If you are like me and you rely on an ancient and wonderful petrol car you will know what it can be like on a cold, wet morning when you have been turning and turning the ignition key and the darn thing won’t start.
You know how your panic starts to rise. With every attempt you can see the battery light getting fainter and fainter, the starter motor is beginning to mew like a dying cat and the children in the back are getting more and more obstreperous. You realise that you are facing disaster: missed school, cancelled appointments – whatever.
And then just as you are about to start sobbing with frustration, just as you are about to get out and actually start kicking the car on the hubcaps or flagellating its bonnet – like Basil Fawlty, with some branch ripped from the nearest tree – just as you are about to abandon yourself to despair, you turn the key again and – good Lord: for reasons you can’t explain, the engine coughs, and splutters, and then roars into life.
You sit back in the driving seat for a moment, with tears of total joy and amazement prickling in your eyes. You feel all that black self-loathing being replaced by a flood of pure serotonin; you feel love for your gorgeous old beast of a car. You feel suddenly confident. You feel hope again.
And that was my feeling, ladies and gents, when I watched Kemi Badenoch this week single-handedly ignite the Tory conference. The Conservatives are not only alive but they have forward propulsion – and in the nick of time. Kemi’s speech was exactly what was needed; not only full of pep and fizz and vim and verve, but with the right ideas: lower tax, lower public spending, less regulation, ruthless border control – all of them clearly and credibly articulated.
She has got the Tory engines running again, and thank heaven for that because this country is on the verge of a socialist disaster.
Look at the mess we are in. We have taxes at an all-time high, with the Government taking more than 37 per cent of UK GDP, and yet Chancellor Healey is absolutely certain to impose even higher taxes this month. Everybody is quivering, waiting for the blow to fall – they just don’t know where. The result is that British business is paralysed with funk, no one is hiring, unemployment is rising (now up to 4.9 per cent) and talented people continue to flee the country in droves.
Kemi Badenoch’s speech was exactly what was needed; not only full of pep and fizz and vim and verve, but with the right ideas, writes our columnist Boris Johnson
After only a few weeks in office Andy Burnham is going to achieve what many of us believed to be impossible – he is more Left-wing and useless than Starmer himself, says Johnson
The reason Healey has to raise taxes is not just that Labour has lost control of public spending, though that is true. Healey’s problem is credibility. He has to show the markets that he is willing to exert some sort of fiscal discipline. That is because we have debt of £3trillion – another record – which means that the gilt markets are charging the government 5.5 per cent – another record – so the cost of servicing that debt, just paying the interest, is about £107billion a year. That is about £300million per day just on debt payments.
Think what we could do with another £300million per day – and yet it is taxpayers’ money being poured down the drain. Labour has got this country into an absolute doom loop, in which higher taxes are depressing growth and forcing up welfare spending, which is in turn leading to ever-higher taxes.
That is why people are going to live in America, or Greece, or Ostend, for goodness’ sake. That is the legacy of Sir Keir Starmer, the human bollard, who completely failed to tame public expenditure. Remember what happened when he tried to do the right thing? He tried to cut some of the PIP or other disability payments now being received by six million people in this country.
He had a reasonable case for reform, because the bill has risen astronomically to about £77billion, and as everyone knows more than 40 per cent of these payments now go for such inscrutable mental afflictions as ‘anxiety’. But most Labour backbenchers swiftly worked out that the number of PIP claimants in their constituencies was now bigger than their majorities, so they squashed Keir’s reforms, chucked him out and replaced him with the Manscaraed Mancunian.
And after only a few weeks in office it is clear that Andy Burnham is going to achieve what many of us believed to be impossible. He is more Left-wing and useless than Starmer himself. He wants to set up a National Care Service, at a cost of about £18.5billion a year, and he wants to renationalise just about everything, with the potential cost running into hundreds of billions.
It is absolute madness, the exact opposite of what this country needs – because he will have to fund all this with yet more taxation, which will depress confidence yet further, which will lead to lower growth and lower revenues and therefore – since spending will climb remorselessly on these plans – ever more taxation.
