Charles Moore waves me to take the chair across from him. The seat is still warm, having just been vacated by his latest interview subject, Rishi Sunak, a frontrunner in the race for prime minister of Great Britain. I settle in to learn from the most renowned conservative columnist in the United Kingdom: Who will take over the country's fortunes? 

As Margaret Thatcher's personally appointed biographer, Lord Charles Moore has had a close relationship with every conservative prime minister since the Iron Lady was toppled from government in 1990. As editor of The Spectator, he spotted and nurtured Boris Johnson’s early “journalistic genius,” as he puts it. He counts Johnson as one of his most famous protégés. 

Fast forward: Johnson has been unceremoniously evicted from Downing Street by his party while the world press gloats. A fascinating succession battle is unfolding as Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss battle for the top job. By early September, Tory members will choose their new party leader, the next prime minister of Great Britain. 

“I think Liz has improved her game and Rishi has got weaker,” Moore tells me as he surveys the field. “But, then again, today, when I interviewed him, I thought he was very good. The best I've seen him.”

Weltwoche: The contest to succeed Boris Johnson got off to a gripping start. But, as I watched the two finalists, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, cross swords on television, I almost fell asleep, to be honest. What is the difference between the two leading candidates?

Charles Moore: Well, arguably, there isn't a fundamental difference. They both have quite a Thatcher-type approach to economics though they put their emphases in different places. 

Truss is more inclined to take a risk on public borrowing and public spending. To put it in very caricatured terms, on the purely economic questions, she's a bit more like Reagan, and he's a bit more like Thatcher. Thatcher was more cautious about the public’s finances than Reagan. Reagan knew that the U.S., as a reserve currency, could run a big deficit. Mrs. Thatcher knew she had to restore confidence in Sterling and in the British economy. So, she had to be more careful about the public’s finances, particularly at the beginning. That's the basic economic difference. 

Weltwoche: Would you say the two differ more in temperament than in ideas? 

Moore: Yes. Sunak would be, if you like, a more intellectual, more establishment figure, more like a very high-grade guy in Seattle, in Goldman Sachs where he worked, or more at ease at a Davos conference, Stanford, all that. He was at Stanford, actually.

She is a bit more rough-hewn and not so much out of the top drawer, as we say. I know his background is quite humble, but he went to a great public school, Winchester. He went to Oxford. Actually, she went to Oxford, too. And, of course, he became rich in his own right and very, very rich because of marrying his wife. I think if he were prime minister, he would be more the chap who tries to keep the whole machine working smoothly, and she would be more the person who wanted to disrupt things.

Weltwoche: Liz Truss is trying very hard to come across as a new “Margaret Thatcher.” Can she live up to her idol?

I don't think she is really like Mrs. Thatcher. I don't think she thinks about things very, very hard. She's more superficial. 

Then, of course, there's the question of how much you can apply a Thatcher example to modern conditions. It is very inexact. People shouldn't try to replicate things from fifty years ago. However, I would say that there is one important similarity, which is we're now in a crisis for the West — inflation, weakness of the West in the global situation, social unrest. And we were in crisis for the West in the 1970s. 

Weltwoche: There is a war raging in Eastern Europe. Leaders with stature and foresight are in demand. Does Truss have enough iron character to succeed as prime minister?

Moore: If you look at Ukraine, I would say Liz Truss is better than Rishi Sunak. However, that is her job because she's the foreign secretary. He was thinking more about, “How do we pay for this?” That was his job.

She has definitely been good on Ukraine. However, I sometimes wonder how much Truss thought it through to the next stage. Suppose that, six months from now, the war is still at a deadlock; lots more people have died; the Russians have not succeeded, but they haven't failed either; there's just a wasteland; and in the Donbas and you have 100,000 people dead. What will she do? Has she actually thought it through? Will we have to try and make a deal? Has Ukraine really got to win? What does winning mean? What will we do about our allies? Will we be able to persuade Germany to be tough enough? What will happen if the world starts to say, “Where's our grain?” The voters in Germany, the Netherlands, and so on, say, “Where's our gas?” I just wonder how much she's thought about that.

