Conservative Party of the UK Leadership Election, 2022

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Braverman announcing that she was going to run - without actually resigning as Attorney General, this when Johnson was still insisting that he was staying - live on national television last night was genuinely surreal stuff.

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The candidate everyone has been waiting for - Bill Wiggin, MP for North Herefordshire.

BILL WIGGIN?!?!!?!

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What are the core differences between Sunak and Truss outiside the latter being a halfwit? It seems like a very similar front 2 in terms of wing if the party. I understand Sunaks appeal to the more moderates though.

Fundamentally they're pretty similar so it's mostly a case of positioning, but Sunak is much fussier about things like budget deficits and fiscal rectitude, while Truss thinks that free tax cuts are a thing you can have even without a windfall of cash. Truss has also leaned much more into stupid Culture War nonsense, but, again, 'positioning'.

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Interesting just how many of the candidates appear to be non-white. That happening in say the Republican Party (in a country with a bigger non-white population) would be unthinkable.

Five out of the eleven candidates are non-white (of course that fives does include Chishti, but he is technically a declared candidate...), and a further two (Shapps, who is Jewish, and Zahawi, who is Kurdish) are from ethnic minorities. There's also the slightly odd case of Tugendhat who is half French and had a Jewish grandparent (thus the name).* Given that this is the party that Enoch Powell used to be a leading member of, this is interesting and does say a lot about our society, though it's worth noting that it hasn't come out of nowhere: even twenty years ago Conservative leadership contenders were, on average, more 'diverse' than the population. Michael Portillo is (of course) half Spanish, Michael Howard is Jewish and Iain Duncan Smith actually has some Japanese ancestry. And, of course, the resigning Party Leader and Prime Minister would bear Kemal as a surname had his grandfather not changed it to Johnson.

_{*The latter, it should be noted, makes him no more Jewish than James Callaghan. Slightly less so as Callaghan's father (not that Callaghan knew until he was middle aged!) was halachically Jewish and Tugendhat's was not.}

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Wasn't Benjamin Disraeli also Jewish?

Well that's going back to a different age, before universal suffrage let alone leadership elections within the Conservative Party (not a thing they had until the 1960s). Though Disraeli being an important figure in the party's history probably explains why they've always been more comfortable about having leading figures from outside the majority population, so long, of course, as they conform to certain things.* Also relevant, in a way, is the fact that Bonar Law was actually a Canadian.

_{*With exactly what varying over time: Disraeli would certainly not have got very far in his career had he not converted to Anglican Christianity before he was an adult, and not just because full legal Jewish Emancipation was some way off when he started out.}

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Badenoch seems the dream Labour candidate. She is completely obsessed with culture wars (many not even our own!) and doesn’t even make up for it with some moderation on other issues eg; public services spending. If she wins then there’s a not insignificant chance she spends the 2024 leaders debate ranting about how Starmer will abolish the police and call people Latinx.

She also used to work at Coutts!

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Brady has just announced the list for the first ballot, and all the remaining 8 have made it.

Badenoch
Braverman
Hunt
Mordaunt
Sunak
Truss
Tugendhat
Zahawi

Do we have figures or just names of candidates from to-day's episode of The Apprentice who were not fired?

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I have to believe that the party wouldn't rip up the Belfast Agreement, because none of the alternatives are plausible, and it remains one of the great political breakthroughs of the last 30 years. I'm not as confident as I used to be though.

They might want to but would find it, in practice, extremely difficult due to Britain's position in NATO and some of the commitments inherent to and implied by that. Whether that qualifies as a comfort, exactly, is a different question.

Which means that we're left with politicians either making functionally impossible promises or toying with making impossible promises, both in order to appeal to an internal electorate. Which is not a very healthy situation.

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We need to be a little careful about surveys right now - e.g. Mordaunt is essentially NOTA at this point and, one way or another, this can't realistically hold - but for what little it's worth, Hunt performed better in the eventual runoff against Johnson in 2019 than YouGov surveys at the time suggested.

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The Mordaunt bandwagon is genuinely bizarre.

The A.N. Other effect.

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They probably tell us something about momentum, which is not a useless thing to know. Otherwise...

