Good morning. Boris Johnson recently told the cabinet that its focus needed to be “crime, crime, crime”. Not committing it, you understand, but fighting it. In today’s newsletter, we talk about the consequences of the prime minister’s own fine, and examine one reason why crime is high on the UK political agenda again.
On a happier note, I had completely failed to realise that we have an extended weekend thanks to the platinum jubilee, which is a rather nice unexpected present. We’ll be back on Monday: until then, say hi at the email address below.
Inside Politics is edited by Jonathan Moules. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.
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Return of the living dead
Yesterday wasn’t a great day in the office for the UK prime minister to put it mildly. Lord Christopher Geidt, his independent adviser on standards, all but said that Boris Johnson’s fine represented a breach of the ministerial code, while Conservative MPs have continued to call for him to face a vote of confidence. How much trouble is the prime minister in?
Well, at risk of sounding like a stuck record, since the Conservative party changed its rule book to do away with the need for a named challenger, the only leader to lose a confidence vote is Iain Duncan Smith, who never commanded the support of a majority of Conservative MPs anyway.
While it’s pretty clear talking to Conservative MPs that enough of them are going to sign a letter calling for a vote of confidence in Boris Johnson to trigger one, it is far from clear that enough Tories are willing to vote against him in a confidence vote. What is certain though is that whatever happens, Johnson’s government has entered its zombie phase. As FT contributing editor and columnist Camilla Cavendish wrote back in April:
The real consequence of all of this is that a leader elected with an 80-seat majority, who could use that power to do almost anything, is now a hostage to his own MPs. Since February, Downing Street has brought in a chief of staff and head of policy who are both MPs, and launched a charm offensive within the party which means, one MP told me, “you can get almost anything, as long as you’re the last person to speak to him”. Hence the wars on the BBC and Channel 4, which are old Tory chestnuts. Hence the strange absence of onshore wind turbines from the new energy strategy, and the change of heart on conversion therapy after a backlash.
That remains the biggest and most important consequence of partygate. Whether Johnson survives or not, his government is not going to do anything controversial or radical any time soon.
The return of crime
That matters in part because there are any number of important policy issues that require a government willing to do controversial and radical things. One of them may well be the rising amount of fraud in the UK.
While there are some exceptions to this rule, in general, a good way to understand general election campaigns is this: the Conservatives go into them trying to make sure the Labour party cannot fight the election on health, education and the condition of the public services, while trying to drag the political conversation on to the economy, defence and immigration. Labour goes into every election hoping to fight it on schools and hospitals — while seeking to neutralise Tory advantages on the economy, defence and immigration.
The reason why both parties obsess over crime is that it is a rare issue that is a) highly important to most voters and b) one that neither party ‘owns’. And that is not just confined to the Labour-Tory battle in England and Wales: in 2007, when the SNP first took office in Scotland, they did so in part thanks to campaigning on knife crime.
That’s why, for all her department is still considered to be a disaster area and for all she is, currently, a faded political force, Conservative MPs have a lot of time for Priti Patel. They haven’t forgotten that Jeremy Corbyn made a great deal of political hay campaigning against police cuts and on crime, and her appointment was one big way that Boris Johnson clawed back the Tory advantage on law and order.
An underrated factor in the past decade has been that the long-run fall in crime has made it harder for Labour to neutralise ‘security issues’ like immigration and defence, and easier for the Conservatives to fight elections on their preferred turf. But scratch under the surface and while most crime is declining, one type of crime is on the up: fraud.
As the chart shows, while crime other than fraud is down, when you add fraud back into the mix, crime is, once again, rising. In fact, fraud is now the most commonly experienced crime in the UK.
This really matters. Firstly, of course, because fraud is a miserable experience. But secondly because it means that crime, the biggest swing issue in UK politics, is back on the agenda.
As it happens, the FT’s UK correspondent William Wallis has interviewed Mark Shelford, the police and crime commissioner who is now the lead PCC in charge of tackling fraud in England and Wales. One problem is that Action Fraud and the City of London police, the lead authorities in tackling fraud in the UK, lack the broad convening powers enjoyed by the National Crime Agency. Another is that it means that UK police forces doing a good job on fraud are invisible — as indeed are police forces that are falling short.
Now try this
Avril Lavigne’s debut album Let Go is 20 years old this week. Her latest record, Love Sux, is well worth listening to if you are in the market for unadulterated nostalgia. And it’s worth reading Sarah Manavis’ interview with Lavigne over at the Guardian, where the Canadian pop star reflects on fame, the music industry and the second life that her music is enjoying on TikTok.