Sir Mel Stride will put “fiscal responsibility” at the heart of the Conservative pitch to voters at the Tory conference this week, three years after Liz Truss was bundled out of Number 10 when she lost the confidence of the markets.
The shadow chancellor and party leader Kemi Badenoch have put the economy at the centre of their fight for political survival with a traditional Tory platform of steep spending cuts, a smaller state and lower taxes.
“I think we are at a pivot point,” Stride told the Financial Times, comparing the supposedly parlous state of the public finances today to the economic crisis that ushered in Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979.
Stride, a keen wild swimmer who claims to achieve mental clarity from icy dips, insisted voters were ready for a bracing jolt of economic reality and that they realised the country’s debts were running out of control.
“There may come a point where, sadly, people become brutally aware of what living beyond your means looks like,” he said, claiming that bond markets could ultimately turn on the Labour government and force up interest rates and mortgage costs.
He does not share Badenoch’s view that Britain could be heading for a 1970s-style IMF bailout. “I think that’s very unlikely,” he said, but added: “That’s not to say we couldn’t be heading for some kind of bond crisis with runaway yields.”
Stride’s focus on economic competence is risky on at least two levels. Truss’s market-spooking micro-premiership is still a recent memory. “I called it out at the time,” Stride, a former Tory work and pensions secretary, said. “It will never, ever happen again.”
But even if voters overlook the Conservatives’ recent record of economic competence, will they want to vote for a party, currently languishing below 20 per cent in the polls, promising tough economic medicine?
Among the policies Stride will set out at the Tory conference in Manchester, from October 5-8, is a pledge to cut the civil service from 517,000 to 384,000 — the number of officials running the state in 2016 before Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We will bring the numbers back down, saving one pound for every four spent,” he said.
Stride’s calculation is that in today’s “fairly crowded multi-party field”, there is a space for the Tories as the party of sound money and business, not least if chancellor Rachel Reeves takes the economy off the rails.
The shadow chancellor admits that after the “incredibly brutal” reckoning with voters at last July’s election, it took a while for Badenoch and her colleagues to work out what to say. But now they know: “Fiscal responsibility lies at the heart of today’s Conservative party,” he said.
While Badenoch has been vying with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK over who can sound toughest on tackling migration — a battle some Tories privately concede she cannot win — the Conservatives are more confident on the economy.
“If I take the economy, I wouldn’t describe them as serious,” Stride said. “I think they are dangerous. If they were in power tomorrow, they would be a present danger to the economy and to everyone who lives in this country.”
He said Reform had “irresponsible” and unfunded plans, for example a tax-cutting proposal costed by some economists at over £50bn, with other policies that start to fall apart on contact with reality.
Stride, who set up successful companies running conferences in the UK and US, will also use his speech to try to “reconnect” with a business world which will be only sparsely represented at the Manchester conference.
“We are the party with business in our DNA,” he said. “We have to be much more of an enterprise-based society.”
At 64, Stride is a year older than the average Tory voter and his reference points are often rooted in an earlier political age: a portrait of Lord Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s tax-cutting chancellor, hangs on his wall.
He compares Badenoch’s faltering leadership of the party to that of Thatcher herself, who struggled initially as leader of the opposition. “We had all this with Margaret Thatcher back in the 1970s,” he said.
“Her voice wasn’t right, her hair wasn’t right, her dress wasn’t right, she wasn’t very good at prime minister’s questions. It took her some time to work her way into being the finished, formidable politician she was,” he added.
Some Tory MPs believe Badenoch will not survive beyond next May’s elections to the Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and in English councils, an encounter with voters who seem, to a large extent, to have forgotten the Tories exist.
“She is incredibly resilient, as cool as they come. She goes away, thinks about it and comes to a decision,” he said. “I’m very confident Kemi will be fine. But it’s going to be bumpy — it’s going to be difficult.”
In his spare time Stride is a qualified tour guide, taking visitors around national relics such as Stonehenge and the Tower of London. Is there a danger that the Tories, supposedly the world’s most successful political party, might also soon be seen through a historical prism?
“No,” he insists. “We are a grown-up serious party. It’s a very volatile environment. You would be foolish to predict results. We are doing the deep thinking about what we need to do to put our country back on track.”