Whatever Next?

11:25, Film4, Trainspotting. It is being billed as an "audaciously innovative and darkly comedic drama about addiction, scams and survival". Not after tonight's Newsnight, it won't be. But much as we are all enjoying Clownfall, the first ever production of King Lear as a pantomime, what comes next?

The Conservatives know who their challengers are. The Liberal Democrats have taken three previously super-safe Conservative seats amidst a sea of lost deposits on the extra-Tory Right. That is because the Lib Dems embody Thatcherism as it actually occurred rather than as it is often selectively or wishfully remembered, and the Major Government that in 1992 took what is still the largest popular vote at any British General Election in history, and the Coalition.

Taken together, those have covered more than half of the years since 1979, and there was a Labour Government for another 13. The last days of David Cameron, and then the May Government, were also hardly Farageism by proxy. Again, the party now closest to them is the Lib Dems. Brexit was a unifying issue, by no means only on any kind of right wing, and Nigel Farage had a personal following, but an electoral bloc to the conventionally defined right of the Conservative Party simply does not exist.

That is now proved incontrovertibly at every parliamentary by-election, and those have been the elections that are going to count. Neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party has ever held an all-member Leadership Election with the Prime Minister as a candidate. An outgoing Prime Minister recommends a successor whom the monarch appoints immediately. In the wildly improbable event of a Leadership Election after that, then the incumbent Prime Minister would of course win by a country mile, and especially so in the Conservative Party, where anything else would look like rudeness to the Queen.

The next Prime Minister is going to be whoever the people who really ran that party thought was best placed to see off the Lib Dems during the rest of this Parliament, essentially by being the Lib Dems until a General Election that, assuming a Thursday, did not need to be held until 23rd January 2025.