Mel Stride wanted this job. Tory MPs believe he ran to be party leader to raise his profile and shore up his chances of getting this job. But he must have known what it was. If Rachel Reeves’ task – managing the economy at a moment of ever-increasing spending demands and ever-stagnating funds – is a tightrope balancing act, the role of the shadow chancellor is a juggling one, where the balls have been replaced by a couple of chainsaws and a live hand grenade.
The grenade is Liz Truss. Labour loves to talk about her. Reeves reminded the House yesterday of two awkward facts: what the mini-budget had done to mortgage rates, and that Nigel Farage heralded it as “the best Conservative budget since the 1980s”.
Half an hour earlier, Kemi Badenoch accused the Prime Minister of bringing up Truss to deflect from his own record. Fair, perhaps. But Kemi also has no idea how to deal with the toxicity of her predecessor-but-one. She has proved reluctant to criticise Truss publicly and last week purported not to even know whether the erstwhile MP for South-West Norfolk was still a party member.
Stride has taken a very different approach. Last week he offered a comprehensive apology for the Truss era, promising the Conservatives would “never again” put the economy at risk. It’s a message he reiterated to journalists after the spending review, arguing that fiscal responsibility was “in our DNA as a party”. But in his parliamentary response to Reeves, he tried to skirt clear of the Truss landmine – only for the Chancellor to seize on his omission with a mocking put-down (“Stride by name, baby steps by nature”).
The shadow chancellor is no doubt aware that his intervention was not universally popular within his party. There are worries that, by apologising for Truss, he has shown weakness and handed Labour yet more ammunition to keep punching this bruise. In the words of one party insider: “It’s like if Ed Miliband apologised for Gordon Brown deregulating the banking sector too much – you bet the Tories would make hay.” At the same time, others feel the Truss’s shadow cannot be escaped until she is expelled from the party. Stride tried to argue that Reeves had “trashed the economy” – but until the Conservatives figure out their Truss position, lines like that will continue to ring hollow.
And Truss isn’t the only ghost of Tories past derailing the party’s ability to respond to Labour. A pointed accusation against the government is that Reeves is taking the country back into austerity – or, indeed, that austerity never ended in the first place. This is a charge the chancellor robustly rejected head-on in her speech, but despite her championing a slate of areas that will enjoy more cash (namely defence and health and social care), other departments are about to see serious real-terms cuts. There is a major row coming up on disability benefit cuts, plus anxiety over funding for police.
Yet unpopular as austerity is, the Tories can hardly accuse Reeves ushering it in without acknowledging who was responsible for the first. If Truss remains a liability for the Conservatives, so does George Osborne – and, indeed, Jeremy Hunt, who paid for a reduction in national insurance by theoretical swingeing cuts to unprotected departments which no economist ever believed were credible. (In his interview with the New Statesman last week, Hunt predicted Reeves would be “doing exactly the same thing that she criticised me about in opposition” but declined to justify why he had left the public finances in such a precarious position.)
The final obstacle blocking a coherent Tory response on the economy is the party’s lack of any kind of policy programme. Badenoch’s weekly tirades against the government’s employer’s national insurance rise can be batted away by the rejoinder that she hasn’t said whether or not she’d reverse it or how she’d fund the NHS investment it was intended to pay for if she did. Stride was similarly unable to say what other taxes he would raise instead of the ones he thought Labour should never have increased. Nor could he say when the Tories would have got defence spending to three per cent of GDP (another of his gripes against Reeves), or if his party would reverse the cash injection to the NHS. “We wouldn’t be starting from here” was his general refrain.
This is fine for a party in opposition that is still focusing on post-election soul-searching. Or it would be, if its position as the opposition party were secure. Badenoch’s strategy of not rushing into policy was considered the right one for a party that has so recently suffered such a crushing defeat. But the government’s struggles less than a year into office (including Reeves’ personal unpopularity) alongside the rise of Reform have raised the stakes. People are already casting about for alternatives, long before voters who abandoned the Conservatives are ready to even consider returning with the party in this state. The Tory party can’t afford to wallow in its thinking phase. The economy has a key battleground, and Labour’s position is looking more wobbly than you’d expect from a government this early in a parliament. But the Tories are going backwards in terms of economic credibility. That should terrify them.
In its own way, Stride’s job this week was even harder than Reeves’. While he got in some good jibes about the “tin-foil chancellor” and the “Corbynite catalogue” of potential tax rises she had been handed by Angela Rayner, the smoke-and-mirrors of scripted one-liners don’t cover up the lack of substance underneath. The Conservative message is that “Labour have lost control of the economy”. Allowing for differences in political perspectives, many people will find it compelling. The problem is that few genuinely believe the Tories would do any better.
[See more: Ireland’s anti-immigrant rage will not go away]
Content from our partners
Related
