What is the Tory party’s legacy?

What will the Tories say to voters at the next election? They’ll be pitching for a historic fifth term, which is ambitious even in the best of times. That there have been three prime ministers in this term alone is one of the least dramatic points of this period. The current occupant of Number 10, Rishi Sunak, is trying to persuade his MPs to stick with him at least until that election, with many of the brightest and best considering quitting before they get shoved by their voters. In less than two years’ time, Sunak will be advancing an argument for why the electorate should stick with him, too. But what can he possibly say?

Once a party is in government its best election pitch is to say to voters that it’s safest to stay with the devil they know, rather than risking the opposition party. Party leaders tend to point to everything they’ve achieved, before asking voters for more time to finish the job. Sunak has two problems with this. He doesn’t have a lot to point to in the way of Conservative achievements from the past decade and a bit. It’s also not entirely clear what the job is that only the Tories can finish, given his focus on fixing a mess made far worse by his own party.

Recently, I’ve taken to quizzing senior Tories about what they feel are their party’s big legacy from their time in government. Their responses follow the same pattern. A long pause. A sigh. “Well, there’s Brexit. And we can be really proud of what we’ve done with education. We need to talk about that more.” And then another pause. Some, after a little head-scratching, also mention universal credit, saying that this huge and lengthy welfare reform has changed the benefits system for the better and made people excited about getting back into work.

The Tories do need to talk about these two early achievements, especially their decision to continue the New Labour education reforms beyond the ambitions of their original architects. Michael Gove has had many incarnations since being education secretary, but his legacy in that job will outlast everything else he’s done – besides campaigning successfully for Brexit.

Gove wasn’t the architect of “levelling up”, but that tends to be the next big reform that Conservatives mention when they reflect on the past decade. They don’t, though, talk about it with the same sense of pride. Instead, it’s with a great deal of regret that they reflect on their failure to produce anything tangible in time for the next election. Levelling up will be one thing the Tories will ask voters to stick with them for so they can finish the job.

But there are only nascent signs of it beginning, which means it is still very difficult for the party to say “look at what we’ve achieved so far”. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt thinks it is worth pursuing, but is keen to change the model entirely. His approach would be to allow elected local representatives, particularly mayors, to be able to solve their infrastructure problems locally, without having to bang down doors in Whitehall by bidding endlessly for small pots of money here and there.

This follows the old “northern powerhouse” approach of the David Cameron government, where city regions won more powers over local services, but it has its political problems. Talk to any Conservative in Greater Manchester, for instance, and they will be spitting tacks, not just about Andy Burnham, but about George Osborne for creating the elected mayoral post that has made him, in their view, such an unaccountably powerful figure. In 2014, when Osborne was on the brink of announcing his northern powerhouse and the directly elected mayoral post, 1922 Committee chair and Altrincham MP Graham Brady warned him the night before that he would be making it harder for the Tories to build support in the city region because it would create a local Labour celebrity who wouldn’t be properly scrutinised or achieve anything meaningful. Those Tories and others will see Hunt’s move as injecting the already powerful Burnham with political steroids.

Burnham took on devolved responsibility for the NHS, but there has been little evidence this has made any improvements for patients in Greater Manchester. It has simply become a microcosm of the national problems with the health service: long waits for elective treatment and ambulance queues caused in part by a social care sector so dysfunctional it is an inaccuracy to call it a “system” as that would suggest some kind of coherence.

The Guardian