Tuesday 19 July 2022

How to pick the next Prime Minister

 

To determine who should be the next Conservative Party leader you first need to decide what are the main issues facing Britain. They are as follows:

1 Winning the next election

2 Keeping the UK intact

3 Making Brexit beneficial to the UK.

4 Raise the average standard of living.

5 Defeat wokeism.




 If you don’t win the next election, then you won’t be able to do anything else much, but rather you will watch Keir Starmer in conjunction possibly with the Lib Dems and SNP do it instead. So, the Conservatives need to pick the leader with the best chance of winning.

But this is difficult. Some great leaders are easy to spot, but others come out of nowhere. The past is not always a good guide to the future. Ulysses Grant was a drunk and a failure before the Civil War, but was more responsible than anyone else for winning it.

Charisma matters in politics, but less so in the Britain than in the USA. It’s possible that one of the candidates will discover charisma in the job, which will help in winning the election, but doing the job well will help more.  None of the candidates will have Boris’s charisma, but lack of scandal and mistakes may make up for that.

Charisma rating:

Sunak 6

Truss 4

Mordaunt 7

Badenoch 8

 

I would rather have intelligence than any other characteristic. Without intelligence you cannot understand the problem nor can you understand the solution. Worst of all you cannot distinguish between what is important and what is trivial.

Sunak has a first from Oxford in PPE, plus an MBA from Stanford and went on to work for Goldman Sachs.

Truss also studied PPE at Oxford and worked for Shell and Cable and Wireless.

Mordaunt got a 2.1 in Philosophy at Reading and worked in public relations and the Navy

Badenoch studied computing at Sussex and then an LLB at Birkbeck, she worked as a systems analyst for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Sunak 10

Truss 9

Mordaunt 5

Badenoch 8

 

The only way we are going to make Brexit beneficial for the UK is if we have a leader who believes in it. Truss voted Remain and at Oxford was leader of the Lib Dems. She keeps proposing to get rid of the Northern Ireland Protocol, but never does so. It may be that she has genuinely converted from her previous views or it may not.

The key to making Brexit work is to be daring. We need to undercut the EU and abolish any regulations that hinder British business. We need to be willing to seriously upset Ireland and the EU or else accept that Irish unification is a matter of time.

Sunak 8

Truss 6

Mordaunt 7

Badenoch 8

 

To defeat the SNP long term, it isn’t enough to say No you have to wait. You have to come up with a new way of thinking about the UK, that makes us more like countries such as France and Germany that are not threatened by secession. You have to be imaginative, for instance, making the SNP an offer they would refuse and finding ways to bypass the devolved parliaments. You have to have the nerve to do something outrageous if it is necessary to stop the SNP. After all there is not much point defeating the Russians if you lose the UK.

Scottish nationalism is an anti-Tory movement, it would be far harder for Sturgeon to portray either Sunak or Badenoch as English toffs. Sunak however would be hindered by his personal wealth and his ultra-rich wife.

Sunak 7

Truss 6

Mordaunt 6

Badenoch 10

 

Woke issues are not a side issue. They are the whole issue. Having lost the economic argument in the 1990s the Left turned to changing how we think in order to change human nature so that we could be made ready for socialism.

Communism failed because of human nature. We are naturally capitalists who understand profit, loss and free trade as ways to personally become better off. We all try to earn more for the benefit of ourselves and our families.

The task for the Left is to make us care more for equality than personal self-interest and to care for society more than ourselves and our families.

This is the purpose of first political correctness and then woke. Once you can get people to believe that men can become women, it becomes easier to make them think in a different way about their families and their selves. If you daughter can become your son, then why can’t a stranger be your son too?

It seemed initially preposterous that basic ideas about human nature could be changed, but look how far we have come since the Berlin Wall came down. Homosexuals can marry, which makes marriage no longer a matter of family and having children. A lesbian can be a man who thinks he is a woman who is attracted to another man who thinks he is a woman. Ted Hughes has been cancelled because of an ancestor who owned slaves.

Mordaunt clearly stated that trans women are women her attempts to dodge this issue merely make her more dangerous. She also advocated that the NHS should use homeopathy, which is a pseudoscience that has been completely debunked. This means that she believes at least two things that are false.

Badenoch has spoken out at some risk to herself about critical race theory. She and Sunak are best placed to counter accusations of racism from Labour and the SNP.

Sunak 8

Truss 6

Mordaunt 0

Badenoch 10

 

Mordaunt’s work in public relations means that she is good at communications, but she fundamentally lacks substance. Her views on woke issues ought to make it impossible that she become Conservative Party leader. It is extraordinary and surely a mistake that she has come so far.

Sunak understanding of finance and general intelligence could be hugely useful in a leader, but he has the disadvantage of being in part responsible for the mess we are in now. His wealth would make it easy for Labour and the SNP to attack him.

Truss has achieved little despite her experience in Cabinet.  She may be a right winger, but I don’t trust her previous commitments both to Remain and the Lib Dems.

Badenoch would be the ideal candidate to take on woke and Labour and SNP accusations of racist Tories. Her main disadvantage is lack of experience at the highest level.

There is a window of opportunity for leadership candidates. Too young and you don’t have the experience, too old and you have missed your chance.

We have very limited information to choose. If it were up to me, I would take a chance on the next two years. If the Tories lose the next election they can pick a new leader, then anyway. Truss offers little, Sunak would be better as Chancellor.

The leader both the SNP and Labour fear most would be Kemi Badenoch.