Friday 7 June 2024

The Tory campaign goes from bad to worse

The election is looking like an extinction-level event for the Conservative party. It's hard to overstate just what a perilous position they're in or how bad a start their campaign has had.  The latest is Sunak's early return from the D-day commemorations in France, for which he was roundly criticised and has now had to issue a grovelling apology. The £2000 Labour tax 'bombshell' has indeed exploded in his face. After the Treasury confirmed the figure should not be presented as having come from civil servants, Sunak doubled down and insisted he was right to use it.

Even the party's supporters have called him out on it. The Spectator made a comparison and calculated that Sunak's own policies for the election would cost households £3000 - 50% MORE than Labour's!!  Ir was an insane own goal.

Sky News also worked out that since 2019, most of it under Sunak either as chancellor or prime minister, taxes per household went up by a staggering £13,000.  Even the inflated figure the Tories have claimed that Starmer is hiding is a fraction of the total they have loaded us with since 2019. It looks like hypocrisy at best.

Tim Montgomerie, the founder of Conservative Home, was on Newsnight last night and was absolutely excoriating about Sunak returning from France to carry out a political interview:

On Question Time, I see the audience was asked if anyone has yet seen any benefits from Brexit and just one man eventually gives a totally incoherent answer as if he doesn't actually believe it anyway:

This isn't the first time Fiona Bruce has asked the question either. Usually, nobody puts up a hand.

The BBC carefully selects the audience to ensure that it's politically balanced. I bet that a majority of the people in that Chester audience - or at the very least the largest minority, upward of 40% - voted Tory in 2019 to "get Brexit done" and now can't see any benefits.  What an abject failure.

I genuinely don't see how Brexit can survive, even under the Tories in the long run. Under a Labour government that doesn't believe in it at all, it will soon be ditched. Nothing is more certain.

I am looking forward to 5 July with relish although since so many Tory MPs are stepping down we will have to forego many of the 'Portillo moments' that I was hoping to see. If JRM loses his Somerset seat I will cheer it to the rafters.

According to some of the latest polls, the Tories will not even scrape three figures;

In others, Reform UK is snapping at the Tory's heels with just 2% separating them:

The problem for the Conservatives is that they and Farage's mob are chasing the same demographic and if you're a dyed-in-the-wool Brexiteer, a closet racist, belong to the far right and harbour dreams of a British Empire 2.0 why would you vote for Sunak when you can have the real thing?

They were never going to be able to out UKIP, UKIP and should have returned to the centre ground instead of drifting ever rightward. The gamble Cameron took in 2016 was supposed to begin that move but instead, it allowed the right to capture the party and use it to give us Brexit, the very policy which now threatens to destroy Conservatism for a generation.

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