, and desire to increase the country’s already record-high levels of immigration.
However, she was elected Conservative leader by ordinary Conservative Party members — against the wishes of the MPs who make up the parliamentary party, who wanted Rishi Sunak — on a platform of mild tax cuts and fracking for energy independence which was considered radical by the low standards of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom.
Even this unremarkable agenda proved unacceptable for the so-called “blob” of Cameroon MPs, scarcely indistinguishable from the Blairite MPs who controlled British politics during the New Labour era, and Truss was forced to reverse virtually every tax cut or tax rise cancellation she put forward in a “mini-budget” shortly after announcing it.
Her Chancellor of the Exchequer and personal friend, Kwasi Kwarteng, had been thrown under the bus in an effort to save her. This was followed up with an attempt to assuage the blob by appointing Jeremy Hunt, an anti-Brexit and China-linked lockdown authoritarian decisively rejected by ordinary Conservative Party members when he contended with Boris Johnson for the leadership in 2019.
But with Hunt’s reversal of virtually all her tax policies and dilution of her scheme to help householders and businesses survive the energy crisis, it became immediately clear he was in fact de facto Prime Minister. With chaotic rows in the House of Commons as a substantial number of Tory MPs resisting efforts to boost energy independence by finally promoting fracking, it was clear it would be untenable for Truss to remain even as a figurehead. She is now gone, becoming the shortest-serving British premier in history.
The message to party members, so soon after the ouster of Johnson — inexplicably still popular among a sizeable chunk of the party base, who chose him over Hunt when Theresa May went in 2019 and was rewarded with the biggest election triumph since the 1980s — is clear: the blob is back in charge, and mass migration and a historically high tax burden will remain the order of the day because deep state officials and multinational corporations have decreed that this is the only “responsible” model of GDP-first governance.
Indeed, Hunt — who backed Rishi Sunak over Liz Truss for the party leadership after his own 2022 run crashed before it could clear the runway — has more or less institutionalised what Truss campaigned against as “Treasury orthodoxy” by announcing that policy will now be guided, if not set, by something called the Economic Advisory Council. This new invention is a wholly unelected body described by Telegraph sketch writer Tim Stanley in the following terms:
Mr Hunt revealed that we are now run by something called the Economic Advisory Council, which contains graduates of BlackRock and JP Morgan. [Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee] Mel Stride said that he hoped it would not challenge the Bank of England or the Office for Budget Responsibility but work with them – which, haha, I feel sure it will.
One reported member of the Council is Karen Ward, a hireling of JP Morgan — which also put Tony Blair in its proverbial pocket after his premiership gave up the ghost — who formerly advised Philip Hammond, the Theresa May era Chancellor of the Exchequer who attempted to sabotage Brexit in the interminable period between the 2016 and the final faux-exit from the bloc in 2020.
Another reported Council member is Rupert Harrison, chief of staff to David Cameron’s Chancellor and Remain campaign scaremonger-general George Osborne, who presided over the austerity cuts that slashed Britain’s military strength, police numbers, courtrooms, and more while making no appreciable dent in the ever-growing army of diversity officers and state-funded far-left “civil society” NGOs which now set so much of the country’s social agenda.
Infamously, Osborne also revealed after Brexit that the Tories’ long-standing pledge to cut net immigration “from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands” was a scam they never intended to honour “though we could” because, quite simply, none of the party’s leaders really believed in it.
The pledge was a sop to a party membership the party politicians privately disagreed with, to be discarded as soon as members and supporters had served the only function they are really expected to fulfil: voting them into office on election day.
By voting for Brexit against the wishes of the party establishment in 2016 and even by voting for the milquetoast Truss against the wishes of the party establishment in 2022, it was clear the members had been getting ideas above their station, and her swift removal — a counter-revolution rather than a coup, really — seems calculated to serve as the message for them to relearn their place that the coronation of Remain supporter Theresa May after the EU referendum failed to deliver.
Indeed, while much of the media will enjoy breathlessly speculating over who will replace Truss in the accelerated, seven-day leadership election that now looms — a possible attempted return to the fore by Boris Johnson is already making for particularly good sport — it is now clear that it hardly matters who wears the party’s paper crown.
A right-leaning, pro-borders candidate like Suella Braverman, who resigned from Truss’s Cabinet over the drive to increase immigration, will certainly not be allowed to reach the final two, when ordinary members will, in theory, be able to pick a winner. But even if she did somehow pull off this feat, she would not be allowed to govern as a right-wing, pro-borders premier any more than Truss was allowed to govern as a mildly pro-tax cuts, pro-deregulation one.
Perhaps it will be Rishi Sunak, who lost to Truss on his platform of tax rises and managed decline, but who still enjoys broad support among MPs who may just be contemptuous enough of their members that they really think they can get away with reimposing him.
Perhaps it will be Jeremy Hunt, who has officially ruled himself out of contention but may yet “reluctantly” find himself put forward as a fraudulent “unity” candidate despite having, as Francis Urquhart said, “absolutely no ambition in that direction” himself, because his party and his country supposedly demand it.
Perhaps it could even be Boris Johnson, if he somehow survives a selection process doubtless be designed with kneecapping him as much as the likes of Braverman in mind. He would be no more able to defy the blob than Braverman — though of course, despite the lingering delusion that he is the “British Trump”, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, he was very much a blob politician himself, pushing net-zero and increased immigration while neglecting Brexit.
Whatever the outcome, where the power really lies is clear: the establishment is in control, the base is along for the ride, and if they don’t like it the establishment’s only pitch to them — now, in the past, come election time, and forever — will be to turn their eyes towards the loaded barrel of a potential Labour government, though it be scarcely indistinguishable from the Conservative ones that loves to fail them.