We are watching the slow, painful death of the Conservative Party. Don’t forget to enjoy it.
For years now, Conservatives have given up on reality-based politics and committed exclusively to character-based politics.
Good afternoon. Whatever you do, don’t turn on the TV or open social media. The former is full of the worst kind of supine royalism and the latter is full of indignant republicanism. Just go and enjoy the long weekend. It’ll all be over soon.
But before you do, let’s take a moment to watch something die. There’s a grim fascination to observing the Conservative Party enter a period of sustained ideological breakdown. The news this week kicked off with the revelation that actually, no, Boris Johnson hadn’t gotten away with “Partygate”, and was, yes, in really quite a lot of bother.
The letters from Tory MPs to the 1922 Committee kept dripping in. A YouGov MRP poll found that the party would lose 85 of their 88 most marginal seats to Labour. Even Johnson’s own seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip looked like it was turning red.
The story just refused to go away. Even with the Gray report in and every minister under the sun insisting it was time to “move on”, new angles kept emerging. Harriet Harman would chair the standards committee inquiry into whether the Prime Minister misled parliament. Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, fired a salvo over Johnson’s dithering about his concerns. And reporters could smell the distinct whiff of blood over a Downing Street gathering on the evening of Johnson’s birthday – which the police and Gray inexplicably failed to pursue.
A truly scary prospect for Tory MPs
But the worst element by far was the standard polling. It hadn’t moved. It didn’t budge.
Normally that wouldn’t be too upsetting, but this week was different. Chancellor Rishi Sunak had just delivered what was, in effect, an emergency Budget, offering billions in help to struggling families during the cost-of-living crisis. And it didn’t even touch the sides. No change in the party’s standing. That is a truly scary prospect for Tory MPs. It suggests that views are now set in stone and impervious to fresh political developments.
For anyone watching closely, No 10’s Save Big Dog operation will have raised further alarm. It is a spasm of contradictory impulses. First, there’s the aggressive reactionary hatefulness, typified by the unspeakable moral proposition that the UK send Syrian refugees to Rwanda. This will be backed up, possibly next week, with legislation to unilaterally break our international agreement with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Then there is the asinine nostalgic opium-dream of an alternate weights and measures system – basically Johnson promising the nation’s most simple-minded voters that he can make them young again by reverting the world to a previous state.
Waitrose Woman
And then, finally, there is the apparent attempt to capture “Waitrose woman” – another of those imagined market-research categories, like Mondeo Man, which can unlock a supposed electoral demographic. This group, real or not, apparently shops at expensive supermarkets, voted Remain, is small-c conservative, and doesn’t like Johnson. How does the Rwanda policy or the Protocol decision attract them? No-one has explained this discrepancy.
Boris Johnson might survive a confidence vote, but the wounded PM’s problems are far from over
04 June, 2022
It’s not just Johnson. The confusion goes all the way down. Leading Tory MP Tobias Ellwood deserves considerable respect for breaking the omerta on Brexit this week. In an article for the House magazine, he dared to say the thing that no-one will mention: Britain is suffering for having left the European single market. Regulatory checks are holding up trade and driving up prices. They’re part of the reason why the Northern Ireland issue has become so acute.
His reward, it goes without saying, was instant dismissal and sneering condescension. Reporters and Tory MPs rejected it out of hand.
Full EU membership?
That was always going to be the way it played out once someone opened the window to let the air in. Everyone else would stand up and scream for him to shut it again. But Ellwood was doing something striking. He was daring to speak in terms of economic and political rationality in a party which has forsaken them.
A closer relationship with Europe is inevitable. It might be a new trade deal, or customs union membership, or single market membership, or even full EU membership. It might be a few years or a decade. But it is coming.
It is coming by virtue of trading gravity. They are big, they are right next to us, and eventually people will start asking what we can do to trade more easily with them. And once you start asking that question, you are entering the debate upon which the EU is founded.
Gnashing and wailing
Ellwood wasn’t just daring to suggest it. He was providing the first instance of a process which will one day need to take place: the Tory rapprochement with reality. There will be kickbacks and much gnashing and wailing. But reality will demand to be let in. It must, in the end, be faced up to, no matter how intense your dream-state.
Johnson’s splatter-against-the-walls personal defence strategy is just the start. As the party declines, it is going to keep exploring all sorts of contradictory and desperate gambits to reverse its misfortune.
It is about to experience an almighty hangover. For years now, Conservatives have given up on reality-based politics and committed exclusively to character-based politics. Now they are waking up after a hell of a bender. The pain hasn’t hit yet, but they just got that first stabbing jolt in their temple, and, with it, the knowledge that it’s going to be a horrible day. Lovely stuff.
