Keir Starmer’s been running the country for just eight weeks but that’s no reason not to get cross about it, says Fleet Street Fox. The Tories can always find stuff to moan about
There are some things you can always rely on a Tory for.
Wearing a tie. Being able to explain opera. Enriching themselves after Brexit. And having absolutely no problem with a bullying scandal, whether it’s on Strictly or anywhere else. They signed up for it, what did they expect, it’s a tough business dancing/politics/private school/fill in occupation of victim here.
Some might have thought that, with a change of government and an electoral massacre, it would take a while for the blue team to gather its thoughts enough to oppose anything. But you’d be wrong, because even rudderless, depleted and defeated, Tories gonna Tory and there’s always something making them furious.
We’re just eight weeks in, Parliament was in recess for five of them, but there is already a hefty list of Things Which The Tories Hate Already.
1. Nightclubs
Specifically, the ones with northern women in them. Not the ones with former Lord Chancellor Michael Gove in them, making shapes, nor the ones with disgraced Prince Andrew sweating profusely in them. Ibiza is just about acceptable, if you have a very expensive villa or a yacht. But working all day, flying out on what is almost certainly a budget airline, and appearing in a DJ booth at the start of maybe a three-day break before reappearing in Parliament to be deputy Prime Minister again, is definitely demeaning to the office previously held by those adornments to public life the tomato-tosser Dominic Raab, the ageing Tintin Oliver Dowden, and Facebook apologist Nick Clegg.
Politicians should dance only on Strictly. Demeaning the office is permissible only by eating kangaroo anus in the jungle while avoiding constituency surgeries. Important steam is let off by holding tinsel-draped Zoom quiz nights while surrounded by champagne empties. Legal raves in nightclubs like a common person will only make voters cross, unlike all the things the Tories did, and about which the voters have just expressed a pretty high level of unhappiness.
2. Oasis
Who? Is this a northern person saying hello to their sibling? How can anyone complain about tickets to a musical event that cost £500? That doesn’t buy five minutes of a Tory PM’s time.
3. Worker’s rights
See previous two points. If Angela Rayner is involved, it must be bad. The idea that flexible working, and earlier parental and sick leave, will help bosses retain and recruit staff with less need for wage increases has not occurred to those arguing that “business will suffer” and “bosses are angry” about laws that will give their staff more certainty, more rights, and more ability to keep on working after children, illness, disability or caring responsibilities. WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WHIP, screamed the beadle, failing to spot that it caused exactly the chaos he hated.
4. Prince Harry
Leaving was outrageous, trying to come back is outrageous, staying away is simply appalling. He’s probably Angela Rayner’s fault too.
5. Labour’s smoking ban
Shocking nanny state overreach, this – a new government following the recommendations of a review the Tories ordered, stopping people smoking outside pubs which haven’t relied on smokers’ trade for 17 years, in a country which the last Tory Prime Minister decided was going to ban it everywhere anyway. How very dare Labour do such a thing, which will undoubtedly save money and lives. It’s a free country and people must be allowed to kill themselves at the taxpayer’s expense!
Unless they’re old and it’s a pandemic, in which case the government will kill them and bill you for decades afterwards.
6. Deporting a record number of migrants and not shouting about it
It’s typical Labour woke claptrap that on August 23 they put 220 illegal immigrants on a plane in what was the single biggest deportation in British history and didn’t crow about it.
The Tory way is to crow about it while not doing it. Or maybe while putting one person on a plane and then letting them get off again, but still having to pay for the plane.
Quiet competence while not trying to sound like b@stards has been bred out of the Tory DNA by actively selecting for privately-educated tosspots. Which brings us to…
7. Private school fees
The fact that the richest private school in the land, Eton College, the alma mater of 20 Prime Ministers and countless aristocrats, millionaires, and financiers, is passing on to parents the entire 20% extra it will have to find after centuries of pretending to be a charity is definitely Keir Starmer’s fault, and not capitalism’s.
It is not behaving like any other luxury business with a high-net worth clientele who’ll give a kidney to use its services. It’s not doing the simple maths of working out that, if customers can afford £52,000 a year on extended childcare for small people they don’t wish to spend time with, then they’ll happily stump up £63,000 to let someone else fail at parenting.
No, this is definitely the politics of envy, not the end of a lucrative scam which has effectively defrauded millions. Tories are OUTRAGED that POOR BLOODY ETONIANS are PAYING THE PRICE just for having the ASPIRATION to destroy the country, its constitution and its social cohesion.
8. Fears of crashing the economy
What’s this now? La la la la la, can’t hear you.
9. Tidying up the mess they left behind
The end of one-word findings from Ofsted? Bollocks. Regulating Elon Musk? Only if he’s not on our side. School absenteeism? Look, we’ve told you, send them private and they get locked in for the term, much more sensible.
What makes the Tories really angry is that Starmer doesn’t jolly people along, like Boris, and isn’t mindlessly blasé, like Truss. They can’t frot themselves over his shoes like they did with May, or tell themselves that clearly he’s a genius like they did with that shonky LED bulb Rishi Sunak.
Which means that they actively prefer a lying, doomed, ever-so-slightly bemused lettuce presiding over them on the basis it wears a blue rosette, rather than someone who’s honest, can expect a solid 10 years in the job, and is at least looking the difficult stuff in the eye rather than pretending it isn’t there.
But therein lies the real thing the Tories hate more than anything else – they hate themselves. They hate the incompetence, the criminality, the expense, the failure, the bad choices. They’ve been locked in a leadership battle for more than a decade, because they cannot reconcile the world they want with the quality of the only people prepared to promise the hellscape of their dreams.
The answer is obvious. But until they decide to dream of better things, we seem to be stuck with permanently angry Tories.
