It is over a year since I declared on my Planet Normal podcast that soon there would be no such thing as a “safe” Tory seat. When party members of 30 years’ standing email me to say they don’t just want the Conservatives to lose the general election, they are hoping for “evisceration”, you know something has gone very wrong indeed.
With what speed have we moved from murmurs of disillusion to outright mutiny. I was not in the least bit surprised to hear that the highly respected American pollster Frank Luntz recently told the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs that any Tory MP with a majority under 15,000 should look out.
No shock, then, that it is widely predicted that on Thursday the Conservatives will get a kicking in three by-elections, two of which a proper Tory party should have no business losing. Boris Johnson had a slim 7,210 majority in Uxbridge so it’s not unreasonable to expect a less charismatic candidate to come a cropper in west London, although Sadiq Khan’s ruinous Ulez policies could have provided an opportunity. But Selby and South Ainsty (20,137) should be a true blue Yorkshire stronghold. And what possible excuse is there for allowing Somerton and Frome (19,213 majority) to fall into the Pontius-Pilate, frangipane-scented hands of the Lib Dems who last held the seat back in 2010 with a wafer thin margin of 1,817?
Our reassuringly competent (yet somehow lacklustre and disastrously weak) Prime Minister tells his troops that mid-term by-elections are “always difficult”. In this case, that’s like saying the Battle of Stalingrad was “a bit tricky”. It’s not as if Tory voters are gagging for the alternatives. Low turnouts in recent by-elections suggest that many previously loyal Tories are too sick at heart to vote at all. The prevailing mood was summed up in the comments under a recent Telegraph article on how other European countries were increasingly choosing Right-wing governments. “If only we had a Conservative option here,” said one wag.
The overwhelming sense is that it’s not us who have left the party, but the party that’s left us. “I’m seriously struggling to call myself a Conservative,” emails a Tory donor who was recently invited by his MP to have dinner with Jeremy Hunt. “The irony of asking for £3,000 to have dinner with J Hunt Esq was seemingly completely lost on him,” boggles my friend.
Sunak has an almost uncanny ability to misread the room. Even when he alights on the right topic, he invariably gets the wrong end of the stick. The Tories I know are not obsessing about students doing useless degrees. Instead, parents are resentful and distressed about what young people have suffered at the hands of universities, acting as profit centres servicing international students, particularly after the terrible time they had during the pandemic. My son graduates this summer and his uni career has been a mixture of strikes and lockdowns. For the majority of the time, he has had no access to college facilities, no clubs, no sport, hardly any in-person teaching. Basically, our boy has done distance learning while paying the full cost of his course. What a con.
There has been no apology, no refund. Instead, students had to take their chances with exams being cancelled all around them because of lecturers downing tools. One mother told me that her daughter at Edinburgh had her language Oral cancelled as she was cycling to the exam. It might not be rescheduled, the distraught girl was told. I hear that some institutions were reduced to drafting in temporary, unqualified markers to grade papers.
The failure to process a year’s worth of graduates stores up another generation of problems for the country. Now, that is what a Conservative government should be concerned about – holding universities to account, not agonising over the drawbacks of Hedgehog Studies at Scunthorpe Metropolitan.
Another easy win for the Government would have been to ban self-identification in schools altogether. No longer could some stroppy, deluded 13-year-old compel teachers and fellow pupils to refer to them as a cat or whatever sex they fancied being that day. Nor would a teacher at an all-girls’ private school be ordered to apologise for greeting her class as “girls”.
Instead, it now looks as if the much-postponed new government guidance on trans issues will be a disastrous cop-out. The advice will make it clear that schools will have to tell parents if their child wants to identify as a different gender or start using a new name – that’s big of them! – and any child who does want to self-identify “should first undergo a period of reflection”.
What possible use is that against a cult that is aggressively grooming children?
What would help parents to protect their children is for schools not to to be allowed to lie about a pupil’s sex. Biology matters. “Change of pronouns” equals lying about a child’s sex because girls cannot simply become boys, and vice-versa, although thousands are now being sold that pernicious fantasy.
A hairdresser tells me that a group of 11-year-olds came into his salon recently and three of the girls asked to have all their hair shaved off because “we now identify as boys”. Their tearful mothers turned up later and admitted that they felt totally helpless. During PSHE lessons at school, their daughters had learnt they could pick a gender as easily as trying on a new set of clothes. When parents complained that their kids were too young to be exposed to that kind of thing they were called “bigots” and “transphobes”.
You hear these chilling stories all the time. The leader of the Reclaim party, Laurence Fox, encountered it first when he asked his son for a goodnight hug and the boy replied, “You need my consent for that, dad”.
Fox, who is standing as a candidate in the Uxbridge by-election tomorrow, went up to his son’s school and was horrified to find out that young children were being taught they could be born in the wrong body. Reclaim wants PSHE to be banned from the curriculum because it is wicked and “possibly criminal”.
It’s obvious that the Government would enjoy massive support if it took a firm stand against the pernicious, unscientific nonsense that is being taught to our children.
Just as I was coming to the end of this piece, an email arrived from Rory in Frome. Subject: A Few Reasons for No Longer Supporting the Conservative Party. Rory was copying me in on a “rant” to his local Tory party explaining why he, as “a once loyal but now ex-Conservative”, would not be casting his vote for their candidate in Frome tomorrow.
All of us could come up with pretty much the same list, I reckon. Complete failure to take meaningful steps to curb illegal migration. A profoundly unconservative Chancellor “raising corporation tax at exactly the wrong time”. No attempt at NHS reform. Hiding from the culture wars. Running down our Armed forces. “Wet career politicians” who might as well be Lib Dems or Labour. Blind adherence to “back of a fag packet” net zero ideology “which will wreck the country”.
Well said, Rory, a champion rant. If other Conservatives in Frome feel the same, then it’s game over. Who cares? Defeat will be richly deserved. When a political party thinks that appeasing their enemies is more important than consoling their voters, it’s no surprise if they end up friendless and unloved.