Saturday, 10 February 2024

Tories in ever deeper trouble

The Tories are in wipeout territory. More and more MPs are clearly recognising the game’s up. The (briefly) former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is the latest to announce he won't be standing again at the next election and I read reports that party managers are pleading with others planning to step down not to do so en masse and to coordinate things to avoid the impression of a party in meltdown. Only the most deluded want to risk standing again, knowing they are either absolutely certain or have a good chance of being utterly humiliated on live TV.

It’s hard to see Michael Gove wanting to spend years on the opposition benches so I expect he’ll be off soon. Claire Perry, a former Tory Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth under Theresa May has left the party altogether and is endorsing Kier Starmer!

Meanwhile, the Labour lead is up to 25% in a YouGov poll for The Times:

Another poll by Redfield and Wilton Strategies puts Labour ahead in every age group, even those over 65!

The FT’s John Burns Murdoch shows just how bleak a future the Conservatives have to look forward to. His analysis shows that the number of young voters who 'strongly dislike' the Conservatives has doubled from 20% to 40% since the EU referendum.

Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov writes in Prospect Magazine that the Tories are in bigger trouble than they might think, despite trying to sweep the Brexit mess under the rug: Brexit hasn’t gone away. Just look at the polls

Kellner concludes that the Tories “have failed to hold on to their surge in support from Leave voters—and become increasingly toxic to pro-Europeans. The result has been to shrink their traditional, ideologically broad, electoral base and threaten their ability to win future elections.”  (added emphasis).

I am seriously starting to believe we may be on the verge of a Canada 1993 moment when the governing Progressive Conservatives suffered a spectacular defeat, losing 154 of their 156 seats in one of the worst-ever reversals for any governing party in the Western world. We can only hope.

However bad things turn out, it won’t be bad enough (unless they do get totally wiped out). They will have deserved everything they get, and as I have said before, Brexit will be at the core of it.

To believe in Brexit from the beginning you had to be pretty stupid and gullible. It meant we never stood a chance of having a competent government afterwards. Johnson compounded things in 2019 by clearing out anybody who thought Brexit was a crazy idea and much like Trump’s GOP in the US, the Tory party became a super concentrated mix of ignorance and incompetence.

People entirely lacking in any sort of ability were thrust into high public office and proceeded to wreck the country. Patel, Braverman, Truss, Kwarteng, Jenrick, and so on and so on. The list is endless. When you think they must have run out of imbeciles up pops another one.

The chief secretary of The Treasury Laura Trott was humiliated on Radio 4 yesterday when Evans Davies (an economist by training) exposed the fact she didn’t realise that debt as a percentage of GDP is forecast to rise up to 2027-28. He quoted the latest OBR figures to her and she still insisted it was falling!  This is the Treasury's No 2!!!

But it isn’t just incompetence or the denial of reality, although that should rule them out of office anyway, it’s the corruption, the cronyism, the gaslighting, the immorality, the scandal and arrogance, the warping of public standards, the total disdain for the lot of ordinary people.

Rishi Sunak is incredibly unpopular and his campaigning skills are virtually non-existent. He has zero self-awareness or empathy as we saw last week. I think he must know they’re in for a historic spanking.

The strategy seems to be not to run a campaign on their own record, how could they?  Literally, nothing works here any more. The last 14 years have really been shockingly bad, so they intend to attack Labour and portray them as being worse and having no plan. It's a terrible idea. Firstly, nobody but nobody could be worse and I personally would vote for Starmer even if he announced at a press conference that Labour had no plan.

I used to think I could forgive anything for a bit of competence in government but we've reached such a state that even Labour incompetence would be better. At least we would be spared the rest of it.

The question Central Office should be asking is who can rebuild the party after what promises to be a historic defeat? I don't see anybody remotely capable and even if there was such a person, the grassroots membership isn't ready to accept them anyway. 

Finally, Professor Chris Grey excelled with a long blog post yesterday which is simply sublime: Unpicking the defences of Brexit.   He utterly dismantles Brexit and Brexiteers, and the mental contortions they have to resort to to defend their failed project. It is longish but every paragraph is a gem.

Finally, finally:

Tweet of the week:

From June 2016


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