It really is time for the Tory party to wake up and smell the fuckoffee. The public didn’t care if you were replaced with baby eating Satanists provided you were thrown out of office, publicly whipped, humiliated & thrown into the dark recesses of hell, never to return. They won’t even consider voting for you again unless you can prove that you are serious about power. Serious about policies. Embracing new ideas. And for God sake stop banging on about Brexit, the EHCR, Rwanda & how you are doing to protect our borders, when you haven’t thought any of this through other than headline catching slogans. And please, please, please, stop being so weird. We have evolved from being the nasty party into the weirdo nut job collective, with existential arguments about ‘being a true Conservative’ and ‘getting rid of the wets’. Let me tell you something for nothing. You carry on like this and you will self destruct and open the door to Reform. Perhaps that what some of you want.
The leadership elections are depressingly and predictably ghastly. Jenrick makes Boris Johnson look like a pillar of probity and good sense. It hard to believe that he used to claim that he was a One Nation Conservative. Now he represents the raving loony, carpet biting, Lederhosen wing. A deeply unpleasant and dangerous malignant pustule on the bottom politic who has been employing his attack dogs to smear the other candidates.
And Tom Tugendtwat? I used to have high hopes for him. Intelligent, middle of the road. Thoughtful. He is supping with the devil too. It’s like a drug to these people. One of his problems is that he appears to have no self awareness. Keeping the King’s secrets and keeping the country safe whilst waving flag and uniform is both pompous and mildly ridiculous. He has become the John Inman of the serving classes.
There are only two serious candidates. Cleverly and Badenoch. Both have resisted the mantra of leaving the EHCR simply because the arguments are complicated with serious repercussions for the Good Friday Agreement and our standing in the world. It needs to be reformed as do most of the immediate post war treaties on asylum and refugees . Not that there is anything that the Tories can do about it for the next five years. But at least these two are serious politicians. But are the Parliamentary Party serious? There are so few of them that all could be on the front bench.
Please do not be deluded that a there are the green shots of a Conservative renaissance because of Starmer’s troubles. There isn’t. Starmer is a politician who not very good at politics and a manger who is not very good at managing. His emotional intelligence is limited. He has squandered any political capital on an an immoral and economically nonsensical plan to deny millions of impoverished pensioners their winter heating allowances. He has allowed his advisors to enjoy the luxury of a turf war against Sue Gray. At best this is a distraction, at worst it will slow down the wheels of policy delivery. His worst mistake was not so much the Chagas islands but failing to make it clear that he he would never bargain away the Falklands or Gibraltar. Oh, and let’s not forget the freebies. Well, we can hardly say that the emperor has no clothes….
But the public have short memories. If Starmer can get his act together quickly they will forget as they forgot the Formula One scandal that haunted Tony Blair in his early months of office. But he needs to get grip.
So far the only politician who seems to understand the mood music of politics is Farage. You may not agree with him but he knows how to tickle the electoral clitoris. And The Chagos fiasco embarrasses everyone except for him.
So how will the candidates react? If they have any sense they will turn this into an insult to Parliament debate. That Parliament should have been consulted….we need the details…..Chinese influence etc. Cleverly could turn this to his advantage as he knows what was on the table to discuss and he is entitled the papers when he was in office. Yet the Jenrick attack dogs will be spitting their venom while he will be wrapping himself in the Union Flag. ‘What would Margaret Thatcher have done?’ He probably doesn’t know that she was negotiating with the Argentinians in the run up to the invasion of the Falklands... And Tom will be keeping the King’s secrets with a chest full of medals.
Not long to go…