James Price: What Alex Burghart’s speech tells us about the Tories intellectual firepower

James Price is a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

“It becomes no man to nurse despair, But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms, To follow up the worthiest till he die”

Noble words from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and apt ones for the Conservative Party to dwell on during its long rebuilding. But it is another Alfred, no less than the Great, who inspires Alex Burghart, the Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and MP for Brentwood.

An academic of Anglo-Saxon history, Dr Burghart has long drawn inspiration from the astonishing restoration of fortunes for our island story, when England sprang back from a muddy marshland in Somerset to become the first modern nation.

There was plenty of clenched antagonisms over which we might despair in a speech that Burghart gave to Onward earlier this week. Reviewing Labour’s first year in office, he expressed that even he did not think it would have gone as badly for them as it has. There were three pillars of fear.

The first is the looming likelihood of economic meltdown; a sovereign debt crisis is, heartbreakingly, severely underpriced. The cost of borrowing is much higher than anything seen under Liz Truss, our debt to GDP ratio is almost twice as bad as it was when the IMF stepped in in the 1970s, and unemployment has gone up every month they have been in office.

More taxes are coming in the Autumn budget, he predicted, which will only make matters worse. And Labour backbenchers have shown they are completely economically illiterate in their refusal to countenance a single cut to spending. “It’s only a few billion” one MP infamously quipped after a rebellion broke Starmer’s authority.

More doom was to come during this funny, detailed speech, delivered with no notes from a rising star of the party, sometimes described as the de facto deputy leader. Alongside the self-inflicted economic pain is the risk of further social breakdown, over another hot summer. Southport last year was a terrifying harbinger of the febrile atmosphere in Britain. And given the Stakhanovite Burghart also double hats as the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, so too does the violence in Ballymena.

The public anger at mass migration, both legal, illegal and of supposed asylum seekers, is combining with a sense of two-tier justice and lax law and order to create a toxic mix. Professor David Betz, a sober War Studies Professor who has been warning about these problems, was even invoked in the speech.

Jesus warned in Mark 6:4 that “a prophet is not without honour, but in his own country”. But just a few hours after Burghart’s speech, violence erupted again in Epping over an allegation that an Ethiopian asylum seeker, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, sexually assaulted a child in the town centre just eight days after arriving in Britain. This led to fighting between locals, police, and some self-declared ‘anti-racism’ protesters. The Shadow CDL was sadly proven right already.

Whether he will be considered a prophet on this, or ignored as Cassandra was, will be up to Labour’s response. If they go in hot and heavy on the locals, as they did after Southport, they are likely to face a more violent reaction. This will further escalate tensions and recriminations, creating the vicious cycle about which Burghart has just warned.

So the economic and social problems may be such that they help propitiate the third part of Burghart’s warning – Labour’s own political collapse. A splintering between “Blairites, Brownites, Starmerites, Stalagmites” and those tempted to join the magic grandpa (Jeremy Corbyn), the Greens or even Reform may fracture Starmer’s majority. We have already seen their inability to pass even modest reforms with a massive majority, and the risk of their authority being unrecoverable is a great risk.

After these gloomy prognostications, Alex Burghart turned to what it means for the Tories. The main issues in the country are all moving onto solid Conservative territory. The Tory brand is in need of obvious repair, but it is still the most trusted issue on the economy. It is capable to being much tougher on law and order, on immigration and on integration than Labour can be.

And if Alex Burghart’s commanding performance yesterday is anything to go by, they have the intellectual firepower to do the exhaustive and exhausting policy work that the other parties are just not interested in. With more appearances like this, we can expect Dr Burghart to march up the ConHome League Table with the confidence of Alfred regaining his stature and marching out against Guthrum at the Battle of Edington. (Which we won, by the way).

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