Britain embraces trivia because it is stuck on the big issues

The fuss over Gary Lineker distracts a nation with no good choices on Brexit, growth and other important questions writes Janan Ganesh in The FT

To south-east Asia, with its EU-dwarfing population, its aspirations beyond middle-income, its clout as a hinge region in the tussle between the US and China. How to explain to someone here the almost subatomic littleness of the main story in the UK? 

You see, we have this sports presenter. And he tweeted something noble but hyperbolic. And the response was even less measured. And the fuss consumed MPs and the national broadcaster. Yes, for a week. No, we don’t have 5 per cent growth and industrial peace. We aren’t immersed in this trivia because the big things are going too well. 

In fact, perhaps the opposite is true. It just takes a bit of geographic distance to appreciate it. Britain, I suggest, is a nation that gets lost in froth and frivolity because, on the serious stuff, it is stuck. 

Let us count the different kinds of deadlock in the kingdom. Britain knows that Brexit was a mistake. It also knows that revising the decision would open the gates of domestic political hell. And so the governing class prefers a conspiracy of, if not quite silence, then awkward terseness on the subject. 

Britain knows what can spur economic growth: housebuilding, a shift in taxation from the young to the asset-owning old. It also knows that Nimbies and pensioners slap anyone who fiddles with the existing settlement. And so the opposition Labour party does not propose to do much more than the ruling Conservatives to displease them. 

Britain knows that its public services could do with more cash. It also knows that its tax burden is nearing longtime highs. Even the state of the union is a kind of impasse. Scotland’s place in it is contested enough to bring constant stress but not so contested as to force a clarifying referendum in the medium term. 

This is a stalemate society. All the energy that would ordinarily go into the debating and doing of meaningful change now finds an outlet in proxy wars about petty things. The Gary Lineker affair (though not the refugee crisis about which he tweeted) is one such trifle. The rolling melodrama of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is another. 

To be clear, there are worse things than stalemate. Britain isn’t a disaster zone. It might avoid a recession. It has broken a run of inadequate prime ministers. One outcome of always skirting hard questions is relative civic peace. (Britain is easier to inhabit now than it was when Brexit was a big subject.) Nor does net annual immigration of more than half a million suggest a country on which the world has given up. Bangkok, Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City are permeated with some of Britain’s abiding assets: the English language, the inescapable Premier League, the elites who choose the UK for part of their education (or property holdings). 

But to plateau at a high altitude is still to plateau. With no movement on the big questions, no projects to be getting on with, expect Britain to throw itself into ever more sagas about nothing. Consider these low-stakes simulations of the debates it should be having. At least France goes direct. At least it is ripping itself apart over something important. Emmanuel Macron’s pension reforms entail vast public sums and the very contract between citizen and state. I had to be reminded, in the age of on-demand goals highlights, that Match of the Day still exists. 

The problem isn’t, or isn’t just, an unserious political class. Or an electorate in love with circuses. It is the insolubility of the UK’s problems. Brexit is as grim as the reopening of it would be. Fraying public services bother millions, but so would a net increase in taxation. The problem underlying everything, low growth, has cures that are as politically incendiary as the sickness itself. For Britain, on issue after momentous issue, there are no chess moves available that don’t hurt its position elsewhere on the board. 

One recent prime minister wasn’t so defeatist. She defined herself against the stalemate culture. She abhorred the polite ducking of hard choices. But Liz Truss will spend the rest of her life as a punch line. No wonder Britain thinks avoidance isn’t so bad after all. If the price is the diversion of national energies into such small potatoes as Lineker-gate, well, worse fates can befall a people. 

A phrase sticks in the mind from a different drama in a different country over a decade ago. “We do not have time for this silliness,” said Barack Obama as he released paperwork to confirm his American birth. Well, Britain has all the time in the world for silliness. What else is there to do?

The people about to choose Britain’s next prime minister

Despite rumours to the contrary, the Tory faithful are exactly what you might imagine writes The Economist

It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.

The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.

What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.



According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.

Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.

But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.

The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.

The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”

Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.

Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.

Shapeshifter Liz Truss on a roll as version 3.0 hits Tory sweet spot

It’s exhausting, keeping up with her journey. It’s almost as if she doesn’t believe in anything at all writes John Crace in The Guardian

 



Listen to Liz Truss for long enough and she’ll tell you she’s been on a journey. The inexorable rise of a girl who went from a rough Leeds comprehensive to frontrunner for the next Conservative prime minister. Via a brief spell in the Lib Dems. We all make mistakes.

Examine the journey more carefully, though, and it begins to look even more remarkable. The human flotsam who just happens to be carried downstream to the doors of No 10. A journey without any ideas or purpose other than to adapt to her surroundings and rise to the top. The failures have been spectacular, yet also spectacularly successful. Each time, she emerges into a more powerful iteration. Samuel Beckett could only stand back and applaud. She is literally living his dream.

