A huge new Mood of the Nation poll via Politics Home shows what these days has become the accustomed tale of catastrophe awaiting the Conservatives at the election. (Just how desperate they have become is illustrated by a now-deleted preposterously imbecilic ad on social media claiming “Britain is the second most powerful country in the world”.)
Clearly the voters disagree. Three quarters of respondents believe the country has “lost its way”, including 71% of 2019 Tory voters. Less than half of those (46%) say they are proud of their country. “The survey and focus groups underline … the strength of the general public’s desire for change,” says Politics Home.
So, the country is going in the wrong direction, we are not proud of ourselves and desperate for change. Dear reader, is it possible at this point the dog is cowering under the table as you yell “Brexit!”? But instead of confronting it, which might solve all these problems, it seems Labour is going to bring us a Stanley Baldwinesque ‘steady as she goes’ government, whose only obvious attempt at bringing back national pride is to be pictured with the union flag.
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But still, Labour’s response is an increasingly desperate “We have to make Brexit work”. Still, candidates parrot the exact words of their leader. Still there is no heretical diversion from the sacred text. And still there is no hint as to how this miracle might be managed, as how could there be?
What exactly happened since the 2016 referendum, when both Keir Starmer and Ed Davey supported Remain, and now? Brexit has proved itself a hideously self-inflicted wound, as was foretold, and has ushered in other countless unexpected horrors in its wake. So what is it about all this that has so profoundly changed their minds to support Brexit?
There is no rational reason. As this writer has pointed out countless times – and will go on doing so – they have simply lost their bottle. The Brexit experience was so crushing for the political class they have no wish to go there again. Yet two thirds of the public disagree. Two thirds of the public wish we were still in the EU. There is no lack of courage among the voters. What is most telling is that our leaders have no conception of the savage anger felt by millions of voters, which isn’t going away.
Lions led by donkeys.
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Yet perhaps Labour’s hard men can press their case too far. We read the party is losing members, both because of the party’s stance on Gaza and what many see as their betrayal on green issues.
We also learn there is a revolt among Labour MPs at the leadership’s determination to include the union flag on the party’s election material – a decision presumably made for fear of upsetting the xenophobe vote.
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Until the past couple of weeks, any polls which showed the Conservatives holding less than 100 seats after the election were seen as outliers. But now, almost every poll shows much the same outcome. (This week’s exception was YouGov: they predicted just over 100.)
This would mean the party could be out of power for a generation. It might even mean the end of the Conservative Party as a political force. But both nature and politics abhors a vacuum. Who will replace them on the centre right of the political spectrum? The answer might be surprising, and EAB will be examining the possibilities in the coming weeks.
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So, how will politics change on the ground? Pecksniff’s colleague Stephen ‘Numbers’ McNair has recently written absorbingly of the seats in this region likely to change, but we shall be looking at a few which have recently become marginals and which have a particular resonance. Like for instance the seat for which Matt Hancock is still outrageously the MP, West Suffolk.
His replacement as Tory candidate is Telegraph columnist Nick Timothy, who according to Electoral Calculus only leads his Labour rival Rebecca Denness by 2.3%. And Survation has Ms Denness 2.8% ahead.
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So what’s that scamp Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) been up to now? His present seat has been broken up and Mr Afolami is clinging to what may turn out to be the wreckage of what he assumed would be the safest bit. Because canvassing is clearly not going well. He is reported as saying: “If they’re under 40 we don’t even bother to knock”.
But now he might not even be the Conservative candidate. All that used to be required of a Tory candidate was a blameless spouse and clean fingernails, then Thatcher introduced them to the joys of ideology. So the Daily Express reports that Mr Afolami is one of 10 Tory MPs whose local parties are thinking of de-selecting, quoting Conservative Post: “For too long it appears a few shadowy people in CCHQ and the Conservative Party’s candidates’ department have been weeding out actual centre-right conservatives and pushing liberal centrists.”
Those liberal centrists, eh? Should one ever assume that at some point normal service will resume and the Conservative Party will revert to its one-nation pretensions, bear in mind that – for today’s party members – even the present government isn’t going far enough.
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The latest Conservative MP to feel the chill is the derided Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal). For her, a distant whisper of voter discontent has become quite a hubbub. Her majority of over 20,000 is under siege, with both Electoral Calculus and Survation giving her seat to Labour.
We have discussed before the caution with which we should read opinion polls, and in particular the problems in this seat with the opposition parties being more concerned with beating each other than displacing Dr Coffey. But rather late in the day, she clearly feels she ought to attempt a campaign. It involves that tried and tested Tory gimmick of distributing literature pretending instead to be the Greens, with no mention of the Conservative Party anywhere.
