Economy must come first for Boris Johnson’s successor - Bernard Ingham

He certainly has four things to his credit: seeing off the appalling threat represented by Jeremy Corbyn with the best Tory election majority since 1987; Brexit; getting us over the worst of Covid with a world-beating vaccination programme made possible by leaving the EU; and rallying the West in defence of Ukrainian freedom and ultimately our own.

On relatively lesser issues, essentially concerned with his integrity, he certainly came a cropper.

He eroded trust which was ruthlessly exploited by the enemies he had made along life’s road and vicious Remainers.

But this raises two questions: can we ever describe our politicians’ integrity as “a little thing”?

And what about the most challenging “big thing” – his handling of the economy?

None of us has a clue how we are to get us out of the financial straitjacket represented by the cost of Covid and Vladimir’s Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Nor, frankly, am I much wiser as a result of the pitches by the cavalry charge of candidates running for the Tory leadership.

Apart from ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak, they seem to be obsessed with cutting taxes or other imposts.

It is as if the costs of the Covid pandemic and the continuing war in the Ukraine, plus the insidious threat to freedom posed by China, were figments of the imagination.

A budget deficit of £300bn and a soaring national debt of £2.3 trillion (thousand billion) means we have no money in the kitty.

Worse still, we are draining £80bn a year of money we don’t have in servicing our national debts.

Now, do not get me wrong. I am all in favour of tax cuts.

I know I can spend my own money more wisely than the Government.

If anything has proved that, it is our ludicrous net zero energy policy that is feeding inflation.

But slashing taxes has to be justified as a likely non-inflationary engine of growth.

Three candidates – Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Kim Badenoch – seem economic realists but the latter two are rank outsiders with the bookmakers.

It is often said, with some justice, that Labour, infiltrated and substantially financed by the hard Left, does not know what it stands for any more.

Yet we are left wondering whether most Tory leadership candidates have any securer hold on their ideology.

The majority of voters are not daft, even if the wokerati suggest the nation has gone crackers. They know that current inflation and our economic plight are largely the result of pestilence and war.

But they need to know how realistically we propose to recover our economic balance.

That is the current overwhelming priority.

Without a reasonably convincing plan they know we can merely tinker at the edges of all our social ills.

That plan cannot realistically offer salvation in the two years left before the next election.

Our politicians have to be frank that we are in for a long, testing haul in a dangerous world and that only sound economics can pull us through.

I cannot believe that whoever ends up in No 10 can ever be as disorganised or inherently presidential as Boris.

That has been reflected in the chaos of the last three years that fed disillusionment.

But the winner needs to heed other lessons of the Boris era.

He or she must restore Cabinet government, provide evidence of order and discipline at the centre and get a real grip on communication with the public through the media.

By my standards, as an ex-No 10 press secretary, it has often been painful.

It is as if Boris did not care what it looked like.

And so used has the “greased piglet” been to getting out of scrapes that he probably didn’t.

Presentation was usually the last thing to be (cursorily) considered by Ministers in my time.

“Little things” like presentation do mean a lot in politics as I hope Boris now realises. I trust his successor does, too.