The hive mind of the Conservative Party has discerned that all is not well with the government, and like one of those primitive tribes who ritually dispose of their king when disaster threatens, many have decided that it must be down to their leader. It’s all Rishi’s fault. The only difference is that, as far as we know, there are no plans to eat him.
But we are told that letters are going in to the chair of the 1922 Committee, which is the equivalent of sharpening the spears and lighting the fire. So let us see… If they go-ahead, then in eight years the party will have had six leaders, and we will have had six prime ministers. Each has turned on its head what his or her predecessor had decreed was the only way forward. But all, you understand, have been faithfully following Conservative principles.
The wise men at the Muckrakers shake their heads and present their empty glasses. Frank is considered among the wisest of them, on account of he can quote from DH Lawrence, sing Gilbert and Sullivan and he drives a bus.
‘I wouldn’t trust any of them to do the weekly shop,’ says Frank.
*
Last week Pecksniff pointed out that Grant Shapps (Welwyn Hatfield) has held five cabinet posts since breakfast yesterday and has been supremely unqualified for any of them. As though to emphasise his astonishing ineptitude, in a TV interview this week he didn’t even know that aircraft carriers are part of the Royal Navy, rather than – as he suggested – the RAF.
There are no insults, no jokes that your diarist could make about the hapless Mr Shapps that won’t be made with a hundred times the fury and astonishment in officers’ messes on ships and in air bases up and down the country.
Then one day soon, their new secretary of state is going to have to face them in meetings and convince them our armed forces are safe in his hands.
*
At long last, it seems, we have a date for the by election, after Nadine Dorries agreed to relinquish her seat in Mid Beds. We can’t know quite what forced her hand. Was it the threat from the standards committee, or the LibDems threatening a Commons vote? A return to some kind of moral standards, perhaps? Or was it the Daily Mail pointing out that the misbehaviour of their £250,000 a year columnist was even in their own eyes bringing them into disrepute?
*
But wait, what’s this? Hardly had the ink dried on the Pecksniff observations than it seems the real reason for Nadine Dorries delaying her resignation was to cause the greatest possible embarrassment to her party. She wanted publication of her hagiography of Boris Johnson and exposé of the plotters against the Chosen One to coincide with Conservative Party conference.
(This would incidentally earn Ms Dorries a great deal of money from the book’s sales, though it is not clear that this ever occurred to her. After all, who could have guessed?)
The thing is though, for the by-election to be included in this cunning plan would imply that, for all her rhetoric, she expects the Tory candidate to get a hammering after her own disgraceful tenure.
Ms Dorries predictably has a different take. She claims there is a deliberately misleading rumour put about by No.10 that the delayed publication is nothing to do with legal difficulties regarding those colleagues she is slagging off, but all about breaking the ministerial code.
“What they don’t seem to get,” Ms Dorries explains, “is that it’s not about me”.
Which will come as a shock to her many followers, being her first act since her election which has not been about her.
*
So who will win Mid Beds? Well, the Tories should in any normal political environment, but that went oot the windy some time ago. As this diarist has pointed out previously, both Labour and LibDems are looking for the momentum to win over tactical voters.
So this is Pecksniff’s take. It’s not impossible that the Tories may cling on. There are few posters about, none of them Tory and probably more Labour than LibDems, who are keen to insist this is essentially a rural seat so they can claim they are more likely to win. But that ignores major commuter areas like Wixhams. Labour seems to be doing well there, on the back of local rage over the lack of GPs.
In working class Wilford there remains a substantial Tory vote, with doubters most likely to stay at home. At places like this, the LibDems are trying to weaponise the Labour candidate’s Greenpeace credentials to bring those doubters over.
Needless to say, it’s getting dirty. Both parties accuse the other of lying. But it’s probably true that, for all Labour’s blinkered arrogance, in the matter of telling whoppers the LibDems probably take the biscuit here.
So who will win? One Labour campaigner outlined to me a brilliant betting ruse which it’s suspected the LibDems are using to bend the bookies in their direction. So that doesn’t help.
Perhaps Labour.
*
Once again this week, Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal), the environment secretary, was presented with irrefutable evidence that the water companies are releasing sewage illegally. And once again, thinking of the suffering of the saints and repeating to herself snatches of the penitential psalms, Dr Coffey acknowledges it and admits the water companies are under criminal investigation, but tells us it still has nothing to do with her.
*
Rarely in the annals of political incompetence can any politician have had such a disastrous effect on this country in so short a time than Liz Truss (SW Norfolk). She accomplished in a few weeks what Vladimir Putin spent years and millions of roubles trying to achieve. The collapse of the British economy.
A new poll shows 81% of voters thought she did badly – 64% very badly – and only 7% would give her the time of day.
Yet, dear reader, we hear that Ms Truss is positioning herself to become the champion of the free market after the Tory cataclysm at the next election. The same woman who in an afternoon showed she had as much grasp of how the market works as the Israelites’ pursuing Egyptian army had of the tides in the Red Sea.
Forget any idea that the Tories can win the next election, or even that they can avoid humiliation. The rump of the party, supported by its diminishing, increasingly elderly and choleric membership, will devote the rest of their declining years to helping to amass the Truss family fortune.
In future years, the main claim to fame of the imbecilic Truss will be as a regular feature of the pub quiz.
*
There was talk of Shailesh Vara (NW Cambs) receiving a peerage – and indeed some expectation from the gentleman himself. Since peerages went to all kinds of sycophants and nobodies, his not-to-be lordship may have every reason to feel miffed. (There will be other leaders to suck up to, Shailesh.)
But it seems he may be taking his fit of pique too far. Last week apparently there was a bit of a to-do when Mr Vara’s driver found his road blocked by a sporting event: the Sawtree 10 mile race. Pecksniff’s spies report that a great deal of hooting ensued, at the command of Mr Vara. So vexed was he that he complained to the race marshals.
The significance of this, if it has any, is that it sounds a bit as though Mr Vara has had enough. It is rarely considered wise for MPs to berate their voters whilst they take their pleasures, not if they value their seat; and Mr Vara’s readiness to take ermine also suggests that long years ahead on the opposition back benches does not have any great appeal.
<<< Previous Pecksniff’s Diary
