Rishi Sunak must have bought his electoral sat nav from Del Boy Trotter. There is, in fact, no possible route from last Thursday’s polling meltdown to a hung parliament sometime in the autumn.
The Conservatives were stuffed last week, and they will be further stuffed in October or November. If there were even the remotest chance of a hung parliament (other than hung in the sense of the party being hung out to dry), Sunak would have already been booted from the highest window in Westminster Palace and replaced with the latest rent-by-the-day alternative.
As the results poured in, I was reminded of the brilliant line from Frasier: “Abe Lincoln had a brighter future when he picked up his tickets at the box office.”
The only thing that’s keeping Sunak in office is the fact that even the most delusional narcissists among his back-stabbing cabal know that there’s no strategy for saving the party’s electoral bacon.
So, they’ll let him take the hit and then battle it out between themselves afterwards. The rest of the casualties – and there’ll be lots of them – will be forming an orderly queue outside GB News and praying for any sort of slot, even the three-in-the-morning graveyard shift, when it’s just the moon-howlers and Liz Truss supporters in the Appalachian Mountains who are still up and about.
You know a party is weak when the only sound you hear in the strategy and communications room is the beep-beep-beep of the life support machine. Oh yes, they’ll be drilling down into every single detail of every single count and checking in with the team of actuaries to find out how many 75+ voters are likely to pop their socks between now and the general election. There’ll be the occasional glimmer of hope – usually just after they’ve consumed the tenth cup of coffee – but the beep-beep-beep will still drown out every other noise.
You know a party is weak when the only sound you hear in the strategy and communications room is the beep-beep-beep of the life support machine
After losing the short-straw selection process, a few poor sods from the backbenches will be pushed towards cameras and microphones and told to sound upbeat. For some reason they all seem compelled (maybe it’s some sort of hypnotism that follows the short-strawing) to talk about the ‘message’ the party has heard from the voters.
I heard that very same message. It was loud, crude, graphically clear and ended in “you can …. OFF”! Yet the message the MPs hear is an entirely different one: one in which their base vote is apparently staying home because they just want the party to do better. Nope. They really do just want them to “…. OFF”.
On the Sunday shows it’s the ‘rebels’ on the prowl. It’s not their role to sound upbeat, but nor is it their role to sound utterly crazy.
I make no secret of the fact that I can’t stand Suella Braverman and her tone-deaf, tin-eared, dog-whistling to the sort of people who would probably tell her to “go back to where you came from” if she actually wandered into the areas where they live.
She may think they adore her: but the brutal truth of the matter is that dyed-in-the-wool racists make no particular distinction between her and the people they want bundled into a plane headed for Rwanda. And if she doesn’t believe me then I suggest she should make her way to quite a few places across the UK without her press crew, security team or office staff in tow.
It looks like the Conservatives are in for a lengthy period of opposition – which is probably no bad thing. The party needs to put itself under an unforgiving microscope and work out what has gone wrong.
Crucially, it most row back from the scaredy-cat swing to the right it took in the 2015 manifesto, when David Cameron offered a referendum on EU membership to try to keep UKIP from winning votes. Since then the party has kept swinging to the right because it has feared UKIP, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK (basically the same group of people in charge of all three).
Ironically, the alt right has been fuelled by the Conservative Party – because the more it shifts, the easier it becomes for the alt right to describe itself as mainstream. The Conservatives need to stop helping Farage and assorted fringes.