Political Review of 2022
by Sean Worth, Alex Black and Tom Hamilton
This end-of-year review takes a canter through what has been an undeniably extraordinary political year. In countdown style, we look at some of the most notable aspects:
Five secretaries of state looks at the extraordinary ministerial churn this year;
Four chancellors highlights the year’s economic policy instability;
Three Prime Ministers reflects on the Conservative Party’s uncanny ability to decapitate its leaders;
Two Michael Goves appraises the state of policy around development and planning;
One leader of the Opposition considers whether Kier Starmer might be our next Prime Minister...
Five Secretaries of State
Our first observation concerns the extraordinary level of turnover of ministerial staff we have seen this year, one of the more extreme examples being at the Department for Education, which has seen five Secretaries of State since only last Christmas. The department has a tradition of displaying their portraits in the lobby and the past year’s churn apparently required a scramble by decorators to find extra wall space to display them all. Michelle Donelan became their shortest ever head: she served in post for less than two days, having been appointed in the dying hours of Boris Johnson’s premiership, before resigning and calling on him to step down.
The turnover has not just been limited to ministers, but also to the rank-and-file backbenchers across all parties. Many MPs have also had the whip suspended, resigned or been expelled from the Commons. The most consequential and infamous instance was the former Chief Whip and ex-Planning minister, Chris Pincher, whose resignation followed an incident in which he had “drunk far too much” and groped two men in front of multiple witnesses. This of course precipitated the ministerial exodus which brought down Boris Johnson’s government.
Among other scandals, one of the most remarkable was Neil Parish MP, who while sitting next to a female colleague in the Commons chamber, opted to watch pornography on his phone. He later claimed he was researching combine harvesters called ‘Dominators’ and that he had happened upon a similarly-named adult website by mistake. Another was David Warburton MP, who - for reasons best known to himself - decided to pose for a photo with lines of cocaine.
This cycle of resignations and career-ending scandals across the Commons appears to have shredded what little was left of public approval for MPs, but for some, also their own will to fight the next election: many have announced that they will not stand again.
Four Chancellors
The business environment has been put in turmoil this year by incredible political instability, possibly best exemplified with the statistic that there were an unbelievable four Chancellors in little more than three months, from July to October this year. It started with Rishi Sunak, who after months of flirting with the idea of withdrawing support for Boris Johnson, finally resigned as Chancellor on 5 July.
This precipitated a two-day crisis in which a further 62 of the Government’s 179 ministers resigned – and ultimately brought down the Prime Minister. He was replaced by Nadhim Zahawi, who presided briefly through the summer leadership contest.
Zahawi was then replaced by Kwasi Kwarteng, who introduced his disastrous ‘mini-Budget’ on 23 September. Chaos ensued in the markets, with the pound dropping to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985.
Seeing the inferno in the markets, Kwasi decided to stoke it further, by briefing the Financial Times that weekend that there was “more to come”, precipitating a further massive surge in Government borrowing costs, which had the knock-on effect of nearly causing pension funds to collapse, were it not for the Bank of England’s intervention.
While Kwarteng was playing with matches, it is worth noting how pension funds came to be such a tinderbox in the first place. Many fund managers employed an “almost certainly illegal” financial product called liability-driven investments. This usage was noted and tolerated by the Bank of England for years.
Its Governor, Andrew Bailey, then made further ‘special’ contributions to financial stability by issuing no less than four contradictory market signals in a 36 hour period in October. The Bank continued in November with mixed messaging on interest rate expectations, which led the Financial Times to publish a tongue-in-cheek article offering a ‘support group for confused BoE watchers’.
Later that month, the OECD reported that over half (52%) of UK inflation is demand-driven: in other words, caused by the Bank of England having set interest rates too low for too long, and for having printed too much money over the pandemic. However, with Government blaming rising inflation on Russia for invading Ukraine, and the Opposition blaming Government for being incompetent, all this went entirely ignored in Westminster.
Truss attempted a U-Turn on the ‘mini-Budget’ at Conservative Party Conference this year, but the damage had been done and the Tories poll ratings tanked further. She sacked Kwarteng in desperation, replacing him with current Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who promptly tore apart Truss’ entire policy platform.
Following Truss’ departure, Hunt was compelled to overcompensate for the fiscal sins of the previous government and his recent Autumn Statement projected that by 2027-28, Britain’s tax burden would be at its highest sustained level for seven decades.
Three Prime Ministers
The year began with Boris Johnson under fire over raucous staff parties in Downing Street during the Covid lockdowns where others were confined to their homes and fined for breaching social distancing rules. The scandal was sustained by Johnson’s proclivity to minimise and evade responsibility through bluster. Over the following weeks and months it ground on, with further stories and delayed resolutions lathering up the general sense of sordid tedium. The only two entertaining details involved some civil servants - drunk on a ‘suitcase of wine’ - breaking a child’s swingset in the Downing Street garden and one of Johnson’s lieutenants attempting the memorable defence that he had been ‘ambushed with cake’.
