What difference does it make?

So, Boris has resigned yet the machine churns on and the question is asked, what next?

Tired columnists, worn down by detail, are keen to answer this begged question with a subtle and definitive encyclopaedia of the possible. What happens if Truss wins? Or Hunt? Or Mordaunt? Or Sunak? Or Saj? Or Shapps? Or Tugendhat?

It’s a classic case of missing what’s right in front of you. The pattern of meaning that connects many of these candidates can be expressed quite simply. You only need to consider where, we - a tired nation with a lot of problems and not very many solutions - are, to understand the context of the race.

There are essentially two potential options. One is very bad, not much of an improvement of Boris. The second would be good for us but is unlikely to happen. Given this, it’s then worth asking, what difference does it make? The most plausible outcome in the near future is either stagnation or decline. Who oversees the slow collapse from risibility to irrelevancy is beside the point. What matters is that its probably going to happen.

The first option is we elect one of the many supposedly qualified mainstream candidates. Ministers or former ministers like Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid and Grant Shapps are good examples of what this looks like. Most frontrunners belong here, but in my view, most are deeply flawed. The issue with these candidates is that they are - at root - unexciting, having little that differentiates themselves from one another.

Vis-à-vis other candidates, ‘experience’ of government, evidenced by past roles in cabinet, is used as an argument in their favour. Often, but not always, they are household names – most vaguely familiar with British politics can recognise their face, say something they’ve done and give a half-hearted opinion on their suitability for the job. These half-known ministers do cut through at some level, and maybe they have successfully tinged their image with some vague ideological truisms, but they rarely posit a plan or strongly associate with a unique solution to Britain’s most pressing problems.

Mainstream candidates that gain their suitability for office through the longevity or seniority of ministerial experience almost game the system. They realise, quite rightly, that the best way of getting ahead and to rise ranks is a combination of loyalty and ambiguity. Stay loyal to the top and you’ll get promoted and say anything of consequence, something that separates you from the crowd, and you can be pinned down to your past words.

But it would be giving a little too much credit to say that these zombie-like ministers have chosen the path of ambiguity. Many are basically uninteresting functionaries, who treat politics as a means to satisfying some desire for self-satisfaction. Time for reflection or engagement with the rhythms of real lived lives is close to nought. The mindset of a minister who willingly enters into this very taxing and often thankless job, where abuse is common, stress is high and workload often eats up any life outside of politics, is a strange and highly unrepresentative one. Weird people enter politics, and when in politics, the machine changes them to make them weirder. And so, when the minister fails to shape the machine, the experience of governance guts another man and makes them a minister - boring, stale and less than brilliant.

More than anything, these ministers and former ministers don’t recognise the enormity of the responsibility required to govern a country. They don’t treat it with the energy or strategy required to react to the heavy weight of each of political moment. Because, a loose commitment to free market ideas is not enough – we have deep problems in our country, ones that cannot be solved by simple platitudes and an appeal to ‘let it be’. Britain faces low productivity growth, high inequality rates and the litany of social problems that accompany them, probably unsustainable debt, a non-existent migration strategy, an inflation crisis, an energy crisis, a climate crisis, in-real terms economic contraction, a war, a crisis in British identity, a creaking constitution damaged by half-hearted reforms, aimless foreign and trade policy, a crisis in Northern Ireland, the threat of the union’s dissolution and continued disaffection from the politically ignored ‘left behinds’. None are even recognised by most mainstream candidates – or even really, the opposition or the political class more generally.

If we don’t meet the moment, we will fall behind. The mainstream Tory Party is one that lacks both its past self-confidence and self-belief. It either doesn’t care about our biggest problems or doesn’t know they exist.

There is an alternative, but it is unlikely - we get a candidate with a modicum of decency, competence and vision. At the moment, the two candidates that best fit this description are Tom Tugendhat and Nadhim Zahawi. For Tugendhat, this is because has refused to buy into the system of ministerial advancement, rising through the Parliamentary Committee system. For Zahawi, although he has played the ministerial game, experience as the genuinely successful operator of several large companies, makes him a qualitatively different prospect than mainstream bores.

But I doubt either will make it to the last round, because Tory mainstream candidates tend to detect the greatest threat and eliminate them. In 2019, this happened to Rory Stewart. His quick rise was brought to a swift end by coordination by the mainstream candidates who snuffed out his considerable momentum.

Even if they do make it to the final round, the Tory grassroots membership tend to have a strong preference for insanity. If the Tory membership at large was in charge of electing the leader of a golf clubbers union, then it might be a largely representative, broadly effective tool. But this isn’t its role, instead, people more at home in the 1970s than the 2020s is responsible for basically electing a Prime Minister.

The current breed of Tory leadership candidates tells us more about the state of politics than it does about any particular candidate. Our political system is one in crisis. What is most obvious is a paucity of talent and a system discourages both ingenuity and being honest about our national problems. Slowly, the jaws of inertia and stagnation are closing in on our democracy. A country that acted as an international lodestar, is becoming pokey and provincial. And what’s worse, we have hardly even noticed.