Weltwoche: When Boris Johnson was toppled, it looked as if Britain would plunge into a deep crisis. In reality, a fascinating succession battle has unfolded. You, personally, were very supportive of Kemi Badenoch, the former minister of state for equalities, who has Nigerian roots. What are the qualities that make her a leading figure in the Tory Party?

Moore: The obvious point is that some conservative views come very well from a person of an ethnic minority. And this has been a very interesting thing about this contest — how strong all that has been with different ethnic minorities being so prominent in the leadership.

All of the twelve candidates, to greater or lesser extent, are good. They're not there as tokens. They're all capable people. I think Kemi is the best of all of them. She's the best at understanding how conservatism can be, in a way, a rebellious force against orthodoxy or the establishment. People expect, wrongly, a Black woman from Nigeria to be on the left. Kemi, in fact, has a completely different attitude because she's come from a corrupt country. She likes Britain because it's a free country.

But she also has the thing, which is stronger in Africa than here, which is the importance of religious belief, family, and so on. She doesn't express economic ideas in a dry economist way, like Rishi does. It's all very much from the heart.

She also is very strong on attacking woke things, which he rather tries to keep at some distance. She puts it pretty well, and she's punchy. She'll hit back. She's actually the first person who's a front-ranked politician to put this into the mix of argument which the others have to think about. 

Weltwoche: Of the twelve candidates to succeed Johnson, half were women. Most of the candidates had an ethnic background, and their faith orientation ranged from Muslim to Hindu, Buddhist to Christian. Can you explain how the Conservative Tories have become the most diverse party in Europe?

Moore: First, the Tory Party has always been more diverse than people realize because it used to have a very strong ruling elite who tended to be Etonians and so on. But, of course, it would never have won an election with the votes of Etonians.

You should always remember that, at any one time, the conservatives won at least a third of the working class vote through the whole of the era of universal suffrage. This was partly to do with what was called the “imperial working class” who tended to be things like people making ships. It was related to Protestantism, as well. Protestants were Tory. Catholics were Labour in Liverpool, for example, and in Glasgow.

All that was there, and it developed into modern times. A certain type of upper working class person would be conservative because they didn't like the trade union movement, and they didn't like socialism, and they wanted opportunity. 

Then, on diversity, in the sense of race, I think this is to do with the fact that a great many immigrants are enterprising people. They hate being told what they think by people who claim to be their representatives. They hate all this public discourse, by left-wing Black or Asian people, which is all about grievance. In fact, they actually like Britain, and they want to get on through their own efforts.

Weltwoche: Soon, Britain will be governed either by a conservative woman for the third time or by a man of British Indian origin. Meanwhile, Labour has never had a woman or a person with an ethnic background as party leader. Why is that?

You've had a very weak Labour Party for a long time now. The last time the Labour Party was a dynamic, interesting party was probably before the Iraq War, so, about twenty years ago. Since then, it's gone downhill. It's got more extreme. 

It is very difficult being a woman or ethnic minority in the Labour Party because they see everything in terms of identity politics. In a funny way, this makes a Black or Asian person a prisoner in the Labour Party who's expected to say certain things and who has to satisfy a very angry constituency of people online and in social media.

Weltwoche: Boris Johnson was removed from government. You supported him for a long time. Were you disappointed with his performance as prime minister?

Moore: I think I've always written and thought that he has exceptional virtues and exceptional vices, and they're quite closely related to one another because his way is always different from everyone else's. This can produce extraordinary benefits, but it is has a lot of dangers. I think the sadness is that, because of COVID, he never really had the chance to start what you might call "an ordinary government" and try and make it work. So, we don't really know what he would've done if he just had to do the normal things plus Brexit. 

We do know he got Brexit done. But then he becomes prime minister, and what does he do about that? The answer is he wasn't able to do very much because he was wrestling with this tremendous problem [COVID], which actually I think he handled, on the whole, fairly well. Obviously, the famous success is vaccines. But, in general, I think most of the things he did he had to do.

