Have the Tories squandered their years in power?
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In March 2023, Rishi Sunak found himself staring into a hole.
On a visit to Darlington, County Durham, he was invited by stern-faced local politicians to inspect a pothole that had been there for two years, according to residents.
The crater in a road in north-east England is an apt symbol of Britain’s malaise and the UK prime minister’s own electoral predicament.
After 14 years of Conservative rule, the country’s roads are in a dire state. The AA motoring organisation says it was called out to 631,852 “pothole-related incidents” last year, the most in five years.
14 years of Tory rule
This is the second of two articles examining the legacy of 14 years of Conservative-led government. The previous, chart-led story explored how the next UK government must grapple with a series of challenges in a nation still reeling from austerity, Covid and Brexit
Sunak responded last autumn by announcing a £8.3bn fund to tackle the “scourge of potholes”. The initiative would be partly funded, the prime minister said, by cutting Britain’s biggest transport project, the over-budget HS2 high-speed rail line to the north of England.
It might seem like a clear example of a government failing to see the wood for the trees, but Sunak was making the kind of choice forced upon the leader of a country with an economy mired in low growth and stagnant productivity and a fraying public realm.
Sunak has precious little money to spend on fixing holes in the road or anything else. Britain’s tax burden is at its highest level for 70 years and rising, debt is 90 per cent of GDP and rising — and so are the pressures on public services.
During their long tenure, the Conservatives have been buffeted by major external shocks such as the aftermath of the financial crash, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. To that, they have added the self-inflicted upheavals of Brexit and chaotic premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Now, they seem to be running out of road. Polls put the Labour opposition 20 points ahead of Sunak’s Tories.
“All you can do is talk about the past,” Sunak said in tetchy exchanges with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in an ITV leaders’ debate on June 4. “I do appreciate why he doesn’t want to talk about the last 14 years,” Starmer retorted. “He’s ashamed.”
If Starmer does move into Downing Street on July 5, what sort of country will he be inheriting? And what exactly have the Conservatives achieved during their 14 years in power?
Sir Anthony Seldon, the historian who has chronicled the tenures of prime ministers going back to John Major, poses the question another way. A book he recently edited bears the title: The Conservative Effect 2010-2024: 14 Wasted Years?
For the Labour party, there is no question. Starmer points to the record tax burden, a decade and a half of stagnant average earnings, 7.5mn people on hospital waiting lists in England, overflowing prisons and the political turmoil that has caused the Conservatives to burn through four prime ministers since the convulsive Brexit referendum in 2016.
Asked about Tory achievements, Sunak points to a strong Conservative record of job creation, improved schools which produce “the best readers in the western world” and falling crime. Other ministers point to fast progress towards green energy, devolution of power to big city mayors, increases to pensions and the national living wage and the legalisation of gay marriage. Leaving the EU, a totemic accomplishment for many rightwing Tory MPs, is rarely mentioned.
Seldon concludes that the 14 years were not wasted. But he adds that “they could have been better”.
Privately, many Conservatives view their record in government in two distinct phases. In the first phase, David Cameron — initially in coalition with the centrist Liberal Democrats from 2010-15 — led a broadly moderate government with a highly controversial economic policy: austerity.
The second phase began in 2016, when Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership ended in the national psychodrama of Brexit, heralding eight years of political and economic chaos and four different prime ministers: Theresa May, Johnson, Truss and ultimately Sunak.
“It was a period of two halves,” says Amber Rudd, the former Tory home secretary who retired from parliament in 2019. “From 2010-16 there was a purpose to the government and it was well controlled. Then it all fell apart. Brexit was the trigger. After 2016 all the stable elements of good government fell apart.”
When Conservatives talk about the achievements of the past 14 years, many of them date back to this first period in government. They include school reforms, driven by then education secretary Michael Gove, who says “there has been a real improvement compared with other countries if you look at the international league tables”. Along with 74 other Tory MPs, Gove is standing down at the 2024 election.