I’d hold my horses with such statements until the opposition actually wins a general election. No matter how poorly the conservatives do, you can always rely on some internal Labour civil war to make them a less effective opposition
The Tories will always be either the government or the opposition. That isn’t a “slow painful death”.
Unfortunately it’s not. The Conservative Party will kill democracy before it kills itself.
I suspect the “very best” we ever get is Boris being kicked out and another new shiny PM appearing doing the very same thing the Tories have done since Thatcher with the media fully behind them proclaiming all the problems were down to the last PM and everyone is pure innocent angels that was forced to follow orders and this is a “new reformed Tory party^tm”
That is **if** Boris gets kicked out, otherwise I suspect with the voting restrictions and the Tory complete control over the electoral commission and FPTP they will miraculously win the GE yet again… while large black bin bags of voting papers from non-tory voters are quietly dumped / burnt
The problem with doing any kind of trade deal with the British is getting them to stick to that deal.
RemindMe! 5 years
Remember they get around £57 million in donations to spin their lies before an election. It’s hard for anyone else to get a word in.
I think we are witnessing the end of this Government, but the party will recover and return. A parliament or 2 in opposition is enough time for some fresh faces to take the leadership positions and the incumbent government to become unpopular. I just wish we could see some election reform in the meantime or a new party emerge to break the cycle.
Yeah, we’ve been saying it since the eighties. Utter bullshit.
We are watching the destruction of DEMOCRACY.
The World is getting smaller and control is getting thighter, less freedom, big brother watching every move you make.
Where are we heading to ????
You cannot kill what doesn’t die….. unfortunately
Hahaha, no, we aren’t.
That very thing was **repeatedly** said during the Brown/Blair years when William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard were the Tory Leaders.
But…here we are 12 years into a string of Tory Administrations (with 2 years to go), out of Europe, economy in the shitter, inflation at record highs, appalling wealth inequality and crises in housing, rents, Health services etc, sleaze, corruption and lack of accountability at the heart of government all tied-up in a creepingly Authoritarian bow.
Do not under-estimate their ability convince the gullible to vote them back into office. :/
Being dead never stopped a ghoul.
I wish that was true. But even after this coming winter where the government once again leaves elderly people to die by the thousands, almost everyone over 70 will still vote for them and almost everyone under 30 will refuse to vote because they ‘don’t do politics’.
They’ll just change the leader, good as new. Tory Nation.
Really dumb article. Historically ignorant. A week is a long time in politics. Just a couple years ago, Corbs was leading Labour to their worst result in a century. Parties go up and down all the time.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Conservative party died shortly after the Brexit referendum and seamlessly morphed into UKIP II.
Heard it before, I won’t hold my breath.
History has shown time and time again, fascists will do anything to hold onto power.
​
They aren’t going to go quietly. They will become more and more corrupt and unhinged in an attempt to remain in power.
​
Buckle up.
I don’t know if a cockroach party would die in an apocalypse.
my only regret is that it isnt the whole political establishment collapsing.
No no no no, I will refrain from such statements until I can dance on their tombstone.
I think it’s complacency with the Tories- they believe they are the default position for the UK, that they have so much to offer- they keep touting the idea that home ownership is the only way the UK can win. It is sinking the UK, it is a poisonous attitude. I also believe the Brexit tories, who managed to persuade 52 percent to vote to leave the EU are a danger to the country as a whole because they won by whatever lies and misinformation and bluster to ensure people voted yet had no real consideration for what they were voting for or how it would actually affect them or their country in the future. If it is complacency you want, the Tories are your party.
The Conservatives are at the floor of their vote.
Roughly 30% of UK voters will vote for their party no matter what.
Labour have a similar floor which seems to be around 28%.
Trouble is, even with the Tories at their floor, Labour have virtually no path to a large majority.
With the SNP dominating Scottish seats, and the left split, the best Labour can hope for is a hung parliament.
Labour need to listen to their members and back PR.
Oh believe me, many of us are getting a kick out of it! 🍿
We may be seeing the implosion of BLUKIP, the party of the swivel-eyed loons.
I doubt the Tories have given up on the last 250 years of political dominance.
We did this with the tories after ’97, and people were saying the same about Labour this election. I’d love to see it but I doubt it.
How am I supposed to enjoy it when their actions have caused rampant inequality and countless deaths? I didn’t grow up in the 80s but I certainly understand the anger and vitriol people have towards Thatcher.
