Please don’t play it again, Boris

Winston Churchill once quipped that the Balkans produces more history than it can consume. That surplus now comes from Britain. Rana, you’ll probably groan (though not as much as me) for having yet again to contemplate the shenanigans taking place in my self-harming homeland. The sad thing for everyone else is that the Conservative party’s degeneration is by no means over. As my colleague Stephen Bush writes in his inimitable Inside Politics newsletter, the party is coherent on nothing. They want balanced budgets but love low taxes and high spending; they hate high inflation but insist on low interest rates; they’re fans of high growth rates but revile the largest market in the world on Britain’s doorstep. It long since ceased to be a serious party. Some of them believe Britain is in trouble because populism hasn’t actually been tried — you read that correctly. Others, but not nearly enough of them, know that populism is the source of Britain’s ills.

The idea that Conservative members of parliament will agree on a “unity candidate” to replace Liz Truss by the end of next week is thus miracle talk. There are lots of volunteers queueing up for decapitation at the Downing Street guillotine. Whoever is next to be voted on to the tumbril will have one advantage over their predecessors, of which this latest would be the fifth in six years; they would begin in the expectation of failure. It is always good to start on low expectations but in this case they are likely to be borne out. Perhaps their choice will be Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor of the exchequer whose resignation prompted the flood that led to Boris Johnson’s departure last summer. Sunak was the one whom Truss defeated in the agonising summer-long leadership contest that followed. He warned that Truss’s tax-cutting plans would trigger a run on the pound and a surge in inflation. He was right — though anybody with their head screwed on could have forecast as much. As Brutuses go, though, Sunak is fairly credible. Which is why the pet rabbit-eating section of the Tory party will never warm to him.

Many of them would prefer Suella Braverman, whose resignation as home secretary this week precipitated the end for Truss. Braverman, who is British Asian, like her predecessor, Priti Patel, is one of those non-white figures the party adulates because she can get away with saying things that would have white Tories labelled as racist. At the party conference earlier this month Braverman said her “dream” was to see refugee seekers put on a plane to Rwanda. If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this. No wonder her nickname is Cruella. I could trawl through a few other names — Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, and beyond. Each suffers from one or more of the flaws of those who went before. Which brings me to Johnson.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, I fear the Conservative party has already forgotten that Johnson was the least popular postwar prime minister until Truss came along. That was why he was evicted. The thought that the chief author of Britain’s ills could once again be appointed its saviour is too much to bear. Nobody does political humour better than the British but there is a limit to any joke. The time for the man-child who said he was pro-cake and pro-eating it has past. We are doubled up with indigestion. What Britain needs is competence, not this.

In conclusion I can do no better than quote my colleague, Robert Shrimsley, on the umpteenth forthcoming Tory leadership contest. “Johnson, Truss and their allies on the Tory right routinely denounced critics as gloomsters and declinists determined to talk the UK down,” Robert writes. “In fact it is they who have driven down its economy and tarnished Britain’s international standing. It has been painful to see the country through the eyes of its allies. Those who shout loudest about the need for belief in Britain have turned out to be those who did most to dispel that faith.” Rana, what’s your take on the special relationship? Do we catch political viruses from each other?

PS Join Edward Luce, Rana Foroohar, James Politi, and veteran commentator Norm Ornstein on November 10 for a subscriber-exclusive webinar staged with the Swamp Notes newsletter to discuss the US midterm results. Register free today here and submit your questions in advance for our panel.

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• My column this week is on a far more consequential matter for the future of the world, Joe Biden’s recent steps to strangle China’s semiconductor sector. “History is likely to record Biden’s move as the moment when US-China rivalry came out of the closet,” I write. “America is now pledged to do everything short of fighting an actual war to stop China’s rise.”

• My colleague Gideon Rachman wrote an important piece on why diplomacy should not be a dirty word in the Ukraine war: “Finding creative solutions to intractable problems is what high-level diplomacy is all about,” he writes. “We need to see more of it.”

• Finally, Rana, I was pleased to see one of my favourite thinkers, Branko Milanovic, blog about your new book, Homecoming. Milanovic gives a generally positive and balanced assessment of your argument. He agrees that the west now has self-interested reasons to abandon free trade but that it cannot expect the rest of the world to agree.

Rana Foroohar responds

Ed, I gotta say, you are never funnier than when speaking about the dire state of your homeland — “pet rabbit-eating” Tories “returning to their own vomit” will stay with me for a while, as will the clip of Johnson’s Peppa Pig alliteration fest (though I guess you can’t blame him for pushing domestic brands).

Anyway, I guess the virus in question is trickle-down economics and the belief that tax cuts make it all better, which gained steam with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution and has clearly now met its end (I hope?) in the UK with the resignation of Truss. The question, which you rightly pose, is “what now?” What do Conservatives have to offer the UK, particularly in terms of economic policy? Britain is a small country, and needs trade, but is caught in the crosshairs of Great Power Conflict around it. I doubt that campaigning on something such as, “Hey, we shouldn’t have left the EU but, since we did, we’d better try as hard as possible to become America’s little buddy,” would work particularly well. But the truth is that the UK is in a worse spot than the US right now because it’s smaller. India recently overtook the UK economy in size. The global picture won’t change, but the situation could stabilise if Tories had a vision for what a new kind of conservatism looked like.

I’m not close enough to the UK political scene to know what that would be. But I can say that I think there’s a parallel struggle here in the US. The demise of trickle-down has left the right with no real economic message aside from Make America Great Again. As you know, I’m a fan of finding the balance between global and local, but that takes industrial strategy and more government involvement, and I don’t think Republicans have truly made peace with that yet (though some, like Marco Rubio, occasionally sound like they have). We are all part of a great experiment in what comes after neoliberal globalisation. The UK, I fear, will do worse than many in this new era. 

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“While Biden stands taller in domestic policy, and Europe stands around him because of the Ukraine invasion, he just stepped into a deep hole in foreign policy. His just-released National Security Strategy makes two mistakes that endanger his relative stature. First, by lumping Russia and China together, he stacks the other two dwarfs. Second, by launching a high-tech containment policy against China, he is tactically clever but strategically foolish. To deprive China of American chips is to force China to make their own. Can China do it? Congress cut off China’s contact with Nasa in 2011, but its space programme is not grounded.” — Brantly Womack, Charlottesville, Virginia