National unity

After an election, especially an election that has resulted in a change of government, the way parties do politics changes. Gears shift. The action moves from party HQs to No10 and government departments. Nobody is trying to win your vote tomorrow, even if nobody has forgotten about the need to win your vote in a few years’ time. There are no posters, no party election broadcasts. Substacks focused on political attack have less to write about.¹

That doesn’t mean that attack has gone away. It just means that it happens in a different way, and with a different focus. It shifts from warnings about the future to characterisations of the past. It’s less urgent, less frenetic, mostly less funny. And the fact that the government has changed means that the purpose of the attack changes too.

The biggest change in how political attack works now is about who the target is. Until last week, both parties were attacking each other, with some attacks focused on past record and some on future risk. Now, both parties have the same target: the last Conservative government.

For Labour, the last Conservative government is baseline, justification and excuse. Baseline, because - unarguably - everything it has now inherited is what the Conservatives have been in charge of for the last 14 years, and they are just starting out. Justification, because - it argues - its inheritance is the reason it has to take certain decisions now. Excuse, because some things will not improve as quickly as you might like, and - Labour argues - that’s not Labour’s fault.

You can see this in many of the early statements of new cabinet ministers. Rachel Reeves, in her first speech as Chancellor, said that she has “instructed Treasury officials to provide an assessment of the state of our spending inheritance so that I can understand the scale of the challenge”, setting up a parliamentary setpiece at some point in the next few weeks. And she presented new Treasury analysis, which frankly did not need to be Treasury analysis because any economist could have produced the same number but which now has an official imprimatur which opposition costings can never achieve:

New Treasury analysis that I requested over the weekend shows that, had the UK economy grown at the average rate of other OECD economies this last 13 years, our economy would have been over £140 billion larger.

This could have brought in an additional £58 billion in tax revenues in the last year alone. That’s money that could have revitalised our schools, our hospitals, and other public services.

This is a fairly obvious setup of two things Labour was already saying in opposition but now wants to land and keep landing in government: the public finances are in a mess, and the only solution is growth. You don’t need to fix the foundations of an economy with secure foundations.

There are similar baseline attack statements across the early speeches of Labour cabinet ministers. Wes Streeting as Health Secretary saying that “From today, the policy of this department is that the NHS is broken” and ordering what the Sun calls a “warts and all” probe, which sounds deeply unpleasant. Lisa Nandy as Culture Secretary saying that “The era of culture wars is over”. The message about the Conservatives here isn’t even subtext: it’s just text.

There are limits to how far Labour can claim that they thought they’d bought a beautiful new house only to discover a bunch of rotting dead cats hidden under the floorboards, which to be fair is not quite their line, but there are also limits to how far anyone else can claim that the rotting dead cats were prominently flagged by the vendors in the estate agent’s blurb. 

That leads to a broader problem for Conservatives who want to push back. Look at this complaint by Tory MP Neil O’Brien.

There are two ways to interpret this. Option one is that the public finances are actually in good shape despite what Labour says now, and option two is that it’s true that they’re in terrible shape but everyone already knew this. The former is a tricky argument for the Conservatives to run with, and the latter is a tricky argument for the Conservatives to run with. It’s a dilemma.

Shadow Leader of the House of Commons Chris Philp, who as Liz Truss’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury knows a thing or two about leaving terrible economic inheritances to his successors, is going with option one.

Good luck with that.²

While Labour attacks the record of the last Tory government, the surviving rump of the Conservative parliamentary party is gearing up to attack the record of the last Tory government or, to put it another way, to hold a leadership contest.

Conservative leadership candidates and their supporters may not, by and large, want to attack the record of the last Tory government. They were part of it, they backed it, they are proud of at least parts of its record.³ But any debate about what the Conservative Party’s future should look like, which is what a leadership contest is, has to involve a debate about what went wrong and why it lost the election. Different candidates can’t avoid acknowledging that the last government made mistakes, even if they can disagree about what they were.⁴

Nobody is officially a candidate yet. But plenty of potential candidates are starting to set out their stalls, and it’s difficult for them to do this without being critical of the last government. Potential candidate James Cleverly says that “we lost our well-deserved reputation for competence and good government”. Potential candidate Robert Jenrick says that “we failed to deliver on the promises we made to the British public”. Potential candidate Suella Braverman says that “we Tory ministers, nominally in charge of the system, completely failed”. They all have a point. But it is one that reinforces rather than undermines Labour’s message.

Some people in the Labour Party say that the 2010 leadership election, which began almost immediately after the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition took office, helped to leave the pitch open for David Cameron and George Osborne to define the ground of politics for the next parliament. Labour turned inwards and argued about itself, and the Conservatives reaped the benefits, talking unchallenged to the public about Labour crashing the economy while the people who had just been in the cabinet failed to rebut it because they were talking to Labour Party members about what Labour got right and what Labour got wrong.