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Roundhay is one of those Victorian villa suburbs that have changed a lot in recent decades - it's very much the sort of place largely inhabited by junior public sector professionals these days - but it was still a traditional bourgeois suburb when she lived there.

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Whilst we don’t quite know what’s going to happen in the final round, I was pretty confident that Mordaunt would come a cropper after that first debate and it seems to be happening.

She sunk her own campaign by doing a 180. Had she just stuck to her previous, 'liberal' Cameronian credentials and fight for them, she might be doing much better.

May have made an error by leaning overmuch into her A.N. Other status rather than fight her corner more.

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Truss reminds me a lot of the 'straight man' archetype in an old-fashioned comedy duo: she's extremely funny, but has no idea that she is and is all the funnier because of this.

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One issue will be what the finished seats actually look like. If sufficient Conservative MPs do not like them...

(and, yes, yes, automatic implementation of etc... but Rule One of the British Constitution is that Parliament Can Do What It Likes).

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The Times: Liz Truss’s tax cuts mean interest rates of up to 7%, admits her economic guru
Interest rates will have to rise as high as 7 per cent to allow tax cuts, according to Liz Truss’s economic guru.

Professor Patrick Minford said that despite fears over mortgages, higher interest rates were “a good thing” because they protected savings and killed off “zombie companies” that were holding the economy back.

Truss cited Minford as one of the few economists who agreed with her as she attacked 20 years of “economic orthodoxy” this week and insisted that cutting taxes was not only affordable but essential to avoid a recession.

Sunak’s team seized on the comments, saying interest rates at 7 per cent would add £585 a month to the average mortgage, leaving homeowners £6,600 a year worse off even after her tax cuts.

Minford cited EU limits on working hours, union powers and employee consultation rights as rules that Truss should scrap to boost growth, saying: “One of things Boris Johnson refused to touch was the labour market and that makes no sense at all.”

However, he said that, unlike in the 1980s, environmental and medical regulation were now the rules that needed to be relaxed after Brexit to boost growth. He wants to reverse the EU’s “highly risk-averse approach” and shift to a system where instead of banning things in case they cause harm, people are compensated afterwards if they do.

I mean from a selfish personal finance position I would do rather well out of high interest rates and the consequences, and the electoral fallout would be pleasing as well, but it would certainly not be good for, you know, the British economy and society in general...

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A brave and courageous policy, as Sir Humphrey would say.

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lol lmao lol

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It's... remarkable how many people are sharing this video.

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He is talking about Blair-era channelling of funds into very inner-city areas, primarily in London. These continue to be places where Labour weighs votes. This has nothing to do with Red Wall seats.

The so-called Red Wall seats aren't inner-city urban areas that had money thrown at them by Blair. They tend to be peripheral suburban sinkhole estates which were ignored in the Blair years. That's why C2DE participation in elections cratered during and after the Blair era, only to make a slight comeback during the EU referendum.

What utter nonsense. New Labour positively threw money at postindustrial towns and at peripheral estates, every bit as much as it did to the inner cities. Masses of money were spent (and spent well! There's a reason why most of these places are comparatively average in their labour market and earnings profiles these days) on rebuilding functional local economies* and integrating those into wider regional economies in the former, masses amounts of money were spent on refurbishing the housing stock (many large suburban estates are physically unrecognisable compared to twenty five years ago: in particular there are far fewer system-built tower blocks around), amenities and public services in the latter. The inner cities were, it is true, especially favoured in terms of education spending, but that is because the state of the education system in our inner cities by the late 1990s was a humiliating national disgrace. Everyone, as one American influence on New Labour once noted, is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.

_{*Especially through employment in the public sector. This was very much a victim of post 2010 Austerity but that doesn't mean that it never happened.}

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'This has been a Party Election broadcast by the Labour Party'

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It's pretty well known that UK workers have on paper some of the highest working hours in the western world, yet are some of the most unproductive in those working hours.

It has always amused me that this has always been framed as some sort of paradox, when, actually, the relationship there is quite obvious...

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In the end, no one wants to be the British John Turner, do they?

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Truss pulling out of an interview with Nick Robinson - something else from the Johnson playbook.

But under circumstances so different that doing so will have actual consequences. A very stupid and foolish decision: if she didn't want to do the interview she should not have booked it.