Spare a thought for the Conservative party. It’s hard believing in meritocracy, yet finding yourself polling at 15%. It’s even harder having wanged on mercilessly for decades about natural selection, yet now constantly finding yourself appearing in the same sentence as the phrase “facing extinction”.
And it’s harder still to find polling guru John Curtice doing panels at your conference in which he outlines the route back to even the same time zone as being in contention. “You’ve got to get yourself back to base camp,” Curtice explained in one mild-mannered drive-by on Sunday. “At the moment you frankly can’t even see the Himalayas.” Given the well-documented traffic issues on Everest these days, we have to face the possibility that more people have reached the summit of the world’s highest mountain this year than have joined the Conservative party.
To the party’s gathering in Manchester, then, where the leadership of Kemi Badenoch continues to come off as a performance art piece entitled All Fall Down. It’s not so much a conference as one of those soap montages that signal the death of a character. By the time Robert Jenrick was on stage at midday holding up a judge’s wig like a sock puppet and promising to “take our country back” (again), 20 councillors had defected to Reform since breakfast. The conference is so mad and sad that it features an exhibition of Margaret Thatcher’s clothes, which various Tory ugly sisters and brothers have been metaphorically trying to squeeze themselves into ever since the party ousted her a full 34 years ago. After this many failed impostors, it’s just possible they should smash the glass slipper and get on the apps instead.
Begging the party to swipe right – quite a bit further right – we have Jenrick, the endlessly metamorphic shadow justice secretary who’s had more eras than Taylor Swift. If you felt a seismic straining in the north-west this week, that was Jenrick desperately trying not to do an Andy Burnham and cast this conference as The Official Launch Party of a Showboy. Here, he’s been at pains to suggest, he’s just one of the team – just a humble fledgling content creator as at home in the world of short-form video as he is halfway up a lamp-post in a tight polo, carrying a six-pack of made-in-China St George flags.
Regrettably – or, as far as he’s concerned, fortunately – some recorded comments of Jenrick’s from a Conservative association dinner back in March were leaked to this newspaper, in which he lamented a visit to Handsworth in Birmingham where he “didn’t see another white face”. A few sentences further on, Jenrick stated “it’s not about the colour of your skin or your faith”, which gave Badenoch the leeway to defend him this morning, although she did explain: “I don’t think this is where the debate should be, about how many faces people see on the street and what they look like.”
I’m sure she doesn’t. Then again, Badenoch is a master of this kind of insouciantly robotic understatement, apparently telling a meeting of Conservative association chiefs a couple of days ago that the party’s poll ratings are “not where I want us to be”. Which reminds me that John Curtice had a few other truth bombs to drop. “The Liberal Democrat vote is now much more geographically concentrated than your vote,” he informed Tories at his conference event, “and the electoral system is now treating you like it treated the Liberal Democrats. And so although the Liberal Democrats are just behind you in the polls, they are going to almost undoubtedly win more seats than you.” Oof.
It must be said this wasn’t the vibe you’d have got from shadow chancellor Mel Stride’s speech. “Let’s face it,” claimed Mel hilariously, “we’re the only party that gets it.” Nkay. Go on. “And that means we have to face some hard truths to which other parties turn a blind eye.” By way of an example, he announced the Conservatives would slash the civil service to 2016 levels. And yet, where was the hard truth – namely that the civil service has ballooned since then because of all the extra stuff it’s had to do since Brexit, the Conservative party triumph with the world’s longest list of small print?
Still, there has been the odd bright spot. Unable to accept that the lethal force of the term “Boriswave” is going to permanently do for him, the undead Boris Johnson has spent recent days mounting embarrassing rearguard actions against his own policies. On Monday, he could be found popping up in frantically casual fashion to say he “went far too fast” on net zero, and that he personally “got carried away”. Of course, of course. Ever since Reform started saying “Boriswave” every five seconds, Johnson appears to have shed devotees at a quite alarmingly fast rate. Nigel Farage is his political Mounjaro. Even Johnson’s most devoted superfan, Nadine Dorries, has been seduced. She’ll still love him and everything, but it must be tough for Boris to face up to the fact that Nadine has defected to a party whose biggest diss literally has his name in it.
Elsewhere, the Tory leadership prefers instead to suggest the party eating its lunch is touting policies that fall apart under scrutiny. As Badenoch whined this week: “Reform is saying stuff because it hasn’t thought it all through.” Well, yes. In time-honoured tradition, they are just saying some shit to get elected. Which is, let’s actually face it, a little something they learned from their predecessors. More than anyone else on the political spectrum, the recent iteration of the Conservative party popularised the idea that actions did not have consequences, that cake could be both had and eaten, and that there were no trade-offs on the route to what Badenoch was this week still calling “the sunlit uplands”.
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If only Labour had absorbed these lessons. Yet incredibly, after having had to live through the post-2016 convulsions alongside the rest of us, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves failed to realise that their own bullshit would also not survive contact with the reality of government. As was pointed out at the time, Starmer and Reeves sought power by making ridiculous promises about what they wouldn’t have to do, either because they were hopelessly naive, or just hopeless. They are now reaping that particular whirlwind, which will reach category 5 with next month’s budget.
Thus it increasingly feels as though cautionary tales are this country’s only remaining manufacturing success story. Jenrick’s speech today ended with him gibbering: “I can feel Britain’s fortunes turning.” We all can. Perhaps the kindest way of putting it is that the Conservative party is part of the new “left behind”.
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