I’ll celebrate as soon as these cunts are no longer in power.
Think we are witnessing the end of the two party system. Only way this old horse can go forward
Aside from Tony Blair, the Tories basically haven’t lost an election since 1974.
They might well lose the next one to a Labour-LibDem coalition but they certainly won’t be ‘dead’!
Bring it on oh please bring it on…
I remember this being said when May was PM.
Too slow. Not painful enough.
One nation Conservatism is dead as a dodo, but the idea that the shiftless, feckless chancers might actually have to do something that does not offer them power and influence with minimal oversight or personal consequences? That ship is as likely to sail as a concrete battleship
Moronic. Who celebrates before anything concrete has happened. I’ll save my celebrations for after a general election victory by literally anyone else
I doubt it – Tribal politics, right wing media, Big business, rich donors, mpeople voting against their own interests etc
Unfortunately I still believe that the English, in their infinite wisdom, will continue to vote for the Tories in their droves.
There’s a pretty significant silent majority in the UK, especially England, who are centre-right leaning enough to continue voting for these clowns as the lesser evil. We see it time and time again at the ballot boxes.
Hard to enjoy it when it is us who have to suffer in the meantime.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Comedy not tragedy. Buffoons these days b
The tragedy is scarlet red labour taking over
Where is a sensible third party
It’s too slow, and not painful enough.
Hopefully not. We have no alternative. I’ll take a different PM and cabinet though.
We still don’t have real opposition and even if we did, Conservative cultists still spout nonsense like ‘imagine if Labour was in charge’
English politics has been drastically shifted to the right and shows no signs of changing any time soon.
Even with all the scandals and incompetence, we still know the Convervatives are going to get plenty of votes in the GE.
They were saying this twenty years ago. It’s not enough for a ruling party to lose, someone else has to take over. Labour can’t even get all the left on one side under one party, and don’t have any message or vision for the country.
The death of the party is inevitable. When Millennials and Gen Z are the highest electorate there is no way they will win an election for decades. We won’t forget what they did and how we were treated. Once all their OAP and boomer supporters are gone, they should be very worried.
Hardly, see the 1990s for the mess they got themselves in to. They recovered and started being electable again.
49 comments
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Finews.co.uk%2Fopinion%2Fwe-are-watching-the-slow-painful-death-of-the-conservative-party-dont-forget-to-enjoy-it-1667460
By Ian Dunt
i columnist
We are watching the slow, painful death of the Conservative Party. Don’t forget to enjoy it.
For years now, Conservatives have given up on reality-based politics and committed exclusively to character-based politics.
Good afternoon. Whatever you do, don’t turn on the TV or open social media. The former is full of the worst kind of supine royalism and the latter is full of indignant republicanism. Just go and enjoy the long weekend. It’ll all be over soon.
But before you do, let’s take a moment to watch something die. There’s a grim fascination to observing the Conservative Party enter a period of sustained ideological breakdown. The news this week kicked off with the revelation that actually, no, Boris Johnson hadn’t gotten away with “Partygate”, and was, yes, in really quite a lot of bother.
The letters from Tory MPs to the 1922 Committee kept dripping in. A YouGov MRP poll found that the party would lose 85 of their 88 most marginal seats to Labour. Even Johnson’s own seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip looked like it was turning red.
The story just refused to go away. Even with the Gray report in and every minister under the sun insisting it was time to “move on”, new angles kept emerging. Harriet Harman would chair the standards committee inquiry into whether the Prime Minister misled parliament. Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, fired a salvo over Johnson’s dithering about his concerns. And reporters could smell the distinct whiff of blood over a Downing Street gathering on the evening of Johnson’s birthday – which the police and Gray inexplicably failed to pursue.
A truly scary prospect for Tory MPs
But the worst element by far was the standard polling. It hadn’t moved. It didn’t budge.
Normally that wouldn’t be too upsetting, but this week was different. Chancellor Rishi Sunak had just delivered what was, in effect, an emergency Budget, offering billions in help to struggling families during the cost-of-living crisis. And it didn’t even touch the sides. No change in the party’s standing. That is a truly scary prospect for Tory MPs. It suggests that views are now set in stone and impervious to fresh political developments.
For anyone watching closely, No 10’s Save Big Dog operation will have raised further alarm. It is a spasm of contradictory impulses. First, there’s the aggressive reactionary hatefulness, typified by the unspeakable moral proposition that the UK send Syrian refugees to Rwanda. This will be backed up, possibly next week, with legislation to unilaterally break our international agreement with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Then there is the asinine nostalgic opium-dream of an alternate weights and measures system – basically Johnson promising the nation’s most simple-minded voters that he can make them young again by reverting the world to a previous state.
