The fall of the Tory party

I loathe so many justifiable things about JRM. And then there is the fact that he is as skinny as a rake and always wears a double breasted suit. What a fucking tool.

The right has it (in the polls)

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Maybe atrocities make up 98% of what gets reported, and that you notice and retain, but that says more about what grabs your attention than it does about what is happening.

Yeah, nah - I'm not talking about what makes the news so much as daily fucking activity. What you and I do at our jobs. The Anthropocene.

Matthew Paris on Robert Jenrick, from the Times

How about Robert Jenrick, now apparently to be known as Rob? Here I cast detachment aside. He’s a slick, smooth-tongued salesman with all the attributes of a crowd-pleaser, except the ability to please a crowd. Lest anyone see him as the safer pair of hands, google him. His personal political history is knee-deep in controversies almost all caused by sailing too close to the wind, but one trait stays constant. Like the word “Blackpool” imprinted through a seaside stick of rock, “Ambition” is stamped through Jenrick’s core. In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West dissolves in water, leaving only her broom. Were this politician to be melted down, everything would dissolve except ambition.

Does Rob really (as he now claims) want Donald Trump to win the US presidential election? This is not the mildly centrist Robert who recommended himself to Theresa May as a junior minister. Where is Robert the former Cameron Remainer who, as Rob now says, will out-Farage Farage?

Which is the real Jenrick: Robert the hard-grafting functionary and one-nation pragmatist we saw in a previous incarnation? Or Rob the Reform-adjacent head-banger, throwing out chunks of stinking raw meat to the Tory right, like his pledge to take Britain headlong out of the European Convention on Human Rights: a folly that would threaten Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement? Does Robert Jenrick believe what he now says — or is he just making it up? It’s hard to say which would be more horrifying.

He stabbed in the back a prime minister struggling to defend the Rwanda policy: an act of treachery inexplicable except as a naked move to distance himself from a beleaguered leader, positioning to succeed him. Now he says he wants to unite the parliamentary party — in almost the same breath as declaring he would exclude from his shadow cabinet any colleague who would not sign up to his incendiary ECHR nonsense. Venomous yet at the same time colourless, this man’s craving for office at all costs would poison the Conservative Party’s bloodstream. There is something of the twilight about Robert Jenrick.

How is Jenrick even at liberty following the Westferry development decision?

just badenoch thinking anxiety is a form of neurodiversity and thinking autism is a mental health condition. she'd be dangerous if she wasn't so fundamentally stupid

Was that the Tricky Dicky Desmond one?

(I lose track of which Tory corruption story is which...)

Source?

That's the one.

All good blue on blue, but wasn't PM Truss an actual former Lib Dem? If the policies that Rob is advocating are the problem then maybe it is more a problem of where the party is at now?

It’s where the membership is, and Jenrick is like Vance- his position and political philosophy are whatever gets him closer to power. It’s possible he has no true politics of his own- merely that which is expedient.

Then you have the Very Online Right who think that immigrants and immigration is the number one issue, and if we could only throw out everyone who sounds funny the economy would be fixed.

Finally you have the actual party, and admittedly some of them are nutters, but I suspect a fair few of them realise that the membership and the VOR are so far to the right of where the public is that to pander to them means irrelevance- but, they can’t change the membership so they’re stuck with whoever said membership will elect.

Whilst I’m sure they will be back as a political force it’s hard to see how they accomplish the required pivot. Clone a million Andrew Tates maybe and put one in every school in England as a PE and Social Philosophy teacher maybe easier.

the actual party

Isn't the actual party the one that has been in power for the last decade and slowly going more erm... eccentric? If the official party is represented by Badenoch, Braverman, Mogg, Johnson etc. then isn't that who the party actually is?

I agree, they’re in a mire. The membership (and the fumbled leadership contest) has tied them into fighting Reform for a share of votes that will never win them power, and that’s even if they could succeed on that front, which they can’t because Reform will always outflank them on the right for the moron vote. Meanwhile the voters they lost to the LibDems and Labour, who would have been much more easy for them to win back, will continue to be appalled by the Tories and lose the habit of voting for them. Eventually they’ll be joined by those who stayed home at the last election when they see that the Tories have no intention of taking things seriously and winning them back.

