Two weeks ago after the Uxbridge by election, Pecksniff wrote: “What was apparently a vote against ULEZ and what is often portrayed as a war against the motorist seems to have become a somewhat obvious target for the Tories from here on.”
Gore Vidal declared that the four most satisfying words in the English Language are: I, Told, You, So. And indeed, yet another Pecksniff observation comes to pass. Rishi Sunak is scrambling to divest himself of any semblance of green in his policies. Fossil fuels are now sexy, and punters will be invited at the next general election to vote for the Apocalypse. (The music will be from Country Joe and the Fish: “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!”)
No matter that the polls don’t support his new line because, you know, Uxbridge… Those polls only make him feel more exposed, but they represent views a long way off in terms of electoral comeuppance (and also in actual distance, if you decide to travel everywhere by helicopter).
Whereas the ERG, the Common Sense Group, the Conservative Democratic organisation (in fact anything lunatic that has Tom Hunt in it), GBNews, the Telegraph and the rest are deafening in his ear, all egging him on.
So what’s a colourless, humourless, socially inept and politically vapid multi-millionaire to do?
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Incidentally, there is a rumour that Labour may well have failed to win Uxbridge because its candidate refused to fight back against Tory claims about ULEZ. If so, then on this whim, this catastrophic error of judgement, the government decides to junk its entire green agenda, and in terror Labour decides to cave in if anybody even mentions the subject.
If the rumour is true, and instead the candidate had fought back, Labour might well have won and the whole supposed narrative would have been turned on its head. On such nuances of fate are whole political strategies planned. Never ever believe that those in the seats of power have a clue what they are doing.
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Still on climate change, what is there to say about Grant Shapps (Welwyn Hatfield)? In an interview this week on Sky, he effectively claimed that not opening up more oil fields in the future would mean people won’t be able to turn on their heaters next winter.
The universal, obligatory force-feeding with lies is now the most agonising aspect of living in our country – worse than all our material miseries, worse than any lack of civil liberties…
Did you find yourself agreeing with those words, dear reader? Do you find them les mots justes? If so, then it is sobering to realise they are not from Pecksniff, but from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and bear in mind he was talking about the Soviet Union…
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“I will do such things,” cried Rachel Reeves. “What they are, yet, I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth!”
Well actually she didn’t, of course, that was King Lear. But what she said about punishing water companies was much the same thing. She is going to charge them for clearing up the sewage mess! She is going to hold them to account! (Terror strikes the boardrooms of every water company: Rachel Reeves plans to Hold Them To Account!)
Only of course she couldn’t tell us how, there was no mention of actually preventing them from making the mess in the first place, or paying back the untold billions of public money the water companies have cynically paid their mostly foreign shareholders. Let alone taking them back into public ownership. (Let’s not be silly, here, comrades.) Robert Frost wrote: “I never dared be radical when young, For fear it would make me conservative when old”. Following Frost’s logic, one can only wonder what kind of nihilistic anarcho-syndicalism stirred the Reeves cocoa when she was young.
So, another catastrophic misunderstanding of the public mood by a woman whose grasp of administering first aid to our democratic renewal seems limited to squirting soda water. But when caught unawares by the camera, Ms Reeves loses the public smile and appears, as that Wodehouse character, like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow. So perhaps there is more to her than her increasingly limp and inadequate pronouncements.
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What Rachel Reeves and so many other politicians seem unable to understand is that we don’t want fairness, or for those who have cheated and misled us, to just get a ticking off. The public mood is savage. Fairness can wait; first we want them all in the slammer. First we want retribution.
History is full of examples of inept politicians who lost the plot. The Covid public inquiry is a start in putting things right, but people want lots of them, with Brexit next. That means the state kicking down the malfeasors’ opulent portals in early morning raids and dragging them away dishevelled and gibbering in front of the cameras. So, legal retribution it has to be, or history tells us we might expect a rather worse version. The social contract is beginning to teeter: for the public to uphold civic order, the government has to fulfil their part of the bargain. But they have abandoned all pretence.
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“I have very little influence in this,” declares Councillor Blake Stephenson, apparently the chair of Mid Beds Conservatives, about the misdemeanour of his MP, Nadine Dorries. So he illustrates how impotent he and his party have allowed themselves to become. He and they deserve the voters’ contempt. Those voters placed their trust in the woman the party put forward as their candidate, and that trust has been betrayed.
In an open letter on the association’s website, Cllr Stephenson whines his excuses by explaining that: “The Association’s primary function is to secure the return of Conservative candidates at elections. This is done by selecting candidates and then supporting them with a campaigning organisation.”
Is that it? This is a convenient attempt at “Nuffin to do wiv us, guv”, which doesn’t work. The explanation would excuse any local political party from responsibility for any actions of their MP, and doesn’t mention holding them to account in any way. Once elected under this dictum, the MP can make a travesty of any kind of democracy (as many do), but that is apparently of no interest to the party. The Tories will go on campaigning to keep them in power. We might therefore expect all Tory election material in future to bear in small print at the bottom: “The local Conservative Association can bear no responsibility for any actions taken by this candidate, illegal or immoral, and voting for him or her is conducted entirely at the constituent’s own risk.”
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The spineless and contemptible excuses of that local Tory party, however, illustrate just how untouchable MPs have become, but it wasn’t always so. Traditionally, the local Tory party chair was all powerful, and woe betide the MP who crossed them. They represented the members’ values, strongly held. A Tory MP couldn’t hope to survive without their support.
