James Millar: Labour could learn a lesson from Conservatives – the goal in politics must be power

It surely hardly needs repeating that the thing that matters most in Westminster is power.

The ascent of Liz Truss underlines that essential fact.

And it contrasts with the forever wars that consume Labour.

While the Tories were putting a fundamentalist and her team of crackpots into government Keir Starmer was busy trying to keep the Trots at bay.

Last week Labour had another round of internal votes on the make-up of its decision-making National Executive Committee. This has been a battleground of sorts for decades but never more so than during the Corbyn years when the hard left seized the levers of party power, didn’t really know what to do with them and promptly blew up.

What remains is a cast of oddballs hell-bent on carrying the torch for their particular faction (and there are multifarious factions, it’d be a lot easier if it was just Blairites versus Bennites). Like all survivalists, they have a specific set of skills adapted to a particularly tough environment, in this case, internal Labour politics rather than a post-nuclear desert for example. However, these skills are unnecessary or unhelpful in civilisation at large. So the sorts of folk who people Labour’s NEC are entirely incapable of getting elected in a poll that involves contact with normal humans.

Liz Truss is every bit as out of touch as Jeremy Corbyn

Labour WhatsApp groups, Twitter threads and the like were filled with venom as the results were announced over the weekend.

And all the while Liz Truss prepared for her coronation.

Here is somebody every bit as radical and out of touch as Jeremy Corbyn. He was mocked for seeming to want a different electorate, one that aligned with his programme. Yet Truss is also peddling an ideology that is out of sync with what the voters want.

Joe Lycett may have stolen the limelight on Laura Kuenssberg’s first outing as a Sunday show star but you don’t have to have a tinfoil hat in your wardrobe to wonder if certain news outlets chose to target the Brummie funnyman to cover the fact the woman who was Minister for Women and Equalities said out loud that she’s not really fussed about inequality. Her statement that it is ‘fair’ that rich people benefit the most from her economic plans is a potential turning point in UK politics.

Truss thinks she knows best

Are we to become a nation that ignores inequality in pursuit of individual wealth? There’s no evidence the people are so cold-hearted, let alone foolish. To tolerate inequality is to fail to understand that anyone can be its victim because by nature inequality is unfair. And it is to condemn swathes of talent to the doldrums simply because the person in possession of that genius comes from the wrong background or location.

But Truss thinks she knows best, better than the people she’ll ask to vote for her in two years’ time.

I am honoured to be elected Leader of the Conservative Party.

Thank you for putting your trust in me to lead and deliver for our great country.

I will take bold action to get all of us through these tough times, grow our economy, and unleash the United Kingdom’s potential. pic.twitter.com/xCGGTJzjqb

— Liz Truss (@trussliz) September 5, 2022

She’s as arrogant as the Islington messiah. And she’ll come unstuck in the same way – when her programme is put to the people. The electorate likes to be led, not lectured to.

And yet there’s a key difference between Truss and Corbyn. She will get to put her unorthodox ideas into action. Because the Tories value power. We’ve gradually moved down through the Prime Ministerial gears since 2010 from the smooth running Cameron years (no matter how efficient your engine it won’t survive impact with an obstacle like Brexit) via Boris Johnson’s clown car that never got out of second gear to the stuttering jalopy parked in Downing Street today.

Lessons for everyone

But by remaining in power all those years the extremists could bide their time and eventually, this week, they get their shot at running and changing the country.

Truss’s top team are as unlikely as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet – a combination of the mediocre, the misguided and the downright daft. The thought of Barry Gardiner round the Cabinet table was as risible as the idea that Kwasi Kwarteng – a man who, if you pay attention to his attire, seems always to be wearing somebody else’s trousers, someone smaller than himself – could be Chancellor.

Back in January, I suggested to a high-ranking Conservative that adding Kwarteng to his Cabinet was a shrewd move by Boris Johnson. When he’d stopped laughing, the top Tory assured me that Kwarteng is a buffoon. That opinion will be proved true if he goes through with an emergency budget viewed as foolish by all respectable economists.

The Truss premiership will most likely be a calamity due to duff personalities, dodgy policies and, most of all, dire circumstances.

But there will be lessons for everyone. The first, for all stripes of Labour, is that the primary goal in politics must be power. From there you can attempt to take the country in any variety of directions depending on time and events. But this is a lesson the Tories have known for centuries, and Labour have yet to learn.

James Millar is a political commentator, author and a former Westminster correspondent for The Sunday Post