And as if to accelerate the country on its downward doom spiral back to the 1970s, he wants to take us back into the European Union; or at least he wants to begin a negotiation about the single market, or the customs union, or something. This is of course a betrayal of his promises to the people of Makerfield, but never mind that. What matters is the great pointless lowering cloud of uncertainty that he is casting over the British economy.
Investors in this country are already spooked by changes to tax, especially what Starmer did on inheritance and business taxes, and by what Burnham will be forced to do to fund his promises. Now they have to start worrying again about the whole regulatory framework of the UK.
Why would you start a new business, when you don’t know who will be in charge of the rules and regulations, the tariffs and quotas? We know the EU, and their Tehran-like negotiating style. This uncertainty will last for a decade at least.
The worst thing about Burnham’s plans to Brejoin is that they have nothing to do with the needs of our economy, and everything to do with party politics. He thinks he has had a bounce in the polls, and he thinks that by offering to undo Brexit he will get enough Lib Dem and Green voters to come his way so that he can risk it, break his word yet again, and call an early general election.
I increasingly think this is a risk. His bounce in the polls is so far pretty modest, but Zack Polanski is tanking and Ed Davey seems almost irrelevant. As far as I can see, Labour only need to be on about 30 per cent, and they have a very good chance of winning. Which is why it was so cheering to see the damp old brushwood of the Tory party finally catch fire this week.
Together with her excellent Shadow Chancellor, Andrew Griffith, Kemi Badenoch has laid out a clear and rational plan to rein in public expenditure with some common-sense measures. From reducing the size of the civil service back to 2016 levels, to restoring the two-child cap on benefits, to reforming PIP and cutting benefits to foreign nationals, the Tories have now found about £71billion of spending cuts – and it is control over public spending, as I say, that is the absolute precondition, because that is what gives you credibility with the markets and allows you to cut taxes.
Here, again, the Tories are opening up a clear blue gulf between themselves and Labour. We know from what he said in 2010 that Burnham is likely to look at a new tax on estates – death taxes – to fund his plans for social care, while the Tories are offering to abolish inheritance tax on the family home.
I believe this is right, since it has always been deeply unfair that you should be taxed again on the home you have already sweated to pay for out of taxed income; and I also think it will be popular. Kemi has laid out the battle lines for the next election, and they are the right ones.
Kemi with her husband Hamish after she left the stage following her keynote speech during the Conservative Party conference on Wednesday
Kemi has laid out the battle lines for the next election and they are the right ones, says Johnson
The British people are not fools. They can see that Labour is back to the old tax-and-spend of the 1970s, and though many are now too young to remember those days, they can see that it is going to end in disaster. They can feel it in their tax bills.
People know instinctively that the economy cannot grow under these conditions, and that confidence will not come back. As for Burnham’s decision to break his promise, and take Britain back into the EU, I think he is insane. To go back into the European Union, the British people would have to agree to give up control of their laws, just when we need to be more flexible in a global economy. They would have to give up legal control of their borders. They would have to give up control of their currency, in the sense that the rules of the EU mean you cannot join without joining the euro; and of course they would have to start sending those epic cheques to Brussels again, to be spent, at the discretion of the Commission, on Potemkin olive groves in Greece.
It is just never going to happen. If Andy Burnham wants to fight an election on reversing Brexit, I say bring it on, baby. We will fire up that bus – the bus of truth – and we will win again. You will have seen that the odds have been recently shortening on Kemi Badenoch becoming the next prime minister, and that more people now say they would consider voting Conservative than for any other party.
That is because they are recognising that other Right-wing parties are either full of ethnonationalist nutcases, or have no credible plan for the economy; and it is because many people are suddenly desperate for a sensible and moderate Conservative alternative to a Labour party that is obviously taking this country in the wrong direction.
This was the week when the Tory engine came back to life. Under Kemi Badenoch they are finally firing on all cylinders. I reckon a lot of disaffected former supporters are going to get back on board.