George Osborne, chancellor from 2010 to 2016, points to the devolution of power to big city mayors outside of London. Manchester has been among the fastest-growing cities in western Europe, he says of the red-brick Victorian metropolis whose skyline is dominated now by skyscrapers, even if its rail services remain stuck in the 19th century. Mayors have followed in a host of other areas including Liverpool, South Yorkshire, Teesside and the West Midlands.
He also cites pension reforms and the simplified “universal credit” benefit system pushed through by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith — which proved to be resilient years later, under the strains of Covid.
However, Labour has long argued that the seeds of Britain’s current problems were sown during this supposedly golden era by Osborne’s austerity programme: slashing spending to get the UK’s deficit under control.
Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation and now a Labour election candidate, acknowledges that parts of Britain’s economic stagnation, not least the pandemic, cannot be placed at the door of the Conservative government.
“But almost all serious economists now agree that George Osborne’s austerity happened too quickly and was far too focused on spending cuts,” he adds. “It proved economically damaging, not to mention socially and politically unsustainable.”
Stuart Hoddinott, senior researcher at the Institute for Government, says the spending cuts “went on for so long they stored up problems for the future that we are still living with”. He points to issues ranging from inadequate equipment and IT systems in hospitals to councils cutting back on social care and early years child support.
Osborne insists austerity was an inevitable response to the 2008 global financial crash and denies his cuts were too deep or lasted too long. “There was a hung parliament, an untested coalition government,” he says. “We restored confidence in the UK when a lot of countries in Europe were falling over.
“The Liz Truss experience a decade later showed you there was not an unlimited capacity for the UK to borrow money,” he adds. If he had his time again, Osborne says he would have spent more on capital projects while borrowing was cheap — but that was “at the margins”.
Sir Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader who served as deputy prime minister in the coalition government, says Labour would not have done things very differently had it won in 2010. Gordon Brown, the last Labour prime minister, wanted to halve the deficit in four years, he notes, while the coalition ended up doing it in five.
“Labour have pretended for the last decade and a half that any commitment to fiscal discipline was just an act of regressive ideology,” he says. Clegg argues this “rewriting of history” will make it harder for Labour to make tough choices if it wins the next election.
Clegg, now president of global affairs at social media group Meta, believes the achievements of that administration are often overlooked, not least because the Lib Dems themselves do not want to talk about a period that ended in their annihilation at the 2015 election. “The coalition government is the most forgotten government of all time,” he says.
In his eyes, the outright Tory victory in that 2015 poll is when things began to go wrong. “They turned the fastest-growing economy in the G7 into one of the slowest . . . that was a direct consequence of punitive budgets in 2015 and 2016, and of course the disaster of Brexit,” he says.
“The Tories shot themselves in the foot, and dragged the rest of the country down with them.”
Brexit is seen by many Conservatives as the turning point.
When the vote was held in 2016, Osborne says, “the UK had full employment, its economic model was held up as an example and London was the place to go”.
“Then we slammed into the brick wall of Brexit and that’s when investment fell off a cliff.”
The economic consequences of Brexit are contested, but the Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s official forecaster, has predicted that Britain will suffer a 4 per cent cut in its potential productivity, relative to remaining in the EU, with UK import and export volumes 15 per cent lower than if Brexit had not happened.
But the political consequences of the vote were also stark. The Conservatives waged a bitter civil war over how to implement the decision, which ended up with May being ousted in 2019 and Johnson delivering the “hard Brexit” favoured by rightwingers.
The feuding stood in stark contrast to the first Cameron government, which despite being a coalition was remarkable for its stability, Seldon notes. Whether it was Osborne in Number 11, Theresa May at the home office, William Hague at the foreign office or Vince Cable at business, key ministers held the same job for almost the entirety of that administration, allowing time for serious policy development.
But each of the four prime ministers that followed Cameron took very different positions to their predecessor, Seldon continues, marking shifts in personnel and tone that undermined the Conservatives’ own legacy.