Waitrose Woman
And then, finally, there is the apparent attempt to capture “Waitrose woman” – another of those imagined market-research categories, like Mondeo Man, which can unlock a supposed electoral demographic. This group, real or not, apparently shops at expensive supermarkets, voted Remain, is small-c conservative, and doesn’t like Johnson. How does the Rwanda policy or the Protocol decision attract them? No-one has explained this discrepancy.
Boris Johnson might survive a confidence vote, but the wounded PM’s problems are far from over
04 June, 2022
It’s not just Johnson. The confusion goes all the way down. Leading Tory MP Tobias Ellwood deserves considerable respect for breaking the omerta on Brexit this week. In an article for the House magazine, he dared to say the thing that no-one will mention: Britain is suffering for having left the European single market. Regulatory checks are holding up trade and driving up prices. They’re part of the reason why the Northern Ireland issue has become so acute.
His reward, it goes without saying, was instant dismissal and sneering condescension. Reporters and Tory MPs rejected it out of hand.
Full EU membership?
That was always going to be the way it played out once someone opened the window to let the air in. Everyone else would stand up and scream for him to shut it again. But Ellwood was doing something striking. He was daring to speak in terms of economic and political rationality in a party which has forsaken them.
A closer relationship with Europe is inevitable. It might be a new trade deal, or customs union membership, or single market membership, or even full EU membership. It might be a few years or a decade. But it is coming.
It is coming by virtue of trading gravity. They are big, they are right next to us, and eventually people will start asking what we can do to trade more easily with them. And once you start asking that question, you are entering the debate upon which the EU is founded.
Gnashing and wailing
Ellwood wasn’t just daring to suggest it. He was providing the first instance of a process which will one day need to take place: the Tory rapprochement with reality. There will be kickbacks and much gnashing and wailing. But reality will demand to be let in. It must, in the end, be faced up to, no matter how intense your dream-state.
Johnson’s splatter-against-the-walls personal defence strategy is just the start. As the party declines, it is going to keep exploring all sorts of contradictory and desperate gambits to reverse its misfortune.
It is about to experience an almighty hangover. For years now, Conservatives have given up on reality-based politics and committed exclusively to character-based politics. Now they are waking up after a hell of a bender. The pain hasn’t hit yet, but they just got that first stabbing jolt in their temple, and, with it, the knowledge that it’s going to be a horrible day. Lovely stuff.
I’d hold my horses with such statements until the opposition actually wins a general election. No matter how poorly the conservatives do, you can always rely on some internal Labour civil war to make them a less effective opposition
The Tories will always be either the government or the opposition. That isn’t a “slow painful death”.
Unfortunately it’s not. The Conservative Party will kill democracy before it kills itself.
I suspect the “very best” we ever get is Boris being kicked out and another new shiny PM appearing doing the very same thing the Tories have done since Thatcher with the media fully behind them proclaiming all the problems were down to the last PM and everyone is pure innocent angels that was forced to follow orders and this is a “new reformed Tory party^tm”
That is **if** Boris gets kicked out, otherwise I suspect with the voting restrictions and the Tory complete control over the electoral commission and FPTP they will miraculously win the GE yet again… while large black bin bags of voting papers from non-tory voters are quietly dumped / burnt
The problem with doing any kind of trade deal with the British is getting them to stick to that deal.
RemindMe! 5 years
Remember they get around £57 million in donations to spin their lies before an election. It’s hard for anyone else to get a word in.
I think we are witnessing the end of this Government, but the party will recover and return. A parliament or 2 in opposition is enough time for some fresh faces to take the leadership positions and the incumbent government to become unpopular. I just wish we could see some election reform in the meantime or a new party emerge to break the cycle.
Yeah, we’ve been saying it since the eighties. Utter bullshit.
We are watching the destruction of DEMOCRACY.
The World is getting smaller and control is getting thighter, less freedom, big brother watching every move you make.
Where are we heading to ????
You cannot kill what doesn’t die….. unfortunately
Hahaha, no, we aren’t.
That very thing was **repeatedly** said during the Brown/Blair years when William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard were the Tory Leaders.
But…here we are 12 years into a string of Tory Administrations (with 2 years to go), out of Europe, economy in the shitter, inflation at record highs, appalling wealth inequality and crises in housing, rents, Health services etc, sleaze, corruption and lack of accountability at the heart of government all tied-up in a creepingly Authoritarian bow.
