Boris Johnson is gambling on the war-on-woke to keep rioting Tories at bay over taxes
Boris Johnson is a man not used to picking up the tab. During his tenure at the Spectator, he infamously never repaid the interns who bought him coffees and in Downing Street he has tried to palm off the bill for everything from his curtains to Daylesford Organic ready meals.
Before the pandemic, while crucial Cobra meetings were taking place, there were even murmurs that the Prime Minister had holed up in Chequers to finish (or perhaps start) his manuscript on Winston Churchill, for which he was paid a handsome advance sum.
For all his attempts to align himself with the war-time Prime Minister, the two leaders are most alike in their disastrous efforts to manage their personal finances.
But it’s time to pay the piper.
The battle for the Conservative’s fiscal soul was in full swing at the party conference in Manchester.
Only second in line to the praise heaped on the NHS in his keynote address, was a warning from the Prime Minister about the state of the public finances, written with all the bombast of Boris, but with Rishi Sunak breathing down his neck.
“We have a huge hole in the public finances, we spent £407bn on Covid support and our debt now stands at over £2tn.”
“Margaret Thatcher would not ignore the meteorite that has just crashed through the public finances, she would have wagged her finger and said more borrowing now is just higher interest rates, and even higher taxes later.”
The acknowledgement of the unique situation the Treasury now finds itself was surely an olive branch to Sunak, who is rumoured to have struck a secret deal with the Prime Minister to match any new spending with tax hikes or cuts elsewhere in the budget.
But it was unlikely to have quelled the unrest – and in some cases outright fury – from backbench Tory MPs worried about the party’s reputation as a fervent believer in low taxes and small government.
At a panel hosted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Steve Baker, known for rustling up controversy in the party, compared the current tax-and-spend strategy to the fiscal plans of Ed Miliband’s Labour party. “We’re all socialists now,” he told a nodding audience of party faithfuls.
Even Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, warned in the days before the descent on Manchester that Britain was “as highly taxed as the country can afford.”
While the fault-lines of tax and spending in the wake of the hikes to National Insurance deepened in Manchester, Cabinet Ministers turned to the culture wars as a way of restoring unity.
Almost every speech or remarks made to auditoriums and drinks parties were packed full of snide comments from Boris’ frontbenchers about cancel culture and statues.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss spoke out against being “in hoc to an invisible set of rules”, Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries doubled down against the BBC’s metropolitan focus and lack of working class talent, while Tory Chairman Oliver Dowden took aim at the peloton owning class of civil servants still working from home.
It struck a chord with Northern MP Jake Berry who declared “we have to end the civil service ‘woke-ing’ from home.”
It ended with Boris’ culture war crescendo in his speech yesterday: “We really are at risk of a kind of know nothing cancel culture know nothing iconoclasm and so we Conservatives will defend our history and cultural inheritance.”
He compared attempts to question British history to a “celebrity trying to furtively change his entry in Wikipedia.”
Digging in his heels on the nauseatingly named “war on woke” is a tried and tested method for the Prime Minister.
It strikes a similar note he was able to build into a chorus during the European referendum campaign, where he casts himself as a defender of everyday people and their interests and a breed apart from the metropolitan elite. That same base will quickly realise they are the ones footing the bill.
It is unlikely to do little but buy him a sliver more time and keep the rumblings about Conservative values at bay for perhaps a moment longer.
But if Sunak’s slightly pinched smile during the Prime Minister’s keynote address in Manchester is anything to go by, he too, is biding his time before he puts his foot down and demands a reckoning in the spending review and budget.
Afterall, rather than that of an awe-struck, aspiring journalist, it’s the nation’s American Express Boris Johnson has been racking up bills on.