Anyone who has ridden the rapids of misfortune will attest that loyalty is a marvellous quality in a friend but, as Mark Twain observed, “loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul”. Nor rescued a political party from extinction, we might add.
Despite yesterday’s poll, which put the Conservatives on a parlous 19 per cent and Reform on a fast-closing 15, despite a death-rattle net approval rating of minus 48 (lower than Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn when they resigned), Rishi Sunak survives as Prime Minister. That is largely due to the misplaced loyalty of his colleagues, but also because, as one Tory MP said, the idea of a leadership challenge at this stage is “utterly bonkers”.
It really isn’t, you know. What is bonkers, truly, madly deeply delusional, in fact, is sticking with a course so calamitous, so certain to end in ruin, that it could spell the demise of a political party which celebrates its 190th birthday this year. I am not exaggerating. Cabinet ministers with majorities of 18,000-plus are facing their own Portillo Moment (a metaphor coined after the 1997 general election humiliation of then Cabinet star Michael Portillo.)
Autumn Annihilation? Present polling suggests the losses of the Charge of the Light Brigade – 113 killed, 134 wounded – were a mere scratch compared to what lies in wait electorally for the Conservative parliamentary party.
So, what?, I hear you cry. It’s no more than the b------s deserve. Spitting in the face of their base with 745,000 legal net migration in a single year, outbidding normal families for scarce rental properties to get thousands of asylum seekers out of hotels (and hide them away) so Rishi can claim to have kept his “promise” before the general election. And they seriously think people who voted Tory in 2019 – clue: immigration is our Number 1 concern – are going to make that mistake again?
Normally, I would agree. The sense of betrayal runs very deep, the desire to teach the Tories a lesson they won’t forget is almost overwhelming. A bunch of Lib Dem cuckoos has taken over the nest built from our votes, our efforts. How dare they, those simpering Alicias and Carolines with their “Let them buy heat pumps!” condescension and ridiculous pronouns. So, you may not like it when I say that acting quickly now to install a true Conservative as leader of the Conservatives is well worth the gamble, but please hear me out.
Do we really want 10 years of Labour supercharging Woke in our institutions, brainwashing schoolchildren to despise their country and feel guilty about its remarkable history, abolishing patriotic feeling (Bye bye Rule Britannia at the Proms, so long Union Jack!), banning parents from talking their own children out of mutilating their young bodies, giving comfort to Islamists and far Leftists who wish to destroy our way of life, repatriating Shamima Begum (Sham’s human rights being more important than ours, of course), pursuing a “safe routes”, all-barbarians-welcome immigration policy, expanding the WFH quango class and suffocating the spirit of free enterprise. Purse-lipped cultural revolutionaries making that British pastime “having a laugh” illegal (just you wait). To cap it all, legislating away free speech to the point where even discussing any of the above is a hate crime.
Make no mistake, that is the very real danger if we, as many of the right-minded among us intend to do, either vote Reform UK or refuse to vote at all. Unfairly, Reform will end up with no seats and the Tories could hold so few that it will be the work of more than one term to get back into government. The Conservative Party may deserve that decade in the wilderness, but what about Britain? I am scared, quite frankly, hugely apprehensive. Afraid that our beloved country will be irretrievably lost under a moronocracy led by clod-hopping class warriors like Angela “Tory scum” Rayner.
A courageous new conservative Conservative leader – a Kemi, Suella, Priti, Robert – committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and taking back immediate control of our borders, who is elected straight after the certain bloodbath of the 2 May local elections, could do much to mitigate that awful fate, I think.
There is a precedent. In May 2019, Theresa May’s government suffered the worst Tory local election performance in 24 years (Sunak is about to seize that grim title). The Conservatives lost over 1,300 seats. Three weeks later, Mrs May announced her resignation. Boris Johnson became party leader on 23 July. Five months later, the new prime minister won an 80-seat majority with 43.6 per cent of the popular vote.
I am not suggesting a victory of that miraculous magnitude can be pulled off now. The rot has gone too deep. Whatever your personal frustrations, Labour does not deserve the landslide it will have pocketed by the end of the year if Conservatives don’t ditch Rishi.
Study the result of every recent by-election, and you detect no great enthusiasm for Sir Drear Starmer. Quite the contrary. Wellingborough saw the Left’s total go up from 13,737 in 2019 to 13,844. A mere 107 votes. It was disillusioned Conservative voters like thee and me who handed Labour the seat on a silver salver. The Tory vote plunged from 32,277 in 2019 to 7,408. With Reform hoovering up 3,919, only 11,327 Right-wing voters bothered to go to the polling station. Where were the missing Conservatives? At home, chucking darts at the Rishi Sunak dartboard.
As long as Sunak remains, wild horses on their bended knees could not persuade those voters to give the Tories another chance. Hang on, Allison, won’t a fourth change of leader in as many years make the Conservatives a national laughing stock?
It sure will. Better to be mocked than deceased, I say. Anyway, people soon move on and I bet they will relish a feisty woman knocking seven bells out of drippy Keir.
Conservatives have a reputation for ruthlessness. I say, let’s play to our strengths! A leadership contest could be swift. No need for a national beauty parade. MPs whittle candidates down to two. Then, party members need to choose between the finalists. With online voting, the whole thing could be over in under a fortnight. By the end of May, the Conservatives will have themselves a brand new leader who is actually prepared to honour their manifesto pledges and Rishi Sunak will have brought forward his private-jet flight to California by six months.
I’ve got a question for all those Conservative MPs still insisting that the hugely unpopular PM will lead them into the general election while denigrating “rebels” who plot to oust him. What good is it being loyal to “petrified opinion”? To whom should you really owe your loyalty? To a member of the billionaire class you know full well will abandon you as soon as he has lost his party hundreds of seats or to the British people who deserve a Right-of-centre leader to stick up for them and fight the Left for the soul of our nation?
“Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.”
The Conservative Party is not obliged to re-enact the pointless slaughter of The Charge of the Light Brigade, which appears to be the current strategy. Try another Tennyson poem, my favourite: “Some work of noble note, may yet be done”.
Pick a Conservative leader who will restore the faith of at least some Conservatives and give them something to hope for. Faced with the alternative, it’s got to be worth a try.
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