Sunak must oversee some serious soul searching

We’ve seen so many instances of politicians degrading themselves lately that one’s capacity to be shocked seems to have evaporated. We know why they do it. Most of them, as the cliché goes, have never had a proper job. They leave Oxford with their PPE degree, become a research assistant, get a lowly job at party headquarters, become a special adviser, work in a think-tank, get selected for, and finally win a seat. They reach their early 30s never having done anything productive, never having created a farthing of wealth. Getting into parliament with no qualification except for politics, they want to get in the government, and then the Cabinet. Without such goals, their life is pointless.

Poor Liz Truss. At 47, a political teenager, she’s the shortest-reigning prime minister in British history, and on the scrap heap

Look at poor Liz Truss. Just 47, a political teenager, she’s the shortest-reigning prime minister in British history, and on the scrap heap. Doubtless her Norfolk constituents will shower love on her and return her to Westminster for as long as she wishes: the Tories can be kind like that. But would you give her a job? Looking after your children perhaps, provided it didn’t include doing the school run. Poor old Liz: she never did any of the jobs she had with any distinction. I recall my lawyer friends howling with derision at her attempt to be Lord Chancellor. But then she ended up as Prime Minister, because just about the worst-informed electorate on the planet thought, on no evidence at all, that she’d be good at it. Some of her fellow teenagers advised her it would be a corking idea to cut taxes by £45bn (so far, so good) but (and here’s the genuinely exciting bit) without telling anybody where the money was coming from. Because neither she nor her fellow teenagers had any experience of the real world, they didn’t realise the markets would go into a nosedive. Yet had she stopped the average barrow boy on the concourse at Liverpool Street at dawn that morning, he’d have told her exactly what would happen. Send a girl to do a woman’s job, and that’s what you get.

She wasn’t, of course, helped by useful idiots in parts of the media, who will cheer anything wearing a Tory rosette irrespective of intellectual merit. And so, having tanked, she went into a period of denial, in which she thought everyone would get used to the idea and order would be restored. Growth would come from, and pay for, these tax cuts: only it wouldn’t, and it didn’t, not least because the promise of rocketing mortgage rates – if you could get a mortgage – would suck any extra disposable income from the nation’s wallets. Then even our pension funds were in peril. She fired her Chancellor, and then fired herself. Has there been a worse prime minister?

Well, yes, I think it would be unjust if we denied Boris Johnson that accolade. And here we come to the real piece of self-examination that the Conservative Party, as it attempts to rebuild its credibility under Rishi Sunak, really must do. According to various Tory websites, there were 50 or 60 Tory MPs who thought it was a good idea that Johnson should become prime minister again. It wasn’t as if the debacle of his earlier attempt was ancient history, able to be revealed only to those with a grounding in hieroglyphics: it was just three months ago. He was (and judging from his claim to have had 102 supporters ready to put him on to the ballot, still is) a remorseless liar. He lied, throughout his premiership and before it, so blatantly that millions of people knew he was lying. And he was utterly shameless: he knew that they knew he was lying but he didn’t care less. He kept on lying because he never knew which gullible individuals were yet to see through him – Nadine Dorries appeared to be one, Jacob Rees-Mogg another.

I read the words of one pompous and self-regarding idiot the day before Johnson pulled out of the race, saying that Sunak should step aside and apologise for causing all this trouble in the first place by resigning as Chancellor and beginning the collapse of Johnson’s administration. This is how the minds, if you can call them that, of Johnson and his fellow narcissists work. Sunak thankfully isn’t out of the same mould as his two predecessors. He resigned because Johnson would not take responsibility for the chaos caused by his mendacious and incapable approach to running a government. But in their warped way of thinking, Johnsonites see Sunak as a traitor who’s just lucky we’ve abolished the death penalty.

Johnson loves humiliating people, and the 50 or 60 who publicly declared they wanted him back, either out of graphic stupidity, complicity in his depravity or sheer naked ambition, soon found themselves duly humiliated. None more so than Nadhim Zahawi, whose recent political life has been one catastrophic error of judgment after another. Remember how he agreed to be Chancellor moments before Johnson finally imploded last July? That ended well, didn’t it? Both he and James “not that” Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, pledged themselves to Johnson seconds before he stiffed them by saying he wouldn’t be running. You can see why Johnson doesn’t have any friends. To Zahawi’s credit he had the balls to laugh at himself for being mooned by Johnson, observing that “a day is a long time in politics”. Cleverly was, predictably, not in that league. When asked by the indomitable Beth Rigby on Sky Television moments after Sunak’s coronation just what it was about Johnson that kept people (she meant imbeciles) like him going back for more, he couldn’t give a coherent answer. If anyone out there is doing a PhD in Prat Studies, for God’s sake interview him quickly.

So what does the Conservative Party do now, apart from trying to govern sensibly? I have two recommendations, and however much it may appear otherwise, they are entirely serious. First, it must apply a process of mandatory deselection to all those MPs who, despite his deceit and disastrous record, wanted Johnson back in Number 10. Darwinian Deselection if you like – a weeding out of those unfit to represent civilised people in parliament due to their amorality, venality and stupidity. Do not give them jobs. Do not give them peerages. Do not let them on so much as a parish council. By doing what they did they cocked their legs over the public and showed that they’re not serious about this country and the increasing struggles of its people. Enough is enough.

Second, the preposterous system by which the Conservatives choose their leader must end. The fact that in its raw form the process takes three months reflects the assumption held when it was devised by William Hague and Archie Norman that the Tories would be in permanent opposition. In government, such leisure is a ridiculous indulgence. Just as Norman, chairman of Marks & Spencer, was not chosen to run his supermarket by the people who stack the shelves, there’s no need for those who choose to join the Conservative Party to decide who runs it at Westminster. What on earth do they know about what it takes to be a prime minister? Mind you, I’m not entirely sure, given my remarks above, what some of those at Westminster know about it either. So I’d have a selection committee, chosen by a vote of MPs and peers, of five Privy Councillors from each house, none current office holders, with the head of the voluntary party as chairman to represent its interests. Then we might be able to rely on those governing us being grownups who aren’t drowning in self-obsession. I think Sunak is one such an individual, although we only have him by virtue of a happy accident. But in such times thank God for small mercies; it’s about bloody time something went right.

Simon Heffer is a historian, columnist for the Telegraph and Professorial Research Fellow at the University
of Buckingham