Suella Braverman’s Tory leadership bid flounders

Good morning. Ed Miliband has announced an end to the ban on onshore wind in England, while Rachel Reeves has set out the government’s plans to liberalise planning. (Excellent explainer of what levers Labour is trying to pull here.)

The policy reason why Labour is doing this stuff early is because these are the things it thinks will help spur growth, but will take time to bear fruit. The political reason is that it thinks it will take a while to bear fruit and it wants to get at least some credit now for the fact it is trying to make things happen, and to shape how people think about any bumps along the way.

Reeves also used her speech to start making the big arguments that she will be making in her Budget and that will ultimately shape how this government fares, warning that the public finances are in their worst state since the end of the second world war.

It was obvious to anyone who cared to find out before the election that the British state faced rising costs and that difficult decisions would have to be made about tax and spend, but neither the Labour party nor the Conservatives felt their interests were best served by being candid about that.

Polls consistently showed people expected taxes to go up no matter who won, and wherever I went in the country that’s what I heard too. My feeling is that one reason why the election went so badly for the Tories is that most people get that we have an ageing population, a difficult geopolitical backdrop, and that very little about the British state works well. They know that these problems are going to involve tax rises. When they hear Labour being evasive they think they know what that means: stealth tax rises for most of us, and for Labour to spend more than it said it would, because that’s what it usually does.

When they heard the Conservative party being evasive about taxes they thought that would mean four more years of division and chaos like the ones we just had.

As such, I don’t think that Reeves’s “wow, I have just discovered that the UK public finances are under strain and there are crises in everything from prisons to hospitals” act matters all that much politically. Most people already think that’s the case.

But at the margin, it doesn’t help the Conservatives that they don’t have a leader to help them punch back, and at the margin, it helps Labour that it has the political stage essentially to itself at the moment. Some thoughts on what the current state of play in that contest is, and how long it will take.

You can leave your Tugendhat on

The most important things to know about the race to become the next Conservative leader is that Suella Braverman’s bid is in serious trouble, and that the current consensus within the party is that the contest should be a long one.

Braverman’s bid is in jeopardy for many reasons. The first is that the balance of the parliamentary party has shifted considerably as a result of the election defeat — although MPs from every wing of the party were defeated, MPs from the party’s right flank did worse than those from its left. Added to that, her own interventions during the campaign were seen as disloyal and unhelpful by some, and her openness to welcoming Farage into the party is a deal-breaker by others.

In addition, although my sense is that the party in the country is still pretty rightwing, in recent days I have heard from more than a dozen Conservative members who have left the party to join Reform. As a result, the prospects for a more moderate candidate, such as Tom Tugendhat or Victoria Atkins, are much stronger than they were, though Kemi Badenoch starts this contest as the candidate to beat.

The second thing to know about this race is that it looks likely to run on until the autumn. The final stage of the Conservative party contest is set by the party’s constitution, which can only be amended by the party’s national convention, a little known body that frankly is not worth your time worrying about.

What really matters is the 1922 committee, which organises how the parliamentary party runs and what the parliamentary stages contest involves, such as how many nominations each candidate needs to run, how long the parliamentary stage runs, and so on. If MPs so choose they can either have such a high threshold for nominations that in practice it guarantees that there will be no involvement of anyone outside the parliamentary party (as they did with Rishi Sunak in the autumn of 2022). Or they can arrange the contest so only one candidate comes forward, as they did with Michael Howard.

The 1922 committee is elected at the start of every parliament and because of the heavy number of losses, it will be an almost wholly new committee, and one elected in large part owing to the candidates’ views on things such as the length of the leadership contest and who should be involved. As it stands, both declared candidates for chair favour a longer contest.

That means Labour’s dominance of the airwaves and its ability to set the tone of its first days in office are likely to continue for a while yet.

Now try this

This week, I have mostly been listening to Laura Misch’s brilliant new record, Sample the Earth.

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