Ultimately Partygate didn’t sink Johnson, despite the Sue Gray report and the police fines. However, the narrative that it created - his boosterish tolerance of misbehaviour - was the necessary backdrop which exhausted Conservative MP’s reserves of patience with him.
In the end, the coup-de-gras was delivered by a former mandarin, Sir Simon McDonald, who Johnson had compelled to take early retirement in 2020. McDonald waited until the moment of maximum danger for Johnson, and then released a letter to the press exploding Johnson’s core claim that he had no idea about the Pincher allegations.
Given that this was the event which propelled Liz Truss to power, she might have profited from the example of not making enemies of mandarins by humiliating them. Instead, Truss - not known for her social tact - decided to fire top Treasury civil servant, Sir Tom Scholar, on her second day in the job, making a public example of him and her contempt for the ‘orthodoxy’ he represented.
Within six weeks, Truss was gone, the shortest serving Prime Minister in history, and having torched the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence and having cemented said orthodoxy more firmly than any predecessor.
To the delight of the internet, the media competed with each other to mark the surreal, chaotic, historic premiership that had just passed. The Mirror posted a livestream of whether Truss would outlast a supermarket lettuce in a wig. Channel 4 broadcasted a mocking retrospective segment to Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’. Not to be outdone, BBC Newsnight posted their own sarcastic farewell montage to the tune of Rihanna’s ‘Take a Bow’, including choice lines such as “you look so dumb right now”.
Rishi Sunak then won the accelerated second leadership contest by default, after both main challengers - Boris Johnson, who had enough support, and Penny Mordaunt, who didn’t - both withdrew. Markets and journalists seemed to appreciate the return of relative normality and a professional Government operation, although there has been little in the way of a substantive poll recovery at this stage, and Sunak has a very steep hill to climb before the next election.
Two Michael Goves
Michael Gove became the country’s first ‘Levelling Up’ Secretary under Boris Johnson, a move which essentially renamed MHCLG in line with the Prime Minister’s main policy agenda. Gove’s most notable move in the role was his self-proclaimed ‘war on developers’ to force them to pay for replacing unsafe historic cladding. He found himself out of office after the fall of Boris, but has been resurrected by Rishi into the exact same role.
In post, Gove has taken back up his cause with relish and continues to pursue the builders, but some principal areas of his policy remit, notably planning, remain stalled. Since 2010, we have had no less than 14 housing and planning ministers (five this year alone) and the Conservatives’ 2019 election pledge to reform planning looks dead in the water.
The Party’s backbenchers recently forced Gove to drop plans for compulsory housebuilding targets, replacing them with advisory ones – which offer councils more ‘room for manoeuvre’ – or perhaps more correctly, the ability to ignore them altogether.
One Leader of the Opposition
In polling terms, 2022 has been Labour’s best year in a very long time. In fact, Labour has not been behind in any poll this year, something that last happened in 2002. It is easy to forget, given the enormous poll leads Labour built up during Liz Truss’s premiership and has largely held onto during Rishi Sunak’s, that it had pretty substantial poll leads for the last few months of Boris Johnson’s time in office too. All of which has led to a switch in media wisdom, with Keir Starmer now widely presumed to be nailed-on to be Prime Minister in a couple of years’ time.
The electoral mountain facing Labour is still, however, enormous – a swing comparable to that achieved by Tony Blair in 1997 would give Starmer a majority of just 1 – but it is hard not to be favourite when you are consistently polling over 20 points ahead of your rivals.
There is a narrative that says that this is all a result of Tory mistakes rather than anything Labour has done. There is some banal truth to this, but an opponent who shoots himself in the foot hasn’t got one of his feet any more, and this has big implications for the subsequent running race.
The conditions created by the last year or so, let alone the last 12 years – high inflation, high taxes, rising interest rates, stagnant wages, degraded public services and so on and so forth – create a favourable environment for any opposition party, and if you think Labour has nothing to do with any of this, well, all the more reason to vote for them.
In policy terms, Labour is in the curious position of having a pretty clear vision of what it wants to do with power, which it is not attempting to keep secret but which the media is resolutely uninterested in covering, but relatively little to say in terms of a retail offer to voters.
What has already been laid out in a series of policy papers, in terms of significant investment in green infrastructure, industrial strategy and devolution, amounts to a fairly detailed picture of where Starmer sees growth coming from and what it thinks the shape of the economy should be. But we know a lot less about Labour’s tax and spending plans, including surprisingly little about public service funding.
One of the biggest risks to Labour’s poll lead in the next two years is that its status as favourite will mean significantly more scrutiny than it has so far received, forcing it to answer questions it would rather leave unanswered until later. Either way, a Labour win at the next election looks a more likely prospect than it has for many years.