Do not under-estimate their ability convince the gullible to vote them back into office. :/
Being dead never stopped a ghoul.
I wish that was true. But even after this coming winter where the government once again leaves elderly people to die by the thousands, almost everyone over 70 will still vote for them and almost everyone under 30 will refuse to vote because they ‘don’t do politics’.
They’ll just change the leader, good as new. Tory Nation.
Really dumb article. Historically ignorant. A week is a long time in politics. Just a couple years ago, Corbs was leading Labour to their worst result in a century. Parties go up and down all the time.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Conservative party died shortly after the Brexit referendum and seamlessly morphed into UKIP II.
Heard it before, I won’t hold my breath.
History has shown time and time again, fascists will do anything to hold onto power.
​
They aren’t going to go quietly. They will become more and more corrupt and unhinged in an attempt to remain in power.
​
Buckle up.
I don’t know if a cockroach party would die in an apocalypse.
my only regret is that it isnt the whole political establishment collapsing.
No no no no, I will refrain from such statements until I can dance on their tombstone.
I think it’s complacency with the Tories- they believe they are the default position for the UK, that they have so much to offer- they keep touting the idea that home ownership is the only way the UK can win. It is sinking the UK, it is a poisonous attitude. I also believe the Brexit tories, who managed to persuade 52 percent to vote to leave the EU are a danger to the country as a whole because they won by whatever lies and misinformation and bluster to ensure people voted yet had no real consideration for what they were voting for or how it would actually affect them or their country in the future. If it is complacency you want, the Tories are your party.
The Conservatives are at the floor of their vote.
Roughly 30% of UK voters will vote for their party no matter what.
Labour have a similar floor which seems to be around 28%.
Trouble is, even with the Tories at their floor, Labour have virtually no path to a large majority.
With the SNP dominating Scottish seats, and the left split, the best Labour can hope for is a hung parliament.
Labour need to listen to their members and back PR.
Oh believe me, many of us are getting a kick out of it! 🍿
We may be seeing the implosion of BLUKIP, the party of the swivel-eyed loons.
I doubt the Tories have given up on the last 250 years of political dominance.
We did this with the tories after ’97, and people were saying the same about Labour this election. I’d love to see it but I doubt it.
How am I supposed to enjoy it when their actions have caused rampant inequality and countless deaths? I didn’t grow up in the 80s but I certainly understand the anger and vitriol people have towards Thatcher.
I’ll celebrate as soon as these cunts are no longer in power.
Think we are witnessing the end of the two party system. Only way this old horse can go forward
Aside from Tony Blair, the Tories basically haven’t lost an election since 1974.
They might well lose the next one to a Labour-LibDem coalition but they certainly won’t be ‘dead’!
Bring it on oh please bring it on…
I remember this being said when May was PM.
Too slow. Not painful enough.
One nation Conservatism is dead as a dodo, but the idea that the shiftless, feckless chancers might actually have to do something that does not offer them power and influence with minimal oversight or personal consequences? That ship is as likely to sail as a concrete battleship
Moronic. Who celebrates before anything concrete has happened. I’ll save my celebrations for after a general election victory by literally anyone else
I doubt it – Tribal politics, right wing media, Big business, rich donors, mpeople voting against their own interests etc
Unfortunately I still believe that the English, in their infinite wisdom, will continue to vote for the Tories in their droves.
There’s a pretty significant silent majority in the UK, especially England, who are centre-right leaning enough to continue voting for these clowns as the lesser evil. We see it time and time again at the ballot boxes.
Hard to enjoy it when it is us who have to suffer in the meantime.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Comedy not tragedy. Buffoons these days b
The tragedy is scarlet red labour taking over
Where is a sensible third party
It’s too slow, and not painful enough.
Hopefully not. We have no alternative. I’ll take a different PM and cabinet though.
We still don’t have real opposition and even if we did, Conservative cultists still spout nonsense like ‘imagine if Labour was in charge’
English politics has been drastically shifted to the right and shows no signs of changing any time soon.
Even with all the scandals and incompetence, we still know the Convervatives are going to get plenty of votes in the GE.
They were saying this twenty years ago. It’s not enough for a ruling party to lose, someone else has to take over. Labour can’t even get all the left on one side under one party, and don’t have any message or vision for the country.
The death of the party is inevitable. When Millennials and Gen Z are the highest electorate there is no way they will win an election for decades. We won’t forget what they did and how we were treated. Once all their OAP and boomer supporters are gone, they should be very worried.
Hardly, see the 1990s for the mess they got themselves in to. They recovered and started being electable again.