Bad smell lingers around Tories as past failures return to haunt them

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Good morning. The UK government’s £63mn-a-year deal with France to prevent attempts to cross the Channel in small boats is “throwing good money after bad”, said Tim Loughton, a senior home affairs select committee member and former minister.

As for the Australia trade deal, that’s bad too, according to former cabinet minister George Eustice. Some thoughts on the kvetching and general bad air around the government in today’s note.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.

Worse than Eustice

The UK-Australia trade deal has come under a blistering attack from one of the cabinet ministers who negotiated it, the ex-Defra secretary George Eustice. Speaking in a parliamentary debate on Australia and New Zealand trade deals in the House of Commons, he admitted:

The Australia trade deal is not actually a very good deal for the UK. It wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. Indeed, there were things that we achieved: a special agricultural safeguard for years 10 to 15, staged liberalisation across the first decade, the protection of British sovereignty in SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] issues.

It’s no surprise that many of these areas were areas negotiated either exclusively or predominantly by Defra on behalf of the UK team.

But it has to be said that, overall the truth of the matter is that the UK gave away far too much for far too little in return.

Part of what is going on here is that one of the rows that went on behind closed doors in Boris Johnson’s government has broken out into the open. Under Johnson, Eustice was derided by Liz Truss’s closest allies as one of the “Waitrose protectionists” (which also includes Michael Gove and Zac Goldsmith) standing in the way of free trade deals due to their concerns about British agriculture.

Many of the so-called “Waitrose protectionists” believed that Truss was either signing up to trade deals to burnish her leadership credentials and/or was a monomaniacal ideologue with no feeling for what the UK was giving up thanks to her rapid-fire trade deals.

Of course, in the end, neither side really won. Truss got her trade deals, and burnished her credibility with the Tory right through getting them, but, well, we all know how that story ended.

As for her internal opponents: they lost the battle over the content of Truss’s trade deals and it remains to be seen whether their fears that British farming will end up being the biggest casualty of Brexit come true.

What’s significant is that, yes, Eustice’s speech is partly an attack on Liz Truss and her reputation. The quality of her trade deals is her only real hope of being remembered for anything other than her disastrous 44-day premiership, after all.

But the biggest loser from these headlines is Rishi Sunak. He once again faces criticism over one of his cabinet appointments — this time Dominic Raab, who was accused of behaving inappropriately towards civil servants during his previous stints as a cabinet minister. And yet again Sunak must deal with headlines about the small boats issue and his government’s inability to tackle it — this time, the problem is a £62mn-a-year deal with France that nobody, not even his home secretary, believes is sufficient to tackle the problem. The UK-France deal is “not a silver bullet”, Suella Braverman said yesterday.

It adds to a highly unhelpful smell around his government: that this is an administration that is divided, fractious, can’t fulfil its functions and is doomed.

Now, you may say: well, yeah. Just look at the polls. Redfield and Wilton’s latest numbers find Labour ahead of the Conservatives by 24 points. What does it matter if the government looks worse? I would say there are two problems. The first is that the Tories’ poll rating could decline yet further.

Second, one reason why the Tory party is continually picking at old wounds, briefing against its own government and policy agenda is the general sense among a lot of MPs that the race has been run and they are heading into opposition. I don’t know what Sunak can do to change the general air of fatalism around his party — assuming, that is, we can safely rule out “first, invent time travel”. But if he doesn’t, then things are going to get even worse. That may mean he finds that he cannot even pass his budget, and that we end up with an election sooner rather than later.

Now try this

As one often does on holiday I found myself browsing various second-hand bookshops in Much Wenlock and Ironbridge during my weekend away. Included in my haul was Sir Terry Pratchett’s Mort (one of many mistakes I made as a student was to shed my Discworld books in a fit of “well, I won’t be reading that again”). Here’s Robert Shrimsley on the enduring power and quality of Pratchett as an author. My suggestion if you are giving the Discworld series a go is to start with Mort, Equal Rites or Guards! Guards! Under no account should you start with the first book in the series, which is not much cop.

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