I feel like I ought to write something that marks the end of our Prime Minister, but, when it comes down to it, I don’t feel inclined to waste words on him – it isn’t as if he’s actually gone anywhere yet. Perhaps the Conservative Party will move swiftly to flush him round the u-bend of public life, but their vaunted ruthlessness in these matters is nowhere to be seen at present. Meantime a scattering of has-beens, never-beens and lunatics gathers in the wings, hoping to get their turn to fail on the national and international stage, and not a single one of them is worthy of office, let alone high office. Even those who have demonstrated some competence – such as the Defence Secretary – are nevertheless people who sustained Mr Johnson in office and accepted joint responsibility as members of the cabinet for the PM’s … I was going to say failings, but that would be to mislead as I am unaware that he has any virtues.
My view of the current cadre of Tory MPs is simple: I despise every single one of them.
Back in late 2019 (Getting it Together in an Old Rolls-Royce) I wrote:
David Cameron famously claimed that Britain was broken. He was wrong then, as The Economist argued at the time, (now £ paywalled) but he and his successors have gone out of their way over the past nine years to ensure that it is broken now. I do not need to cite the ills that surround us. But we will not do anything to mend things while telling people they are stupid, thick, or misguided. We will not fix things by shouting about how much we ‘hate the Tories’ or trumpeting that we don’t know any Tories and wouldn’t want to. We won’t fix things by bossing Twitter, orchestrating pile-ons, saying we’d never be friends with a Tory (or other persuasion). We won’t change things by making promises in manifestos that no one reads except activists and journalists.
And we will not fix things by trying to analyse the fragmented society we now have in the conceptual categories and language of a society that has gone.
Since writing that we have had the ongoing pandemic, war in Ukraine, further imbecilities in the American polity and the ever-present intensification of global heating. And while I remain of the view that we don’t fix it by abusing people with whom we disagree, I also think that to even begin to address the mess the world is in, while rebuilding this country from the shitstorm unleashed since Cameron and Osborne set us on this course, requires a political class that at least grasps the reality of the situation we’re in. I see no evidence that they exist in the Conservative party, and they are depressingly scarce elsewhere.
Although it is not itself a sufficient condition of change, getting the Tories out is a necessary preliminary step. And that means a General Election. Soon.
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