Convenience Big Store: Is this really a Conservative government?

27 September, 2021

In the headlines

Soldiers could be scrambled to drive petrol tankers under emergency plans being drawn up by Downing Street today, as motorists continue panic-buying. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps insists there is "no shortage of fuel", but the Petrol Retailers Association says up to 90% of the country's pumps have run dry. Two potential rivals for Keir Starmer's shaky leadership are drawing attention at the Labour conference in Brighton: Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham. Rayner made headlines on Sunday by refusing to apologise for calling Boris Johnson "scum". "She is an imbecile and until she realises that, the party will never be credible," one Labour MP tells The Times. Burnham, meanwhile, joked about his "King of the North" nickname: "I've not quite gathered the troops at the M6 Knutsford services, but the day may come if they don't sort out this levelling-up thing."

Comment of the day

A petrol station in Bury St Edmunds on Saturday. Edward Crawford/Sopa Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Is this really a Conservative government?

The centre in British politics is moving "stealthily, steadily to the left", says Matthew Parris in The Times. The knee-jerk response to every problem has become: "What's the government going to do about it?" And, increasingly, the response of the "chameleon" Tory party is: "We're working on it." What is it about the words "empty supermarket shelves this Christmas" that fills ministers with horror and media commentators with indignation? Will we starve if there's no turkey? Do mince pies contain essential nutrients unavailable from other food sources? Surely as grown-up consumers we can just adjust our habits.

Conservatives used to believe in the free market. If you're short of applicants for a job, you "raise the wage". If there's a fuel shortage, you let prices rise, because it will encourage more companies to supply fuel and prompt buyers to be sensible. Everyone understands the attraction of socialist intervention and state control, and occasionally it will prove necessary. But the voices that used to act as "counsel for the prosecution of statism" are silent. Events today may call for intervention, but "events always will". The Conservatives used to resist that call. Now we're getting a change of government without the formality of a general election.

Britain's green revolution could end in tears

All our political parties are green nowadays, says the Bagehot column in The Economist. The Tories want to "build back greener", Labour demands a "green industrial revolution" and the Liberal Democrats are urging everybody to "go further and faster". That leaves a huge gap in the market for "anti-green politics". Rising petrol prices inspired France's gilets jaunes; Germany's Alternative für Deutschland and Finland's Finns Party have lambasted "green hysteria". Anti-greenery is still nascent in Britain, but, like Brexit, it could easily tap in to ordinary peoples' resentment of distant elites. After all, environmentalism is driven by the populists' two big bogeymen, "scientific experts and multilateral institutions".

The green transition will hit the poorest hardest, not just because they are poor, but also because they are more likely to work in the "dirty economy" – unlike the bureaucrats and shiny entrepreneurs who push the eco message most loudly. Nigel Farage, driving force of Brexit, is all for "sensible environmentalism", but he's wary of the establishment variety that taxes "poor people to give money to rich people and big corporations while China's going to ignore it all". Policymakers should listen. They need to see the world through the eyes of people who accept that climate change is a problem, but must "ceaselessly struggle to get by" in the here and now.

Why it matters

In his "bizarre Marie Antoinette impersonation" at the UN, Boris Johnson showed no understanding of the hardship his "unthought-out, uncosted, unaccountable gallop to a green heaven" would impose on swathes of the population, says Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. Environmentalism's "messianic recipe for saving the world" is overwriting what was once our most sacred social principle: governments should not enact policies that "disproportionately hurt the less well-off".

Noted

Pop stars and fashionistas are "dressing like cult leaders", says Laura Neilson in Air Mail. Nicole Kidman, above right, has led the trend, playing a "witchy wellness guru" in the TV series Nine Perfect Strangers. Lorde, centre, has gone "woo-woo" in the music videos for her latest album, Solar Power. It seems everyone's wearing minimalist kaftans and Birkenstocks. Max Mara's recent resort collection featured "silky and ethereal ankle-grazing cream-coloured kaftans", while an "army of barefoot models", above left, wore faded-pastel sheaths on the runway for Rodarte's spring 2022 collection.

Zeitgeist

Medical journal The Lancet described women as "bodies with vaginas" on the cover of its latest edition. No, says Judith Woods in The Sunday Telegraph, "I'm not making this up". Apparently "women" is such a distasteful word that one of Britain's oldest scientific publications won't use it. I wonder what will have to change next, now "women" is off-limits. Song titles will be tricky. We'll have to settle for Bob Marley's No Person, No Cry and Whitney Houston's I'm Every Person. "My own favourite, because I am a person, has to be Aretha Franklin's You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Person with a Vagina."

Snapshot

Inside politics

In Bob Woodward's book Peril, American general Mark Milley details the lengths to which he went in preventing Donald Trump from starting a rash war. Such scheming is troubling, says Gerard Baker in The Times, and his discussing it with a journalist is "a shocking breach of confidentiality".

A senior commander urging others to ignore the commander-in-chief, as Milley did, "nudges American government closer to banana republic territory. What if Milley or some successor decides that Biden is too cognitively impaired to give orders and that it's the military's job to work around or defy him?"

Snapshot answer

It's a painting by Hunter Biden. The 51-year-old son of the US President has undergone a career change since his father won the 2020 election. Next month 15 of his hallucinogenic artworks on the theme of "universal truth" will be up for sale at the Georges Bergès gallery in New York. Each is expected to rake in between £55,000 and £370,000. Because of ethics concerns surrounding access to the White House, the identities of the buyers will remain unknown – even to the artist. It's a recipe for dodgy dealing and dodgier buyers, says Wessie du Toit in UnHerd. "Investing in artworks is now one of the easiest ways to exchange ill-gotten cash for respectable assets."