But over recent years, the members have become demoralised. No sooner do they profess loyalty to one leader than a successor preaches quite a different and usually opposing set of principles. Gradually, the members’ beliefs are worn away, trashed. The values they have held all their lives are discarded. They wait forlornly to hear what it is they are supposed to believe next, and Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak hand down the beliefs of the day through their boyars, the MPs.
So power is top-down these days, MPs reinforcing what their Westminster masters tell them to pass on, and the only constant principle is power at any cost. Even if, as in Rishi Sunak’s latest pronouncements, it literally costs the earth.
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We have a new poll for Suffolk Coastal constituency. It shows Therese Coffey holding her seat by 7%, down from a majority of 36%. Dr Coffey’s vote share is reckoned to have fallen by 14%, and surprisingly that appears to have gone directly to Labour. But with 43% of the vote, that means 57% to her opponents. So the seat is winnable if the parties are of a mind to make it so.
Will they? Will anybody stand aside? Labour have 36%, LibDems 15% and Greens 7%. Labour have not helped their standing with other parties by their aloofness in not joining the coalition which has just taken control of East Suffolk Council. It seems their dominating strategy was sour grapes. The LibDems here tend to be pushy, and after Labour’s council huff would probably be disinclined to do them any favours.
The Greens are shown at only 7%, which may be surprising given their recent council dominance. No doubt they would point at that success and claim they have a shout too.
So we have the usual problems. Labour could win, but are considered too arrogant to work with and too moribund to be arsed. The LibDems probably can’t win but can be churlish and don’t see why they should stand aside for a bunch of no-hopers. And presumably the Greens, though lagging, would have their reasons for not standing aside too.
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It looks as though Tory attempts to portray their MPs as men and women of the people instead of the capitalist overlords of the proletariat are in full swing. MPs who hardly knew what a doorstep was are now self-consciously standing on a few. Those whose last visit to their constituency was during election night are now boning up on street maps.
Charities which had forgotten they even have an MP are being bombarded with offers to turn up and hold something or open something – anything so long as there is a camera. Duncan Baker (N Norfolk) is a particular example… Banking hubs become a big issue. The LibDems take it up, it gets into the press, then Mr Baker takes it up.
In fact there is presently a joke going around his constituency:
“What is the difference between God and Duncan Baker?”
“God may be everywhere, but Duncan Baker always gets there in time for the photo bomb.”
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The politics of Peterborough are murky and deep, and not for the faint hearted or those with a weak stomach. In the middle of it all we find Councillor Wayne Fitzgerald, the Tory leader of the council. He is, as the saying goes, capable of starting a fight in an empty room, so there are rumours he is running out of allies. This week your correspondent found the estimable John Elworthy of CambsNews holding a curia of wise men at the Muckrakers, and over a pint of Old Unprintable he gave Pecksniff the skinny on the shock horror drama he believes is likely to transpire.
But this must wait until the mighty presses begin to roll at the News. It is their story to tell.
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The Suffolk Show is full of huge and alarming-looking agricultural machinery, dun-coloured yeomen looking for something to shoot, hard-eyed salesmen and damn-your-eyes farmers. Not obvious territory for a fervent anti-Brexit group like Suffolk for Europe, you might think. But times have changed. The group took along its ubiquitous amulet, the brexitometer, and the public response is described as having been one of “surprise and delight”. Most browsers didn’t know of the group’s existence – the farming community tend not to get out much – but young people in particular were apparently enthusiastic.
It is reported that three respondents were hostile. But the wife of one advised them not to mind him because he’s angry about everything. And after all, where else would one expect to find angry old white men but at a county show?
The brexitometer worked its usual magic too, giving the heave-ho to ideas that Brexit may still hold some enticement in the farming world. There was little here.
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Anybody who knows this diarist will scoff at the idea that smugness would ever be entertained in the Pecksniff corpus. So it will not be misconstrued were it to be pointed out that, my dears, we are a marvellous bunch at EAB.
This week, the BBC’s flagship Panorama programme reported on the catastrophic mismanagement of Thurrock Council, thus following in the footsteps of that relentless seeker after truth, EAB’s JJ Jackson. The man Jackson (or is it woman?) is a star of EAB’s own Spotlight investigations team, and responsible for many of the revelations on just how that Tory council managed to lose half a billion smackers, much of which appears still to be unaccounted for.
Panorama pointed out that the council’s being bankrupt has left Thurrock people impoverished in their services – you think? – and chased somebody up a garden path (because TV always needs action), and that’s it. Whereas depend upon it, EAB and the estimable JJ are still on the case.
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One last thought, dear reader. Rishi Sunak is on holiday at Disneyland, a place of unbelievable characters and bizarre and fantastical happenings. Which is odd, since one might have expected he’d want to get away from it all.
In his place, the country is being run by – checks notes – Oliver Dowden (Hertsmere), a man who isn’t even a household name in his own household. He has been described as a ‘milquetoast’, which is not complimentary. Milk toast was a dish of toasted bread dunked in warm milk; only to do Mr Dowden justice, the milk would have to be skimmed and the toast made from sliced white. His most memorable quote is: “The privet hedges of suburbia are the privet hedges of a free people”.
This, my dears, is where we find ourselves. All that and a cold wet weekend and the end of the world beckoning. Your diarist fervently recommends gin.
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