All the things not being talked about in the Tory leadership race

The Conservative leadership contest has, it is fair to say, been hard to avoid. It is the summer and I do not get to vote for the next prime minister and you probably don’t either but still, here we are, persistently haunted by Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

They have both announced roughly three new policies every hour on the hour, they cannot stop attacking each other and, as far as I can tell, they have now done hustings in every single local authority in Great Britain. They have talked about tax rises and tax cuts and Russia and China and Boris Johnson and Labour and the Liberal Democrats and seemingly everything else.

Well, not quite: sometimes what politicians do not talk about is just as interesting as what they do decide to talk about. Here are some topics that have been conspicuously absent from the debate:

Once upon a time, an important question in leadership contests was: can this person bring our country together? At the very least, can they bring our party together? Candidates would promise that they and only they could be the one to carry everyone forward, that they had a plan for everyone to get along and be happy again, or something along those lines.

It is fascinating that neither Sunak nor Truss is even attempting to make this case. There are attacks on the Labour Party, of course, but little is done to give the impression that their premiership would be a bridge-building one. Perhaps it is a more honest way to go about politics; it just isn’t clear if it is an effective or a reassuring one.  

Are you aware, reader, that one Margaret Thatcher used to be leader of the Conservative Party and indeed served as prime minister for many eventful years? And are you aware, my friend and confidant, that one Boris Johnson has been leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of the United Kingdom since 2019? Now, this may shock you, and I can only apologise, but did you also know that 29 years elapsed between the former and the latter, and that the Conservative Party had numerous leaders and prime ministers in that time? I know, I know, I hope you were sitting down for this.

More seriously – it is nice that we’ve had a Summer of Thatcher but, really, the candidates could surely learn more from John Major. Aren’t they hoping to succeed a unique leader after many years in power and then go on to win a general election themselves?

Elsewhere, Theresa May could be an interesting person to point to – she cared about the “Just About Managing”, those people whose lives are comfortable enough but nowhere near stable, and that is a demographic we are about to hear a hell of a lot more from in the coming months.

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Both Sunak and Truss lead the classic Tory MP life. They are married and have wonderful children and live in a lovely big house, and so on, and so forth. It is quite striking that we have heard little about this, about how jolly it is to have wonderful children and a loving partner, and how Conservative those values are, yadda yadda.

Could it perhaps be because they both, until recently, supported a leader whose approach to “family life” was somewhat more, erm, liberal? In any case, this feels like a good thing. There are few silver linings to the Johnson premiership but the end of the white picket fence and the corny family photoshoot is a welcome development.

I mean, this one speaks for itself. Britain has been burning for weeks now but do we care? Oh no we do not! Maybe we will care one day but who knows! It’s not like this is an emergency, right? Not like we have to act now. Hohoho, no it isn’t.