This is true. But what Labour people who complain about it sometimes miss is that there was no serious alternative to it, other than potentially a decision by Gordon Brown to stay on as Leader of the Opposition for several months or even longer, not call a leadership election and robustly defend his own record having just been kicked out of office - a decision he would not have wanted to make and that would have had plenty of downsides. In other words, Labour’s post-2010 election absence from the national debate was not a mistake, it was structurally inevitable. You can argue at the fringes about whether a three-month contest would have been better or worse than a one-month contest or a six-month contest, but these are arguments at the fringes. Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter very much.

If you lose and your party leader doesn’t want to stay on, you have a leadership election. If you have a leadership election, you have an internal argument. If you have an internal argument, it’s partly about what you got wrong and the reasons why you lost. If it’s partly about what you got wrong and the reasons why you lost, it’s critical of your own party’s record. If it’s critical of your own party’s record, it’s reinforcing the new government’s message. If it’s reinforcing the new government’s message, it’s helping them more than it’s helping you. To take those six points in turn: tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. There is nothing you can do about it.

Kemi Badenoch, another potential Conservative leadership candidate, has reportedly called for leadership rivals to “sign a non-aggression pact to avoid brutal blue-on-blue slanging”.⁵ Ideally, this would have come before she accused potential leadership rival Suella Braverman of having a “very public” nervous breakdown, and before Braverman responded that “Kemi, and the rest of the cabinet, should not have nodded along, as they and Rishi took the party to disaster”.⁶ But it doesn’t matter. Of course leadership rivals should avoid being personally abusive to one another, even if it’s more fun for the rest of us if they don’t. But unless they sign a pledge not to criticise the record of the last government, the damage is going to be done. And if they don’t criticise the record of the last government, the leadership contest isn’t about anything.

After weeks of posting about the main parties’ attack operations in the run-up to the election campaign, and the election campaign itself, Dividing Lines’ first post-election post hasn’t really talked about what happened on election day, or on election night. This isn’t a newsletter that does detailed analysis of polls or of voting by constituency; let’s just say that Labour won by a landslide, and that I’m very happy about it. One of the reasons I am more optimistic than some about Labour’s prospects of winning the next election⁷ is that the Tories’ record in office up to 2024 is still going to be on the ballot paper in 2028 or 2029. And if there’s one thing that the public, the Labour Party and the Conservative Party can agree on now, it’s that the Tories were crap. Let’s see who changes their mind first.

If you want to hear more of me going on about the UK general election, the latest edition of The Election Tricycle focuses almost entirely on the results and what they mean, and involves a lot more of me talking than my co-hosts Rohan Venkat and Emily Tamkin, for which I can only apologise but in my defence it was my country’s election this week.

You can also hear the last of the weekly Sunday panels I did on Kate McCann and Adam Boulton’s Times Radio show alongside Jo Tanner and Sean Kemp throughout the election campaign - these were a lot of fun to do, although it’s easy to overstate how hard it was to make one ex-Tory staffer, one ex-Lib Dem staffer and one ex-Labour staffer broadly agree with each other week after week: the Tory campaign was rubbish, and we all thought so.

1. I don’t yet know what Dividing Lines is going to look like in the coming months. My assumption is that it will still exist, but that posts will be less frequent because there will be less to write about. One of the reasons this Substack is free is that it was always obvious that this was going to happen, and the last thing I want is a bunch of paying subscribers who have a legitimate complaint that they’re not getting what they’re paying for. Like a well-disciplined political party, I didn’t make promises I knew I couldn’t keep. You may get a bit less of what you’re not paying for, but that’s not really anyone’s problem.

2. Chris Philp has form on ill-advised tweets about economic data.

3. Apart from Suella Braverman, who appears not to have identified anything at all that the last government did well.

4. Strictly speaking this is not quite logically true: they could in principle go with “the last Conservative government was brilliant and did nothing wrong, but unfortunately Labour under Keir Starmer’s leadership is even better”, but this is an unlikely Tory leadership pitch for various reasons.

5. The quotation marks are of the Sun’s reporting, not of Badenoch. I would be astonished if she had said that she wanted “a non-aggression pact to avoid brutal blue-on-blue slanging”, because nobody in the world talks like that.

6. “It was not someone else’s fault”, says Suella Braverman, while making it very clear that in her opinion it was someone else’s fault.

7. I am optimistic. This is not the same as saying that I think they’re definitely going to win. But I think Labour are strong favourites at this point, even if they won with a relatively low vote share and a lot of their MPs have very small majorities. I should say, though, that after the 2019 election I thought the Conservatives were strong favourites to win in 2024 - here’s a piece I wrote in 2021 saying they would probably win the next election. My analysis isn’t worth much, as it turns out.