Mel Stride’s apology for Truss episode will fall on deaf ears

Good morning. I had planned to write about Rachel Reeves’ big speech today. But given that I haven’t written about the opposition for a while, and Mel Stride, shadow chancellor, is due to deliver the speech I have been saying the Tory party needs to give for some time, it seemed churlish not to write about it. More on Reeves’ speech in a future note.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

The role of a shadow chancellor is threefold: to repair their party’s reputation for economic competence, protect it from attacks over its spending plans and attack the government of the day. I list these in that order deliberately. If you don’t repair your reputation, it makes it much easier for the government to respond by listing the failures and mistakes you made that led to you getting turfed out of office.

Stride’s tenure as shadow chancellor has largely been a failure. Shadow cabinet ministers can essentially say and press release what they like without sign-off, which means they regularly make statements that imply either unfunded spending commitments or cuts. That is partly the fault of Kemi Badenoch’s office, which is the reason for the light-touch approach.

The Labour government’s record ought to make it a soft and easy target. Borrowing is up, gilt yields are up, the chancellor makes unfunded spending commitments on the winter fuel allowance then claims taxes will not rise. This is not a hard challenge politically!

But one big reason why Stride has been ineffective is that he has done little or nothing to repair the Conservatives’ record on the economy until now.

He will today apologise for Liz Truss’s “mini” budget in a speech. The political rationale for doing so is watertight: the Truss experiment, in a stroke, destroyed the Conservative party’s reputation for economic competence and helped power Labour’s landslide victory.

Apologising for the debacle and making it clear the Tories won’t ever embark on a similarly dangerous experiment in office is a prerequisite to restoring the party’s reputation, just as Keir Starmer’s embrace of the flag and expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn was a prerequisite to showing that Labour had changed.

All successful opposition parties find a way to discard and apologise for whatever it was that caused a breach between them and the electorate: David Cameron embraced social liberalism; Tony Blair embraced economic liberalism. Stride is absolutely right to apologise for the Truss disaster.

The problem is that while he has understood, Badenoch hasn’t. Liz Truss is no longer an MP and, at a basic, strategic level, the Conservative leader should have made a great show of kicking her out the party by now. This week, Truss appeared at the launch of a new whiskey owned by a boxer who had gone to prison for beating up a pensioner. Talking about being rid of her is a free, simple, no-brainer opportunity.

But Badenoch will not take it and indeed does not appear to have noticed that part of the job of opposition is signalling to voters that the party has changed. Her failure as leader means Stride’s speech is largely a pointless expression by a waning Tory leadership rather than a sign the Conservatives are finally getting it together. But if the party is to have a future, it relies on echoing what Stride is saying today.

Now try this

I had a lovely dinner last night at Camille, the wonderful French bistro in Borough Market. The food was delicious, the wine wonderful. But what sets Camille apart is the quality of the service and the experience. Whenever I go, whether for dinner with friends or lunch with a contact, I wish I went more regularly. Don’t take my word for it though: Tim Hayward’s review is here.

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