Britain needs effective Opposition, says Fleet Street Fox. Instead it’s going to get freewheeling, self-medicated outpatients, still seeking the right asylum
Well, at least we know now what pissed Prince Harry off.
The only thing more likely to make someone decide to leave Britain than a one-on-one chat with Boris Johnson, the most venal, amoral, and shambolic human being that these islands have ever produced, would be hearing that the Black Death had leaked out of a lab at Porton Down and found its way onto public transport.
Actually, no. It would be finding out that Liz Truss was still not in a compost heap. No, no, I’ve got it, the only thing more likely to make someone leave would be hearing that Jacob Rees-Mogg, having been ejected from the Parliament he reclined in at our expense, not only believes we still need to hear his views on the economy, but is being given a platform to air them by the self-styled ‘natural party of government’ which has forgotten why they just lost.
Maybe Harry and Meghan aren’t two slightly-dim, thin-skinned, thickos at all. Perhaps they are the great seers of our ages, able to see, just a month after Johnson won a landslide, that within four years he would have been swept from office, lettuces would be the greatest joke in British history and that somehow the Tories would still manage to get worse.
It was January 2020 that Harry and Meghan hightailed it out of Blighty, a whole four and a half years before the financial genius of Charlie Mullins’ accountant urged him to do the same. And we know they hadn’t foreseen a £22billion black hole in the government accounts, or cutting the winter fuel payments, because no-one saw those coming.
Not unless they’d read the Conservative manifesto in 2017, where it very clearly said they’d means-test pensioners as well. In the same election Labour promised to keep it, but that was 7 years before the Tories committed to billions of pounds’ worth of public sector pay rises, and £10billion of hotel bills for the asylum seekers they didn’t deter or process, and failed to put the money necessary into departmental budgets.
Committing to buy something you’ve no intention of paying for is usually considered fraud, or at the very least bilking. If you do it at a petrol station you get arrested; do it in Downing Street, and you get such an inflated sense of self-justification that ordinary citizens will be surprised to learn that you were once a prime minister, and not a helium balloon that’s gone astray from a particularly toffee-nosed wedding.
But here we are, in a world where someone who isn’t in need of a peerage is told off for throwing cash at politicians, two of our last three prime ministers won’t shut up about why they’re right despite all evidence to the contrary, and the third has gone AWOL while his party does everything it can to be less electable than it already is.
While Johnson publishes a rapidly dashed-off tome that still isn’t the biography of Shakespeare he ignored bodies piling high to write, the party he destroyed has got to that point of self-digestion where it has already eaten its own entrails, limbs, and digits, and now has no option but to feast upon its faeces.
Next week is the Conservative Party Conference, and if this was a party in the grip of sanity it would spend a few days questioning its historic loss, its leadership rules and the rampant racism of its membership, then choose a boss capable of fixing at least one of them. Instead, it will be a bunfight between the reanimated corpse of freshly-nationalist Robert Generic and the you’re-all-idiots doubt-vacuum that is Kemi Badenoch.
At the same time, in defiance of the tradition that former PMs make themselves absent until everyone’s forgotten why they loathed them, Liz Truss expects you want to hear her ‘in conversation’. Then she will head to Australia to give her views on conservatism, after which we can probably expect an influx of returning emigrees claiming a right to reside in this hemisphere based on 18th century convict forebears and a firm desire to let the black widow spiders have her to themselves.
The Tory faithful will also have an opportunity to hear the views of Jacob Rees-Mogg on the economy, despite the fact that 20,000 constituents voted for the other chap, his economic brilliance involves a hedge fund now in liquidation, and Tories are supposed to prefer people who are upstanding.
It is great fun to kick the Tories, and of late so easy as well. It is not in the nation’s best interests, though, to have an Opposition formed of the same emboldened crazies as the last six governments were. In power, they are constrained by Parliament, courts and the civil service. In Opposition, they can freewheel as self-medicating outpatients still seeking the right asylum.
An Opposition that wishes to be re-elected, and which picks someone capable to moulding it to that end, will be more direct; more accurate; more professional. History proves one that wallows self-indulgently in its own demonstrably-flawed belief system, as happened under Foot, Corbyn, Howard, and Duncan-Smith, is more of an off-switch than an Opposition.
It means the party of government, however well or badly it behaves, stops checking its homework as thoroughly. Ministers come to believe in their right to govern, rather than their duty, and every cog in the machinery of state becomes less bothered about who will notice what they didn’t get right.
It has happened a hundred times before and it is about to happen again, because if there’s one thing a natural conservative can’t do it’s see what must be changed. Labour needed 3 elections, and 3 leaders. The Tories, unless they rediscover their political ruthlessness, seem likely to cycle through their back catalogue a few more times yet. At some point Kemi will be likened to a black Maggie, Robert will pretend to be Enoch, and the membership seems determined to keep thinking Boris is Winston, although the only resemblance is girth.
What the Tories won’t grasp for a while yet is that they won’t be back in power until they have flushed Truss, seen through Johnson and found a great new hope who doesn’t make people pine for assisted dying. All the best efforts of the Tory press and scandals about frocks, GCSE revision and football have lopped no more than a single point off Labour’s standing in the polls. The real malignancy the Right should fear is the support for Reform, and realise that its instinct to absorb rather than defeat its xenophobic superiority complex is only going to to extend the Tory time in the wilderness.
Britain needs Left and Right, and it needs them to be competent, a check on each other with a moderate middle ground where most of us are happy to live. Being in exile and talking to the contents of your own toilet bowl is something only Harry and Meghan seem able to get paid for. Perhaps Keir should have a one-to-one with whoever wins the Tory leadership race, and advise them how to do it.
