Common sense

On Esther McVey and how her job reveals a party that doesn’t know what it thinks

One of the most common errors made by campaigning organisations seeking to increase the profile of their area of interest is to ask the Government to create a cabinet minister for it. The argument goes something like this. This area of policy is important but neglected. Nobody is fully in charge of it. It falls through the cracks. The most important policy areas have cabinet ministers in charge of them. If someone were in charge of my chosen policy area too, they could grab the issue by the scruff of the neck and get stuff done.

There are a lot of problems with campaigning this way. It’s a distraction that gets in the way of identifying the policy problems you care about and proposing solutions to them. It tells all the ministers who are currently responsible for the policy area you care about that you wish they weren’t responsible for it, rather than that you wish they’d step up and deal with it. That makes your campaign one they can’t endorse (“this issue within my remit is vital, which is why I am supporting the call to hand it over to someone else”), even if they are sympathetic to your overall position.

And if you succeed - which you almost certainly won’t - the policy blockages that existed before won’t have gone away, except that the cabinet ministers most responsible for them aren’t even in charge of the area any more and so they are incentivised to care even less. Every time you create a cabinet minister for something, you create at least one cabinet minister for not-that-thing-any-more, who is almost certainly more senior to the new most-junior-minister-in-the-cabinet minister for whatever it is you want to create a cabinet minister for.

None of this stops people calling for new cabinet ministers. It’s easy to do. And it looks, at least at first glance, like common sense.

Anyway. Esther McVey was recently appointed the cabinet-level minister for common sense, a position that never previously existed (and which, to be fair, isn’t quite her official title even if it’s been briefed), giving up a paid presenting gig at GB News to take it up.¹ The liberation of the rest of the cabinet from the responsibility to display common sense is something they have embraced with enthusiasm.

Part of McVey’s role is attack-focused, albeit in a rather unfocused way: witness for example this attack on the decision of some employers to adopt a four-day week and the attempt to link this to Keir Starmer even though it’s not Keir Starmer doing it and even though the measure appears to suit some employers and employees and isn’t being imposed on anyone else.

This is of a piece with the way her remit appears to be playing out more widely: the common sense for which McVey sees herself as responsible, or at least on which she chooses to speak out, is the kind of common sense that starts with the words “Why oh why oh why” and ends with with the words “oh why oh why hasn’t the government done this, how hard can it be, has the world gone mad?” That is to say, it’s the kind of common sense that functions as critique rather than defence of a government that’s been in office for a decade and a half.

She made this pretty clear herself, explaining her position early on in her tenure:

I am committed to delivering common sense decisions, such as delaying the ban on petrol and diesel cars, delaying the ban on oil and gas boilers, scrapping HS2 Birmingham to Manchester, reducing the overseas budget, all common sense policies that those on the opposite benches have voted against.

Another way of describing these policies is that they all involve changing decisions made and defended by Conservative governments. It may well be true that Labour voted against all of them, but the more inconvenient fact is that the Conservatives did too, slightly sooner. It’s one thing to say that a deteriorating fiscal position means that ambitions need, reluctantly, to be recalibrated and scaled back. It’s quite another to suggest that scrapping long-standing Conservative policies is just common sense. That ought to go too far for the intellectual self-respect of the Conservative Party, and it’s quite striking that it doesn’t.

The most startling example of this from McVey so far is an article she recently wrote in the Telegraph headlined Pro-lockdown MPs can’t deny the huge costs of their actions.

This takes what is, to be fair to McVey, an indisputable common-sense point - lockdown had economic consequences - and couches it in an eyebrow-raisingly anti-lockdown tone:

When MPs were voting for lockdowns and repeated restrictions for the best part of two years, what did they expect the consequences to be? Whether or not they thought lockdowns were an understandable response to the virus, did MPs voting for the restrictions believe they would lead to a rosier economic picture? Did they think all the money that was going to support individuals and businesses would never have to be repaid? Really?

Every MP who backed the restrictions should have known there would be consequences. And if they didn’t, they weren’t doing their jobs properly. 

You wouldn’t read this and think it comes from a minister for a party whose position is that lockdown was the right thing to do. You might, however, think it’s the kind of thing you could hear from someone who believes that lockdown was “one of the most idiotic policies ever to have occurred and something we must never ever do again”. And, as it turns out, it is. Esther McVey is on record as thinking that lockdown was idiotic, and her criticism of MPs of all parties who voted for it needs to be read with that in mind.

