We Are Not Going To Go Away

Only George Galloway could just have said this live on air at seven o’clock: “Boris Johnson is said to bear the impression of the last person to have sat on him, and that’s quite likely to have been Carrie Symonds.” As James Frayne puts it:

Dominic Cummings’ departure marks the end of a radically successful experiment to turn the Tories into the party of the provincial English working classes. A year ago, the party campaigned heavily on a platform to improve the lives of ordinary people; now, hours after Cummings’ exit was confirmed, the party briefed a return to the preoccupations of metropolitan England. This weekend the party is administering welcome home kisses – on both cheeks, naturally – to affluent people in the big cities and turning their backs on the people of Derby, Mansfield, Walsall, Stoke and Durham.

The Conservative Party gained 20 seats in 2017, and it lost six of them back to the SNP in 2019. But it picked up another 58 that night, mostly from Labour, and almost all of them in Leave-voting areas north of the line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. That gives 72 Red Wall seats, and the Conservatives’ overall majority is 80. Now, though, they face an Official Opposition that is as glad to be rid of us as they themselves are resentful of having needed us. Between them, they have decided that if they ignore us, then we are going to go away.

Well, we are not going to go away. My think tank, The Centre, will be starting next year. It will fund itself in part by owning half of my editorially independent new weekly magazine, The Weekly Standard, which will feature, on its odd-numbered pages, a weekly column by each of around 20 regular contributors, plus around five guest articles. The even-numbered pages will feature popular news stories relating to sport, television, music, and so on, plus advertising.

And I am a declared and active candidate for the parliamentary seat of North West Durham at the next General Election. Please give generously. The only thing that could keep me off that ballot paper would be the success of the ongoing criminal conspiracy by Keir Starmer’s Crown Prosecution Service to have me in prison on the day that nominations closed in 2024. At that Election, the “choice” will otherwise be between a Labour Party that did not want us back, and a Conservative Party that no longer pretended ever to have wanted us, yet each of which thought that we owed it our votes. We do not.