Wednesday 13 March 2024

The Tories are sunk under Sunak

Rishi Sunak is beginning to look like King Canute, unable to hold back the rising tide of casual racism, intolerance and corruption that threatens to engulf the party after Brexit. The party looks on helplessly and seems to be in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown with reports of MPs - including Sunak himself - having meetings with Sir Graham Brady, chair of the all-powerful 1922 committee. Some commentators suggest this is a prelude to the party ditching the PM and convulsing itself with a fifth leadership election in eight years. And to think we used to laugh at Italy.

Lee Anderson’s move to Richard Tice’s Reform UK company (it’s not a political party in anything like the accepted sense but a limited company) is the final leg of his mad journey from Arthur Scargill’s NUM via Labour as a local councillor and the Conservatives. And it’s only the last leg because we don’t have any party further to the right.  

He quit Labour in 2018, accusing it of being taken over by the hard left and joined the Tories. The Brexit-supporting MP won his Ashfield seat the next year and rose rapidly to become deputy chairman in February 2023. Six months later he was advising asylum seekers to “f*** off back to France” if they didn’t like the conditions aboard the Bibby Stockholm floating barge. 

His journey across the whole political spectrum has been nothing short of extraordinary, not for what it says about him, but for what it tells us about the Conservative Party.

The move came about after multimillionaire Tice offered a reported £400,000 transfer fee, payable to Anderson himself. Other Tory MPs are said to be considering a switch to Reform.

Anderson’s elevation to deputy chair of the Tories was, like Sunak’s anointment as a replacement for the useless Liz Truss, an attempt to show the party is something it's not. After Mrs Thatcher and Truss, they like to think of themselves as diverse and inclusive. Sunak himself was a reluctant choice but helped polish the party's multi-cultural credentials.  

However, I think we can see that underneath it has been shifting further and further to the right, led by its members who are pretty well exclusively unhinged elderly white men with views of the world that haven't changed in centuries and financed by other wealthy white men who aren't really political but only care about money and themselves.  The disgraced Crispin Odey was one and now we know Frank Hester is another.

Mr Hester is in the news after it is alleged (and not denied) that he had said in 2019 work meetings the Labour shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women” and added the MP “should be shot.” 

This apparently is not out of character for Hester, another multi-millionaire who has donated £10m to the Tories in recent years, about a third of the party's income. His money was made from his healthcare technology firm, the Phoenix Partnership (TPP), which has large and presumably lucrative contracts with the NHS and the DHSC. 

These are comments about him from anonymous workers at TPP:

Glassdoor is a workplace review site where employees can post their real thoughts to help potential employees decide if they want to work there or not. It's pretty clear Mr Hester, for all his protestations otherwise, holds some, let us say, quite extreme views.

The PM after 24 hours finally condemned the comments as 'racist' but only after a lot of pressure on Downing Street and his official spokesman. The party won't return his money which is being used to finance a 1200% increase in social media ads.

This led Tim Montgomerie the founder of Conservative Home to say Sunak 'can't do politics':

With polling last week showing the Tories hitting decimation territory at 18%, Montgomerie thinks Sunak must go and he has a point. Sunak is not a leader, in any sense of the word. He may grasp the details of stuff but he's more like a low-level functionary with a lot of self-belief but lacking any sort of charisma. 

The party is now between a mountain of rocks and an extremely hard place. It has a leader with zero campaigning skills who looks more like a sixth former wearing trousers that he has outgrown, than a prospective prime minister. Worse, he will be trying to defend a totally indefensible record with living standards lower now than they were in 2008.

Tory MPs want someone who can bend the truth and paint a glowing picture of life under yet another Conservative government. Someone who glosses over details and obfuscates and can persuade a sceptical public that they - and Brexit - deserve another chance.

I think you can guess who that person is.

Step forward Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. We are told he is going to campaign in the red-wall seats which the party won in 2019. 

This looks like the final desperate throw of the dice and shows how out-of-touch the party leadership is. They actually think red-wall voters have forgotten all the worthless promises made by Johnson in 2016 and 2019 and will be easily fooled again. Some will of course, but I suspect not many.

This is what they think of us.

It won't work. Under Rishi Sunak the Tories are sunk.

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