John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
This week saw another attempt at the rehabilitation of Liz Truss. The former prime minister launched her book, Ten Years to Save the West, with an intensive round of media appearances designed to re-spin her short and disastrous term in Downing Street.
Truss wants to be seen not as the failed seven-week PM, but as the unappreciated sage. Her narrative is that she was the only one bold enough to stand up to Britain’s challenges, and that she was undone by the machinations of the unambitious and unelected intent on guarding the status quo.
Instead of a failure, she hopes to be seen as an undervalued visionary, able to be a future power player or, perhaps, even have another tilt at the top table.
It remains to be seen who will buy this argument, literally or figuratively. Truss presided over a precipitous drop in the party’s polling and became a national joke. Her book advance was far smaller than any other recent prime minister, suggesting a lack of confidence from the publishers.
Her continued enthusiasm, however, points towards the impact that self-retconning ex-leaders could have when the party is recovering from the expected election defeat.
Never before will the party have headed into opposition with so many former leaders so eager to rehash what happened under their tenure. For reasons of both ego and ideology, each of the five who held power in the last 14 years will be looking to absolve themselves of blame and pass on the buck of the repeated policy and political failures.
The party is no stranger to former prime ministers trying to direct it. Though it was seemly to make their interventions rare, it still happened. Ted Heath bristled on the green benches throughout Margaret Thatcher’s tenure, while Harold Macmillan criticised her economic policies from the Lords.
In opposition after 1997, it was Thatcher’s turn to hangover the incumbents, her electoral and political legacy hanging over all those who came after her. In recent years, John Major has tried to influence the party and burnish his reputation as a “sensible” elder statesman.
The next few years, however, will be something very different. All of the prime ministers since 2010 have a sense of unfinished business around them.
None served as long as they would have wanted, tripped up by events, their own shortcomings, and the scheming of their colleagues. With shorter and frankly less successful tenures than their predecessors, there is more blame to share around and more shoulders for it to fall on. This will be intensified if the next election is the disaster the polls suggest it might be.
Each of the leaders we have known in this era has a storyline they will want to promote. We know Truss’s well already. Theresa May too has shown her hand, with her memoirs painting her as upstanding and dutiful where critics saw her as impotent and unconvincing. Boris Johnson plays up his electoral success while downplaying the dishonesty, poor leadership, and public anger that led to his demise. Rishi Sunak too will eventually emerge with a glossed-up retelling of his premiership.
These stories are likely to find willing audiences. Where once former prime ministers might shuffle off stage, the current crop will have no shortage of outlets for their self-aggrandising. As Truss’ week has shown, the media thrive off these appearances, even if the big driver is morbid curiosity.
Social media amplifies the utterances of former leaders and gives them a permanent platform alongside the usual memoirs and speeches. Where interventions from those who had left Downing Street were once rare, the marriage of this bumper crop, with their stories to spin, and so many places to spin them, could mean we are hearing more than ever from them.
For the party, there’s a risk to each of these leaders presenting their tenure through nothing but rose glasses. If the party is ousted in the election, and especially if it loses badly, there will be a long period of flux.
Both in and out of Parliament, the Conservatives will have to address how and why things went wrong, ideally with candour and honesty. Should the conversation be dominated by former leaders polishing their reputations, it will be a shallower one, and less honest.
After any failure, the temptation to cover your backside and blame others is strong. The very personal nature of being prime minister intensifies this. It’s always lonely at the top, and the way Downing Street works encourages a sort of bunker mentality.
At the same time, most of those who have led the party in the last 14 years have a remaining faction in parliament which will be jockeying for influence in the post-election landscape. Each will want the others to take a bigger share of the blame, in the hope that the part of the party which escapes cleanest might have the soonest chance of power again.
For the health of the party, however, a deeper period of introspection will be needed. Quite how the party went through so many eras in less than three full parliamentary terms requires examination; so too how each leader foundered in their own way.
Some were as much symptoms as causes of what was going wrong with the party. The reality is none is fully to blame. But nor does any have a spotless record. There was no one big mistake, and nor will there be one easy fix for the crisis the party now finds itself in.
The speed at which the party recovers from losing a general election depends on the efficacy of the postmortem that follows it. This is truer the bigger the scale of the defeat.
On current projections, the Conservatives will have to delve into where things went wrong, confront those mistakes, and take the lessons forward. Five prime ministers feuding over who needs the lion’s share of the blame might be entertaining, but it will be a distraction in all of this. The party will need true introspection; face-saving memoirs should probably be left to one side.
The post John Oxley: Our party needs an honest debate about these 14 years, not ex-leaders polishing their records appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: John Oxley
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