There is a very uncomfortable tension in the way the Conservative Party now thinks about lockdown. On the one hand, they imposed it, most people think they were right to do it, it was popular at the time, and there was little immediate political opposition to it, even if there was plenty of debate about the precise shape of it, and about the timing of various points at which it ended and was reimposed.

Indeed, economic decisions about supporting individuals and businesses through lockdown fuelled Rishi Sunak’s early popularity and put him in a position where he was a credible candidate to be Prime Minister. Sunak is well aware that it was the furlough scheme which first catapulted him to public attention as the rescuer of millions of people’s livelihoods at a genuinely frightening moment - witness his response at last week’s PMQs to a question from Labour’s Angela Eagle:

Angela Eagle: Which part of his economic legacy is the Prime Minister most proud of? Is it presiding over the highest tax burden since the second world war, or is it delivering the slowest real wage growth since the Napoleonic war?

Rishi Sunak: Saving 10 million jobs in the pandemic with the furlough scheme.

At the same time, Sunak was clearly uncomfortable with lockdown while it was still going on: he let it be known from an early stage that he was one of the “hawks” in the internal government debate between “hawks” and “doves” over lockdown policy.² His cultivation of groups of Tory backbenchers as Chancellor reportedly included “lockdown-skeptics, who were impressed by Sunak’s championing of their concerns over the economic impact of COVID-19 shutdowns”. In September 2020 he opposed a new lockdown when the Government’s scientific advisers were recommending one, and invited dissenting scientists to Downing Street to present the opposing case.

The fact that there was genuine debate about lockdown at the time inside government and inside the Conservative Party, that many Conservatives wanted to lift it sooner than it was lifted, and that the main opposition to it came from the right, means that the Conservatives have somehow managed to meme themselves into thinking that lockdown was Labour’s fault, that if Labour had been in office we’d still be in lockdown now, and that the Conservatives were against it all along. See for example this part of McVey’s Telegraph article:

For Labour – who, don’t forget, wanted deeper and longer lockdowns – to pretend that they would have avoided these issues had they been in government is utter tosh, and they know it. They are treating the voters – just as they did after the Brexit referendum – as thickos who wouldn’t know any better.

The link in the text there is not to any evidence that Labour wanted deeper or longer lockdowns, but to a piece by former-Labour-MP-turned-I-know-Labour-are-killers-I-used-to-be-one-Telegraph-columnist Tom Harris, making the frankly bananas argument that “Labour may seek to rewrite the history of the pandemic as having been a massive cock-up from start to finish, with various measures and restrictions put in place in the face of principled opposition from their party”. This isn’t true, nobody in the Labour Party thinks it’s true, and nobody in the Labour Party is going to pretend it’s true, because the only people who think there is political mileage in pretending to have been against lockdown are Telegraph columnists.

McVey’s appointment, and the job she’s been appointed to, are symptomatic of the strategic confusion of the Conservatives under Rishi Sunak’s leadership: a party that’s lost sight of what it’s for, is trying to balance factions with too much distance between them, and can’t make its mind up what it thinks about some of the central policy decisions it’s made in office.

It is dangerous for any government to endorse the idea that “common sense” means railing impotently against things it can’t stop, reversing things it used to support, and retrospectively denouncing things it did with broad public support at a time of national crisis. Common sense would suggest not doing this. But common sense would suggest not creating a minister for common sense in the first place.

1. This leads to the confusing situation that there are now two Esthers in public life who can be referred to in newspaper headlines by their first name, one of them rather more famous than the other but both of them appealing to the same mid-market right-of-centre newspaper-reading demographic. The way to distinguish between them is that Esther Rantzen is campaigning for the legalisation of assisted suicide, whereas Esther McVey is campaigning for the Conservative Party to do it without any assistance at all.

2. The meaning of the terms is not intuitively obvious: the “hawks” were broadly in favour of lifting lockdown restrictions as soon as possible to help the economy, while the “doves” were more cautious about the risks of new Covid-19 waves if lockdown was lifted too soon. Don’t worry, I kept reading it the other way (that the hawks wanted to lock you up and the doves wanted to let you out) too.