Reams of commentary will be written about the battle for the Tory leadership, because newspaper pundits confuse blowing hard on cold ashes with real manual labour. But if reading it all seems too much like hard work, then this column is for you. Today’s piece won’t be about “What the Conservatives must do to become fit for government”, since I don’t want them back in government, ever. No, the purpose of our inquiry is to suss out what kind of opponent the party’s next leader will be: the fights they’ll pick, the parliamentary votes they’ll force and the hurdles they’ll heave into the path of better politics. And I believe the best way to do that is with a game involving two words. As you glance across the contenders, ask yourself this: are they a moron or a bastard?
I am not in the business of throwing insults, but using two technical terms with specific definitions that draw upon three decades of rightwing history.
“Moron” you may remember from the autumn of 2022, when Liz Truss became prime minister and announced the biggest tax cuts in half a century, promising more to come – much more. It was what markets wanted, apparently – until markets plunged into turmoil and demanded the UK pay penalty rates to borrow, inevitably dubbed the “moron premium”.
Moronism is shorthand for a particularly toxic strain of rightwing supply-side economics. It dominates the fringe of any Tory conference, where hobgoblins fresh out of university talk moistly about Laffer curves, planning deregulation and Pinochet’s Chile, but it has grown ever more virulent within the parliamentary party over the past decade.
And “bastard”? For........