Kemi Badenoch’s advisers looked like they were walking on air after her conference speech in Manchester on Thursday. They went skipping out of the hall, spinning it as a great success.
And it was successful in all the superficial ways: well-delivered to rapturous applause and with a properly big surprise announcement to close on with her pledge to abolish stamp duty, the tax on property sales above £125,000 (or £300,000 for first-time buyers).
There was all that excited lobby talk of a narrative shift. Didn’t she speak so well? Perhaps things won’t turn out so bad for her after all, despite the months of terrible poll ratings and the spectre of a confidence vote.
So have the Tories finally have found a solution to their ills? Perhaps, but that solution might just be to consciously uncouple from objective reality. The stamp duty cut, without anything to replace it in the form of some new property tax, would cost the Exchequer around £9bn a year. The business rates cut for high street shops and pubs, pre-announced by shadow chancellor Mel Stride and repeated by Badenoch, would cost around £4bn a year.
The plans were presented as “fully costed”. How so? Well Stride said they will be funded by a helpful, and helpfully vague, £47bn of savings that the shadow cabinet have “found” in recent months. Some £23bn of this would be cuts to welfare. A sceptical observer might ask why it was so hard to find them 15 months ago when this same shadow cabinet was in government.
As well as paying for the proposed tax cuts, half of the projected savings would be used to bring down the budget deficit which is currently running at over £60bn a year. It took some gall to say all of this while accusing the other party leaders of “shaking the magic money tree”.
Some are already sceptical about how serious these plans are. Take Mel Stride’s pledge on business rates. A Tory with experience in government told me that, gazing into the crystal ball, if that pledge makes it into the Conservative manifesto at the next general election we can be sure they will not be in a position to form the next government.
All of this was a clear gear change. Badenoch has thus far been urging patience. She set up arcane policy commissions and said the papers would have to wait until 2027 to hear concrete proposals for the next Tory manifesto. No longer. In the silence she created, Reform flourished. Now the pain of polling at the same level as the Liberal Democrats has proved too much to bear.
But to have landed on a plan of more swingeing cuts to pay for tax cuts suggests a failure to grapple with the reasons the Conservatives just suffered their worst election result ever: partly, a crumbling public realm. Labour’s attack dogs will be drooling at the prospect of ripping these plans to shreds.
That speech and its aftermath might end up mirroring the sequencing of the conference as a whole. The brief, happy delirium of endless champagne receptions, followed by a crushing hangover.
But now at least the Tories have something to go out and argue about.
[Further reading: Lucy Powell: I’m already moving Labour leftwards]
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