Before Pleasure

The old “never run a business” line is being thrown at the Cabinet, but there have been 16 Leaders of the Conservative Party since the War, and beyond shareholding, or being married to businessmen, none of them has had any business background worth mentioning, if at all. They have had stopgap jobs and what have you, but nothing more than that, and not even that in some cases. Nearly half have been beneficiaries of the massive public subsidies to landowning.

Winston Churchill, toff. Anthony Eden, toff. Harold Macmillan, toff enough. Alec Douglas-Home, toffee toffee toff toff. Ted Heath, full-time politician since university. Margaret Thatcher, millionaire’s wife. John Major, full-time politician all his adult life. William Hague, full-time politician since childhood. Iain Duncan Smith, paid by the Army to go away. Michael Howard, full-time politician since university, more than 40 years earlier. David Cameron, toff. Theresa May, millionaire’s wife. Boris Johnson, unaccomplished, semi-aristocratic Classicist whom none of his hearers at the CBI would have employed even before he had extolled to them the virtues of Peppa Pig World.

Liz Truss, failed at Shell, and then unemployed for several years before a sinecure at a thinktank enabled her to sleep her way into Parliament. Rishi Sunak, briefly at Goldman Sachs before he became the full-time son-in-law of a foreign gazillionaire. And Kemi Badenoch, hacked Harriet Harman’s website for The Spectator, an act that carried a potential prison sentence of five years when she did it, and that is about it unless anyone can find anything else that she did before politics, insofar as that could be said to have been so. It is not even clear where she was born, although her British citizenship depends on the answer.

Andrew Griffith has very considerable business experience. He was also the Financial Secretary to the Treasury at the time of the mini-Budget, and Truss even tweeted her congratulations when he was appointed Shadow Chancellor. The mere suggestion of the mini-Budget crashed the economy, but Labour pretended to oppose only one measure in it, the one that Truss had not included in her prospectus to Conservative Party members, while actively supporting all of the others. Look what those proposals did even without being enacted. Yet had they ever been put to a Commons Division, then the Labour Whip would have been to abstain, and even then only because of the abolition of the 45p rate of income tax, a pretended opposition that was purely opportunistic.

And Griffith was a protégé of Lord Young of Graffham. So much Thatcher’s fixer that she trusted him even over Norman Tebbit, Young was later a Number 10 insider during the Coalition to which the more pro-austerity and pro-war party was the one in which Truss had started out. One of that party’s Coalition stalwarts, Ed Davey, has suggested that in the event of another hung Parliament, then the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats might take up where they had left off in 2015. After all, the Coalition has been by far the most stable and, in its own terms, the most successful Government since 2010. 

Badenoch dismisses Reform UK as “dishonest” “drama queens”, and would prefer another General Election to a “monstrous Reform-Conservative hybrid”. But she has not rebuffed Davey. His party’s competition with hers for the votes of the same people always makes the difference between a majority Government and a hung Parliament across the economically Thatcherite, socially liberal, and therefore Rejoiner South either outside London or barely in it. Think on.