LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Few ministers will likely leave the Conservative conference with their reputations improved, it is probably safe to say. However, it may equally be argued that few individuals would have anticipated Jake Berry to be one of the specific casualties.
Liz Truss appointed Berry, an MP for Rossendale and Darwen since 2010, as party chair in the hopes that his connections with the “red wall” MPs, for whom he served as something of a forerunner, would keep a new, inexperienced administration in touch with the public.
Berry, though, runs the risk of developing a bad reputation for making ineffective media appearances and for alienating the MPs he is charged with retaining just under a month into the job.
Many of Berry’s struggles at the Birmingham conference were a direct outcome of larger issues. He was by no means the only politician to spend the whole Sunday vehemently supporting the elimination of the 45p tax rate, only for Kwasi Kwarteng to abandon the plan before 8 a.m. on Monday.
However, Berry did raise some eyebrows when he made it clear that he thought any Tory MPs who ultimately voted against Truss’s mini-budget should lose their whip.
When Michael Gove, the former levelling up secretary, announced at a number of conference fringe events that he would still vote against the 45p proposal, any expectations that his statements from a Sunday morning TV interview may quell a revolt were dashed.
Berry’s interview with Sky News included a number of other flubs, including an apparent remark that families with higher energy costs “can either cut their consumption, get a higher salary, or get out there and get that new job,” as part of a muddled comparison to government expenditure.
Additionally, he referred to the claim that the proposed tax cuts will disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Britons as “nonsense.” Berry claimed he could not see it after being given a graph from the think tank Resolution Foundation demonstrating that this was the case.
Berry, who serves in the cabinet as a minister without a portfolio, is hardly the only MP-facing minister under fire. Backbenchers have debated whether Chief Whip Wendy Morton should be fired as a consequence of the threats against the whip, according to The Guardian.
However, it must be denied that Berry’s very visible involvement largely strengthened the rebels’ determination. Some said that in order to demonstrate the number of people at risk of losing the whip, they made the fast decision to go public with their worries.
This surge of opposition so dissent Truss that she felt compelled to phone a number of other dependable ministers to ascertain the intensity of opinion on the backbench over the 45p rate before doing the U-turn.