Weltwoche: What were his biggest shortcomings?

Moore: He shouldn't have done the second or third lockdown, probably. Of course, he got very ill [from COVID] and everything was very difficult. In a way, he never really came out of that.

Weltwoche: Then, there were the parties he was involved in while he had his people locked up at home.

Moore: I honestly think the parties are not terribly important. They became important because they looked like arrogant behavior, and they were sloppy. But I think it was fundamentally quite trivial, actually. Put it this way: If everyone was happy about everything else, nobody would've cared about the parties. If energy prices weren't shooting up, and if inflation wasn't coming, and food wasn’t getting more expensive, and all the rest of it, people would've said, “Fine.” 

Weltwoche: In his resignation speech, Johnson said, “In Westminster, the herd instinct is powerful. And when it moves, it moves.” This implies his colleagues are a bunch of mooing cows. Has the Tory elite been guided by a herd instinct?

Moore: Yes. I think what he said about the herd instinct he didn't mean cabinet colleagues. He meant all conservative MPs because they're the herd. Whereas, the cabinet would be more at the head of the herd, sort of thing. I think there was a herd instinct moving against him. They were all getting frightened. But, fundamentally, this wasn't a moral question in their mind. This was about whether they would win the next election under him.

They realized that if they don't change the leader, now, it'll be too late before the next election. In that respect, it's the same as getting rid of Mrs. Thatcher in 1990. You do it in the middle of the Parliament [legislature], if you're going to do it at all. Yes, I think there was a sort of a plot to get rid of him, as there was a sort of plot with Mrs. Thatcher. 

Weltwoche: You say “sort of a plot.” 

Moore: Because a lot of these things are understood without being stated. Boris thinks that this conspiracy goes right back to the very beginning, because of the behavior of Dominic Cummings.

Weltwoche: Dominic Cummings, the former Svengali-like advisor of Boris Johnson. 

Moore: You may remember a very odd incident in which, very early on, the chancellor was Sajid Javed. He was thrown out by Boris and was replaced by Rishi Sunak. What it seems to be the case is that was all arranged by Dominic Cummings. When Dominic Cummings was supposedly backing Boris, he, Cummings, has now admitted that he was already fed up with Boris, thought he was no good, and wanted Rishi [as prime minister].

Weltwoche: Was Rishi Sunak an active part of this Cummings plot? 

Moore: How much Rishi knew? That I don't know. When I asked Rishi about this, just now, he denied knowing. So, that's the atmosphere of it.

Boris is right to feel conspired against. However, it is also his own fault because if only he'd been more disciplined, et cetera, he could have avoided all this. He definitely has thrown it away. He had a big majority and a lot of popular support. If he had only seen the warning signs earlier and thought about it more. This is the bad side of him. Sometimes he just doesn't sit down and reflect properly about these things.

Weltwoche: Have you spoken to Johnson lately?

Moore: Yes.

Weltwoche: Does he believe that he was stabbed in the back?

Moore: Well, I better not say what he says in private. But I think it's clear, from various things he has said in public, that he's unhappy with how it happened. I think I'm inferring that he does want to keep going on in some way.

Weltwoche: In the political scene?

Moore: Yes. I'm not quite sure what that means, and he probably doesn't know what he means, either. But Boris being Boris, you can imagine him coming back.

Weltwoche: “Hasta la vista,” as he said in his resignation speech. 

Moore: Yes. You mentioned it at the beginning of this conversation that it all looks very boring without him. I'd be surprised if this changed before the election. But suppose the Conservatives do badly at the next election and Boris is still in the game. He would be in a position to say, “Look, I was there. You, who threw me out: Look what's happened.” He probably shouldn't do it, because it would be very divisive. But he might.

 

Charles Moore, 65, is a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Sunday Telegraph. Margaret Thatcher personally appointed him to write her biography, published in three volumes (2013, 2016 and 2019). In July 2020, Moore was given a peerage and made a member of the House of Lords.