The result, if they can be nimble enough, will be the LibDems hoovering up the disaffected centre-right and threatening the Tories’ position as the second biggest party.

If everything is an atrocity then nothing is an atrocity.

I don't really see the point of blanket statements like this unless you're trying to justify your plan for an Oryx & Crake-style reset.

Sometimes I use single-use plastics. It's not ideal, but I'm not going to call it an atrocity when objectively much worse things are happening.

If everything is an atrocity then you can criticise anything anybody says or does with zero intellectual effort.

objectively much worse things

Not sure what the formula is for that...

Is genocide in Gaza worse than sending yet another mammal species extinct?

Or locking in another 0.5° of warming with yet another demented bit of fat cat fellatio in place of government policy?

98% of human activity is a bad idea. Proponents of the slacker ethos > Protestant work ethic bootlickers. It would be best if we all stayed in bed.

I agree, they’re in a mire. The membership (and the fumbled leadership contest) has tied them into fighting Reform for a share of votes that will never win them power, and that’s even if they could succeed on that front, which they can’t because Reform will always outflank them on the right for the moron vote. Meanwhile the voters they lost to the LibDems and Labour, who would have been much more easy for them to win back, will continue to be appalled by the Tories and lose the habit of voting for them. Eventually they’ll be joined by those who stayed home at the last election when they see that the Tories have no intention of taking things seriously and winning them back.

The result, if they can be nimble enough, will be the LibDems hoovering up the disaffected centre-right and threatening the Tories’ position as the second biggest party.

100% agree. The only thing I think that might be interesting here is the Greens and the formerly Tory NIMBY vote - if the Greens continue their policy of NO NO NO NO to all development then that might become the (somewhat surprising) home of a lot of formerly Tory voters in the Shires who don't want new housing, new infrastructure, new factories and facilities near their village thank you very much.

In a parallel universe we are still waiting for a GE with inflation falling and an interest rate cut

And no planes to Rwanda.

However, the press would be celebrating how in touch "Swifty" Rishi is having taken his daughter's to her gig.

Yes the Greens are very interesting on that front, the disaffected ex-Labour left who make up a decent proportion of their swelling support make very strange bedfellows with the rural, ex-Tory NIMBYs you describe, however I reckon they might find a more natural fit with the LibDems eventually.

@dubtap

In a parallel universe we are still waiting for a GE with inflation falling and an interest rate cut

That’s the sort of thing you could mention in a comment on Conservative Home, if you really wanted to upset them.

Where this whole nihilistic chat falls down is you can't have it both ways.

Either you can give things a weighting* and 98% of human activity is a bad idea, or you can't and human activity just is.

*even if it can't done to the granular level in your eg

Politics is all about making these coalitions, though.

The Greens managed to pull that off last time, winning in both urban, previously Labour constituencies and rural Tory ones.

Johnson's great achievement was to build a coalition that spanned the elite and enough working class voters in Labour red wall seats to give him a majority.

Next time it will be harder for the Greens in the Tory areas, though. Virtually all of their second places, from which they will select their targets, are in Labour seats - so I'd expect them to double down on a positioning to the left of Labour. And Labour has left an awful lot of space there.

If Tories lurch further to the right under their new leader the best outcome for them is if the centerists they lose are split between Labour and LD. The nightmare is if one gets them all as more electorally efficient.

Sure, coalitions are important, but probably more so if you’re trying to gain/retain power. The Greens are a long way off from that, so like you said they’ll probably double down on positioning to the left of Labour.

Which is a shame in some ways, as green politics sometimes seems like it’s viewed/used by some on the left merely as a convenient wrapper for attacking the centre. I hope to be proved wrong about that.

Johnson's great achievement

It wasn't Johnson's achievement but his election strategists'. He had no part in it.

Which is a shame in some ways, as green politics sometimes seems like it’s viewed/used by some on the left merely as a convenient wrapper for attacking the centre. I hope to be proved wrong about that.

Could you expand on this a bit? Their core message is trying to tie together environmental justice with social and economic justice. Whether that’s trying to pull conservatives left or simply presenting as a left-wing party I’m not sure.

(I’m also not sure if it’s effective at either of those things, since they’re not really that connected, at least not at surface level)