What is interesting is that these notices are clearly party political – for all that no party is mentioned – yet they were posted on town council websites at Aldeburgh and Felixstowe, where presumably Dr Coffey has friends. Pecksniff has asked Aldeburgh Council for an explanation.
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More desperate Tory literature, this time misrepresenting the event it promotes. It shows a frowning Duncan Baker (N Norfolk), a blessed relief from that manic grin which makes him look like a children’s entertainer about to pull a rabbit out of his trousers. He is surveying a flood at Potter Heigham (which EAB reported on), and recalls a public meeting he held in February.
Only, his recall is not the same as what Pecksniff reported at the time. He claims that “constituents had the opportunity to raise important questions – have their voices heard”. Only it seems that those whose voiced challenged him were not to be heard, and had the microphone snatched from them. According to Mr Baker himself – not verified by anybody else – things became so rowdy that the police were called.
His critics were drawing his attention to his Commons vote effectively in favour of allowing water companies leeway to do what they liked. It was something he had already addressed. In August 2022, he wrote a piece headed ‘Busting the sewage vote myth’, in which he claimed he and his government had voted for “a robust enforcement mechanism to fine water companies who fail to take action.” Since then, sewage emissions have more than doubled.
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A new constituency which is attracting attention is Ely and East Cambs, where the local Labour Party seems to be noticeably excited at their prospects. Their hopes may not be wholly misplaced either, since this week’s Survation poll makes Tories and Labour neck and neck: 35.1% and 34.6% respectively. There was a hoo-ha earlier this year when the LibDems declared that Labour had “given up” on winning, since it’s not on the party’s target seats. Labour perhaps understandably took umbrage, since after all it is only 39th on the LibDems’ own list and Survation only gives them 17% of the vote.
But optimism for either party is the enemy of good politics, and Pecksniff has spent too many exultant evenings on licensed premises after the polls close, only to find the count leaves a less pleasant taste.
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For reasons best known to the clinical psychiatrists among us, there is always a fascination with Tom Hunt MP (Ipswich). This week he predictably backed Rishi Sunak’s veiled threat to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. He claims it is “intent on undermining the fundamentals of national democracy”.
Presumably that all depends on how one defines ‘national democracy’, though it seems Mr Hunt defines it as whatever the government can get away with. If so, he is bang on the money. The idea began with Winston Churchill, who one supposes has the approval of Mr Hunt. In the wake of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, the idea was to establish an international organisation to promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights, and to become a court of last resort for those countries who might fall into the hands of undemocratic regimes. It has nothing to do with the EU and predates it by many years.
So when Messrs Sunak and Hunt prate about leaving the ECHR, they are actually threatening to rob the British people of the last protector of our democratic freedoms. And expecting us to consider that a good idea.
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Things are getting so desperate that even Liz Truss is back in the country, and has even been seen in her constituency, South West Norfolk. Though judging from a photo which appeared this week, she may only have come back for Nigel Farage’s birthday bash. And only, given her record, if somebody else was paying. She was also photographed outside a local church, so shows she at least dropped in, and holding an Easter lamb – a picture one wag dubbed the ‘Lamb and Lettuce’.
The church however is interesting. It is St Mary’s at Beachamwell and is being restored. According to Simon Knott in Norfolk Churches, it is best known for its medieval graffiti, which features a lady in a wimple and a devil, in what is described as “intricate detail”. We can be sure, however, that this was not the attraction to Ms Truss.
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North Norfolk LibDems have discovered via a freedom of information request that Norfolk Police, in an almost entirely rural county, has no specialist rural crime squad. Your diarist is not entirely sure what makes for a rural crime squad, and one assumes it amounts to more than remembering to keep a pair of wellies in the boot. The government doesn’t define it but uses examples: mainly concerning organised crime groups and involving plant and livestock theft, hare coursing and burglary of firearms. So if Norfolk Police don’t specialise in these activities, one has to wonder where its priorities lie.
Expressed in these examples, one can see that preventing rural crime does seem like awfully hard work, and with the force no doubt ravaged by government cuts, there are probably easier and cheaper ways of occupying officers’ time – if much less effective. If the funding simply doesn’t allow for proper policing, then it should be the responsibility of the police and crime commissioner to make a serious noise about it, and not just suck it up because the government happen to be of the same political party.
Apparently the present incumbent is one (checks notes) Giles Orpen-Smellie. (Who knew?). The LibDem to stand against him next month and who they hope will replace him is Councillor John Crofts.
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Thanks this week go to James Porter.
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