Take Version 1.0 of Radon Liz. She’s a gas, but she’s inert. This was back in the early days of David Cameron’s leadership. No one was more socially liberal than Truss. No one ever hugged a husky tighter. Or embraced austerity harder. As and when required.

This Liz was also an ardent remainer. I can remember meeting her in the spin room of a televised debate during the referendum campaign. She bent my ear at length about how Vote Leave was based on lies and that remain was going to win at a canter. No sweat. No bother. That was probably the first time I seriously entertained the idea that the UK was going to leave the EU. Her reward for failure was promotion.

Radon Liz 2.0 turned out to be a passionate leaver. Far more so than many people who had supported Brexit all along. It wasn’t that she now reckoned what was done was done, there was no going back and we just had to make the best of it. It was that remaining in the EU was wrong. A thought crime. A mortal sin. This was the Truss who draped herself in the union jack for photographs at every available opportunity. Who was never happier than when cosplaying Margaret Thatcher in a tank. While the economy also tanked. This version was also rewarded with ever more governmental baubles.

The newest version, Liz 3.0, is almost incomprehensible. She has slid so far through the looking-glass to the Tory right that in some parallel universes she appears to have adopted Marxist economics. Dialectics has never been so confusing. She both reveres Boris Johnson’s memory, saying she wouldn’t have changed a thing, yet trashes the record of the government. Her prescription for getting the economy back on track is to reverse the national insurance hikes and to cut personal and corporation tax. How she would do this, she hasn’t said. Right now it’s enough just to talk in riddles.

It is exhausting, though. To keep up with Radon Liz’s journey, you have to be able to run fast. She is the anti-ideologue. The anti-conviction politician. Not so much a set of ideas looking for their natural home as vaulting ambition in search of some ideas. Any ideas. If you don’t like hers, she’s got some others.

Because here’s the thing. Truss is a tabula rasa – a dodgy 1980s computer with a screen that is permanently buffering. Someone capable of reinventing herself almost at will. And it just so happens that every time she needs some new ideas, she comes up with a set that exactly mirrors those that are needed to enable her to rise still higher in the Tory party. It’s one hell of a coincidence. Imagine one person having that much luck. It’s almost as if she doesn’t believe in anything at all. The ultimate shapeshifter. “Tonight, Matthew, I will be whatever you want me to be.”

For reasons not entirely clear to anyone, Truss has struck paydirt with version 3.0. It’s all but a certainty that her journey is now complete. No one is yet calling the next seven weeks a pointless extended coronation, but we’re not far off that point. Radon Liz’s latest incarnation has hit the Tory members’ sweet spot. Partly by not being Rish! – there are plenty who will never forgive him for betraying the Convict – but mainly by telling them what they want to hear.

Were she a bit brighter, she too would be amazed that so many people could forget that Rish! didn’t increase public borrowing and increase taxes because he’s a socialist. He did so because the country was falling apart in a pandemic. But when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll. And Liz is living her best life as the prime minister in waiting. So much so that she’s almost relaxed. As relaxed as AI gets.

Her interview with Nick Robinson on the Today programme passed off with few alarms. She even found her way into the building and navigated her way out without having to call security. A vast improvement on her launch event the previous week. And she even managed to talk the usual bollocks without sounding too robotic. Close your eyes and you could almost imagine she was human.

She knew her plan for unfunded tax cuts wasn’t inflationary because Patrick Minford had told her so. This was the economist who had forecast that Brexit would increase GDP by 7% and that food prices would fall. Bring on the Nobel prize.

Later on Thursday afternoon, Radon Liz was at Little Miracles, a charity for children with life-limiting and other disabilities, and looked quite at ease. She must have made countless visits like this as a constituency MP. She chatted to the kids for a while about the hassle of being followed around by the media. She looked pointedly at the collection of sketch writers. But there was kindness and laughter in her eyes. She can at least see the absurdity of someone like her becoming prime minister. And she does believe in a free press. Unlike Rish!.

Truss then moved on to the parents and listened as they shared their experiences. Afterwards, I asked two of them, Wendy and Brian – neither Tory voters – what they thought. Nice enough, they said. Though the proof would be in the delivery. If Truss were to spend proper money on social services, that would be a first.

By then Radon Liz had moved on. Just time to say she was all in favour of a new royal yacht, provided it was funded by Tesco, and that she was Labour’s worst nightmare. Wet dream more like. But she’s entitled to her delusions. And with that she was off. Job done. It had been the quintessential Liz experience. Charmingly superficial. Little Miracles would still be short of funds and the parents would still struggle to get the services their children needed. But more importantly, Truss would be in Downing Street. She left as she came. Without a trace. On brand to the last.