Despite their campaign victories, the Conservatives have made surprisingly few converts to their biggest idea. Now they have nothing left to say, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr
Despite their campaign victories, the Conservatives have made surprisingly few converts to their biggest idea. Now they have nothing left to sayfear losing an election less than they crave release from government. The shift is not always perceptible. Disheartened MPs quit quietly, letting their more pugnacious colleagues fill the airwaves, and even many defeatists put up some kind of fight out of collegiate solidarity and automatous partisanship.
But the public face of that determination takes on a desperate hue. The prime minister defends himself in a tone of wheedling exasperation that barely conceals impatience with a nation that refuses to recognise the tireless work he is doing on its behalf. On camera, Rishi Sunak looks as if he is struggling to keep a lid on the same frustration that
The school roofs fiasco lands with exquisite precision on a zone of maximum vulnerability for a prime minister who presided over a shrinking state refurbishment budget while donating tens of thousands of pounds from his personal fortune to Winchester college, his elite alma mater. There is no need to rehash old economic arguments about optimal fiscal pathways out of the financial crisis to recognise that George Osborne’s 2010 strategy was primarily political. The goal was to incriminate Labour profligacy as the reason why belts needed tightening, thereby insulating David Cameron’s government from blame for the ensuing pain. The long-held Conservative ideological conviction that the state should be smaller was rebranded as a mission of civic responsibility.
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