“There was too much churn, too much prime ministerial and ministerial churn to have consistent policymaking,” he says, citing the seven business secretaries in the seven years after the vote, some lasting just a few weeks in the job.
The party’s approach to governing post-Brexit was marked by “chaotic, doctrinal decisions”, says Lord Michael Heseltine, a former Tory deputy prime minister.
May’s time in office was consumed by Brexit negotiations, while her successor Johnson took power rejecting Osborne-era austerity and claiming in a 2019 Spectator interview that he had long ago concluded that “austerity was just not the right way forward for the UK”. He promised a new era of open spending taps, with money gushing into hitherto neglected areas of the north. It was a “dead end of big state nationalism”, says Osborne. “Taxes went up, spending went up.”
Along with “getting Brexit done”, it was a popular message. Johnson won an 80-seat majority over a Labour party led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn. Rudd argues that for all the criticism of post-Brexit Tory governments, they did at least keep Corbyn out of Number 10.
But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, blowing a £400bn hole in the public finances and derailing Johnson’s strategy to “level up”. Most if not all of the 40 or so “red wall” Labour seats won by Johnson five years ago are likely to be lost on July 4.
Johnson was swept out of office by his own ministers after it emerged he had lied about parties in Downing Street during lockdowns, among other things. Next came the chaotic 49-day premiership of Truss, remembered chiefly for the tax-slashing “mini” Budget that precipitated a meltdown in the UK government bond market and her downfall.
Sunak does not like to talk about Truss’s time in Downing Street, other than to say that he warned that her £45bn of unfunded tax cuts would be an economic disaster.
But Starmer talks about it all the time. Ipsos polling for the Financial Times found that more than half of voters who think the UK economy is in a poor state blamed decisions made by Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng.
Dame Priti Patel, the pro-Brexit former home secretary and potential future leadership contender, argues that neither the Truss interregnum nor Britain’s departure from the EU were ultimately to blame for the malaise facing Britain today.
Rather, she says, Covid and the inflationary shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were the principal causes. “It’s easy to forget about the hard economic legacy we inherited,” she says. “A lot has changed — the pandemic has created a new economic order, war in Ukraine has changed the fiscal outlook . . . It’s a very, very difficult, changed backdrop.”
Nevertheless, the constant flux has made it hard to build a defence of the party’s record in office, says Lord Gavin Barwell, Downing Street chief of staff during Theresa May’s premiership. “There has been a real difficulty with consistent narrative and the story you’re trying to tell.”
Seldon agrees. “When you have a successful period of one party domination, [the governments] build on each other. It’s not constantly jerking in one direction and then a different one,” he says.
Sunak, who became prime minister in October 2022, has been grappling with this toxic political and economic legacy ever since.
He surprised many at his party conference last year by claiming he would be the “change” candidate at the next election. In a bold move, he disowned the past 30 years of failed politics, “vested interests” and empty rhetoric — almost half of them under post-2010 Tory administrations.
But no prime minister can escape their own party’s legacy in power, or shrug off the outcomes of decisions taken by their predecessors. Only a couple of months later Sunak implicitly recognised the hopelessness of his “change” pitch by bringing back Cameron as his foreign secretary.
Patel acknowledges that recent political upheavals had been “the most unedifying spectacle in one of the most successful political parties in the western world”. Voters appear to agree; they may not have warmed to Starmer, but Tory candidates can see the writing on the wall. “You can’t push water uphill,” says one. “This is clearly a ‘time for a change’ election.”
Barwell believes the Conservatives now face “an existential threat”: Labour looks set for a landslide and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party circles above what he believes will be the carrion of the Conservative party after July 4, hoping to replace the Tories as “the real opposition” to Labour.
Sunak, launching his party’s manifesto at the Silverstone Grand Prix track on Tuesday pleaded with voters to put aside the past. The economy had “turned a corner”, he insisted. The time had come “to talk about the future”.
But next month, voters will be casting a verdict not just on the promises politicians make about the years ahead, but on the state of the nation after 14 years of momentous and often chaotic Conservative rule.
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