Spookily enough, such has been similarly proposed very recently as necessary, and is more fully expanded upon by someone whom you might know better and be more aware of. It makes for an interesting and thought provoking few minutes read .......
NB. ...... Anyone admitting falling foul of TL:DR earns an automatic F* [Fail with Star Distinction]
#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September and replace the Tories?
Assumptions? The market opportunity? Principles for a new Party? How to grow? Stand in seats in GE24?
DOMINIC CUMMINGS
11 AUG 2023
A great chance (best since 1850s?) to replace the Tories
An easy way to see the utter rot of the Tory Party (and the No10/Cabinet Office system) is to consider that after the Boris-Truss fiasco they’ve put in charge the MP with probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic and he’s ‘respecting the institutions’ and ‘listening to the MPs’ like a good head boy with personal integrity just the way he’s been told to by Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Insider pundits, the Institute for Government et al, and the result is:
. no grip of power, the Cabinet Office a dumpster fire and no No10 plan to fix it, No10 given the run-around by Whitehall as soon as the PM’s office switches from one disaster to the next,
. no governing plan for the NHS, crime, the war, productivity growth, R&D or anything else — just nightmarish Treasury budget/Spending Review processes that vandalise long-term building and entrench the dangerous rot of critical national capabilities,
. no message,
. no serious polling, communication or political machine (just incoherent jabbering to the media per the Tory model of ‘communication’ for decades),
. no political strategy worth spit (current approach is indistinguishable from ‘annoy everyone’),
. a humiliatingly awful level of argument from No10 on every major issue (reduced to defending idiot MPs telling people to ‘fuck off’ out of frustration that their own policy, which officials and their own spads told them couldn’t work, has turned into the predicted fiasco),
. political disintegration.
The old system isn’t getting any better than Sunak as PM so what does this say about the system? For Insiders obviously the answer is — he should have been even more Insider, tell the country immigration is good (not out of control), the boats need a ‘safe route’ so they stop being ‘illegal’, ignore crime, you’ll have to work harder and pay more taxes and trust Westminster more, no populism! Outside SW1, the answer has been clear for years but SW1 doesn’t want to hear it: government is broken because the people aren’t up to it.
Every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis. Having resolutely ignored the core dysfunctions of Whitehall in favour of daily tacking to MP factions and ‘the news’ in Westminster (‘respect the institutions!’), No10 is now timed out by that system — normal-mode Whitehall can’t do anything fast and from September officials will ensure the timetable for anything they don’t agree with stretches into the election campaign so it won’t happen.
Even if the PM suddenly decided to use his power he won’t be able to. But all signs are he’s effectively given up. Officials across No10/70Whitehall discuss ‘has the PM given up or is it some complex psychology indistinguishable from giving up?’. Either way, he’s chosen not to use the power he has but instead listen to uber-Insider-pundits with the inevitable results.
How does he spend his time? A few officials who work with him give almost the same line:
He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job, I don’t think he realises this and I don’t think his spads tell him.
He spends his time wading through endless detail and spreadsheets on fifth order matters because it’s psychologically easier than doing the PM’s actual job which he doesn’t know how to do nor wants to do. Officials obviously prefer him to Boris or Truss. He reads the papers diligently and is neither a crook nor a cretin. But the old hands know it’s roughly the Brown failure mode: a workaholic, the PM’s office a massive bottleneck and can’t sustain focus when the news shifts, the smartest MP but can’t build a team or lead etc etc. No10 is so politically lost that OFFICIALS suggest ways the PM can achieve his priorities faster and his OWN SPADS say ‘no too aggressive’. The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality, not deep state resistance.
If he had four years I can imagine him figuring things out and evolving but his misfortune is that he had no time to learn. He’s compounded his misfortune by listening to the most insider of Insider advice. When you make your daily fix the MPs and news, as almost everyone does, it’s incredibly hard to escape from because, like escaping any addiction, there’s an unavoidable awful period after you change course where you annoy everyone before a new plan has time to work so there’s always a ‘sensible’ Insider argument to delay. And by the time you realise you’ve wasted your time reacting to the news like every PM since Thatcher, you’re done. (See here for why I got him promoted in 2020.)
From September a long election campaign will effectively start and it will be a continuation of 2023 — a weekly race to show who is worse at politics but with all fundamentals favouring Starmer.
Then dud Starmer will fail from Day 1 and the patterns of failure will be the same as we’ve seen since Brown (with the brief partial exceptions of July-December 2019 and March-May 2020). Starmer and Sunak will write Memoirs and puzzle, like Cameron’s, about how they could never find those mythical ‘levers of power’ — the levers that the Cabinet Secretary of spring 2020 said a few days ago that he also struggled to find or, if he did, found they didn’t connect to much (even though, remember, the Cabinet Secretary is 10X - 100X more powerful than the average Cabinet Minister).
Will the Tories improve after the election and grasp why they failed so badly, why the 80 seat majority Vote Leave won was wasted? No. They will talk rubbish about the last 15 years, as they did after 1997.
Already I’m getting messages from MPs and donors ‘How do we rebuild the Party after the inevitable, can we have a quiet chat?’ NO NO NO. No more excruciating Tory dinners. No more ‘X is obviously not up to it but … maybe … we could build a team around them, oh god pass the red…’ NO. Plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt. I prefer the calls that start, ‘Come on, it’s time for the startup party let’s go’.
This is the time to start building the replacement so that from 2200 on election night in October-December 2024 the old Party is buried and a new set of people with new ideas start talking to the country and can take over in 2028 and give voters the sort of government they want and deserve.
Here endeth Part 1 of 2, with the tail end of a simply complex solution to now follows as Part 2
Biting the hand that feeds IT
