It is clear some within the Tory party want to get rid of Boris Johnson. Partygate etc is giving them the ammunition. As a general observer of current affairs you have to ask why. The answer is much more in economic/financial doctrinaire than personality and moral compass.
Below I have copied and pasted an article from the Daily Telegraph written by Fraser Nelson the editor of the Spectator. Fraser Nelson is a grown up journalist and I read his stuff a lot. His connections and his analysis usually prove to be rock solid.
Below he sets out the fundamental issue that is causing so many tensions in the Tory party to the point internecine warfare has broken out.
The Tories are traditionally low tax, small government, market orientated, live within our means - as Margaret Thatcher.
Boris in many observers eyes is Labour light - high tax, big government - big spending.
A few months ago I resigned form the Tory Party on this very issue. I did not vote for Labour type policies. I have seen over my life time that the road to ruin is high tax and big government spending. Why? Common-sense. High taxes is a disincentive to hard work and employment especially as civil servants and politicians are absolutely useless at spending money wisely (getting good value for the tax payers money they are spending). Consequently high taxes mean the tax take is always lower than anticipated but tax takes increases overall when businesses and individuals have an incentive to work and be entrepreneurial. Socialists do not like that truth but is the practical reality. Under Boris as I have said we are getting Labour type policies. Connected to this of course is the extent our new freedoms from Brexit have been utilised by freeing up our economy - but to be fair to Boris and his administration Covid 19 has thrown a big spanner in the works.
Boris needs a major rethink. Start with cancelling the National Insurance proposed increases. They also need to get away from the thinking he has allowed to develop that any problem can be solved by government with calls for them to throw more and more money around tax payers money or borrowed money). I support small government because big government does not work.
This is what Fraser Nelson has to say :
A toxic Tory civil war is brewing – and it threatens to leave the party in ruins
The poisonous allegations spread so far are but a taster of the fury likely to follow the fall of Johnson
If Sue Gray’s report is bad enough (or even if it isn’t) there are now at least 54 Tory MPs ready to call a vote of no-confidence in Boris Johnson. His attempts to shore up his position are not going well and exposing the shallowness of his personal support. “If Nadine Dorries is your main cheerleader,” says one minister, “you really are sunk.” But he isn’t: not yet. The would-be mutineers are waiting for a reason. They need to work out not just what would follow, but how bad the fighting would be – and whether the party could survive it.
The old Tory omertà, whereby MPs bury their grievances and differences for the sake of party unity, is already collapsing and the damage has started. Did Gavin Williamson really say he’d refuse to build a school in Bury if its MP didn’t vote with the Government? Did the Tory chief whip really tell Nusrat Ghani that her “Muslimness” had been raised as a problem in Downing Street? These are serious – and grim – allegations that voters may not forget in a hurry.
What Theresa May once called the “nasty party” seems to be making a comeback. Tory whips are being accused of bullying, which may sound like accusing a boxer of fighting. While most governments have whips who represent all wings of the party – using flattery as well as threats – No 10 only chose Johnson loyalists who had a weakness for bluntness. This led to plenty of resentment, much of which may soon come out.
Margaret Thatcher had the wets and dries, Cameron had modernisers and traditionalists, and Johnson had Brexiteers and Remainers. His unusual means of dealing with this was to fire all 21 of them by withdrawing the whip. This pained him, but he’d justify this to colleagues by comparing it to the purges of Augustus Caesar: brutal but bringing years of peace. The flaw in his analogy was that they also meant dictatorship.
Most Tory leaders make a show of party unity in their Cabinet choices, but Johnson has filled his team with those who backed him in the leadership contest. “He never even tried to be the unity candidate,” says one exiled ex-Cabinet member. “He has run a factionalist government, so divisions have grown.”
The Red Wall MPs provided the Tories with their majority and some talk of themselves as a new guard coming in to refresh the old party’s blood, creating a new, genuinely One-Nation conservatism. Liz Truss is generally seen as the champion of the new intake, but her problem may be how she promises low taxes – likely to be her signature theme – while supporting the high-spending policies that Johnson has sold.
This is a common Southern Tory complaint: that the Red Wall MPs like high spending and low taxes, and won’t accept the contradiction. “You talk to these guys and do a double-take,” says one Tory. “They always want more spending. You think: what party do you think you’re in?” They might respond: Boris Johnson’s party, and the mandate he personally won richly entitles him to push through his own blend of higher-tax, high-spend Toryism. One of the many arguments that would be played out in a leadership campaign.
Even among the low-tax Tories there’s a split, embodied in the row between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak over the impending National Insurance increase. In a Cabinet meeting, Truss said the party should honour its manifesto pledge not raise taxes and let borrowing take the strain. This led to quite a fiery response from Sunak, who told her such an approach was fundamentally un-Conservative. This marks a Tory dividing line that runs far deeper than is commonly understood.
One of Sunak’s most strongly held political beliefs is that serious spending commitments must be funded (via tax or cuts) rather than dumped on the next generation via national debt. This is why he’s for the National Insurance rise: he thinks it holds up a mirror to the decision to spend all of the extra money. This model could be taken further, so all extra NHS spending is funded by increasing what would, in effect, become a special NHS tax – thereby focusing Tory minds next time they want to shower the health service with cash.
Should it come down to Truss vs Sunak, this would be a main debating point. She might be joined by Kwasi Kwarteng, Iain Duncan Smith and others offering lower taxes to party members and being relaxed about paying for this with a deeper deficit. It would all work out eventually, they’d argue, because lower taxes tend to mean more growth and, ergo, higher revenue. Sunak and others would argue that this is economic vandalism, more Reaganite than Thatcherite. It’s a very Tory argument, recited in David Davis vs David Cameron in 2005, but passions do run deep.
Then we have the more enthusiastic Brexiteers, dismayed that so little has been done with Brexit powers (David Frost quit the Government over this point) and keen to suspend the Northern Ireland Protocol rather than see more sovereignty eroded. Then Scotland: almost every single Tory in Holyrood has come out against Johnson, and at least some of these rebels have flirted, in the past, with the idea of breaking away from the “London Tories”. Such tension is a bad look for the supposed party of the union.
So we have a recipe for multi-dimensional Tory wars: high spenders vs the frugal, Scots vs English, Northerners vs Southerners, Brexit radicals vs incrementalists, free traders vs protectionists. All fought, quite plausibly, with a toolkit of dirty tricks. The “Partygate” scandals so far emanate from just one building: 10 Downing Street. Might similar soirées have been held in other government departments? If rule-bending activity in lockdown is enough to end political careers, there may be a few more ministers worried about what may come out.
Perhaps this is why some of Johnson’s allies are saying that his enemies can forget about any smooth transition. That he’d hang on to the last, maximising the agony, then there would probably have to be a snap election. Do they really want all that now? Après moi, le déluge: hardly the most optimistic message to keep his party together. But over the next tense few days, it might be the best he has.
