I was hardly the target audience, but I thought that Kemi Badenoch did better than Robert Jenrick. "The Conservative Party is in a hole. Let's get all our best players on the pitch"? Where did he go to school? But two lost by-elections, and either of them would be finished as Leader. To Reform UK, and the strategy would have failed. To anyone else, and it would have been the wrong strategy. One of each, and both.
When the rules on MPs' presenting television programmes changed, then Nigel Farage will presumably give up his seat to retain his million pound gig on GB News, and the Conservatives would have done well if they were to take back Clacton. But Reform won all of five seats, one of those was with the incumbent, and most of its second places are to Labour, although even most of those are too distant to be flipped, while most of the rest, including here at North Durham, would depend on coming through the middle of a divided left-leaning electorate.
The Conservatives' big losses were to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. They even lost twice as many seats to the Greens as Labour did, having suffered major losses to them at the local elections. Liz Truss lost her seat to Labour. Hexham, which until this year had only ever returned a Conservative MP, was a major centre of UKIP activity back in the day. It was won by Labour. The Lib Dems are already doing victory laps. They took the seats from which Theresa May and Michael Gove had retired, they took David Cameron's old seat, and they took Boris Johnson's first seat, which he had taken over from Michael Heseltine. Based on unfolding developments, they have barely started.
Both of this evening's questions on immigration were from immigrants. Jenrick's was from an Australian, and Badenoch's was from some sort of Eastern European in his early twenties, who could not have been here five minutes. For a good half a decade, I have observed at a distance what looks like organised Rightist immigration from several parts of the world straight into certain activist networks in and around London. It is not an awful lot of people. But it does not need to be.
I did wonder whether we might have been on the brink of seeing national prestige publications that were written by people who really did hold socially conservative views, but unless Sir Paul Marshall acquired the Telegraph titles and reshaped them on clearly Holy Trinity Brompton lines, then there is no sign of that. He has appointed Michael Gove as Editor of The Spectator, and of course Gove has endorsed Kamala Harris. Badenoch declined to answer the question, and Jenrick was not even asked it. Yet within 18 months, even either of those is probably going to be overthrown from the left.
Gove says that he is following Dick Cheney, and unsurprisingly he is. No one doubts that George W. Bush and all the old Project for the New American Century ghouls voted for Joe Biden in 2020. This time, they are saying it out loud. Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen, Karl Rove and the Cheneys, are all actively campaigning not only for Harris, but with her. Harris's and Biden's Democratic Party is the Republican Party of Bush and Cheney. Why would you vote for that? Why would Gove not? And if The Spectator endorsed the Conservative Party in 2029, as of course it will, then know that it was at least one of the branch offices of the Biden-Harris and Harris-Walz Democratic Party. Be it led by Badenoch, Jenrick, or anyone else. The Guardian, most obviously, will endorse Labour. On exactly the same basis.
Barack Obama is annoyed that black men are not overly keen on Harris, but if anything they are giving her too much of the benefit of the doubt, considering how many of them she kept locked up past their release dates in California as Thirteenth Amendment slave labour for her corporate donors. Both of her parents were immigrants, as was his black parent. James Baldwin said that Bobby Kennedy had "got here last week". If you had a black ancestor in the United States in 1924, then you almost certainly had one in 1824, you therefore had one on that territory in 1724, and you had at least one in 1624. But no one like that has ever been on the ticket of either party. And they know it.
“Yet within 18 months, even either of those is probably going to be overthrown from the left”
ReplyDeleteNot a chance-and after your “hung parliament-take that to the bank” prediction I think you’d best stay away from attempting political predictions. The Tories are not targeting a few Lib Dem seats as those weren’t what gave Boris Johnson his massive majority on a “Get Brexit Done” ticket-they’re targeting the many Labour Red Wall seats where Boris and Reform UK did so well.
Ever since 2019, they’ve worked out that’s their path to victory. And those voters want straight-talking right wing politicians who oppose political correctness and mass immigration.
Kemi, a steadfast opponent of trans rights in her time as Minister, and Jenrick, who rightly advocates an immigration cap and leaving the ECHR, are the right candidates.
Neither main party talks about 2019. It never happened.
Delete“The Lib Dems are already doing victory laps.”
ReplyDeleteThey’re now just a distant fourth biggest party in Britain-Reform UK is now Britain’s third biggest party by vote share. Reform polled well in all the Red Wall Labour seats that gave Boris Johnson’s Tories an 80-seat majority in 2019.
The Tories know that (and not the few well off seats won by the Lib Dems) are their only path to victory and straight-talking anti-immigration anti-woke rightwing leaders that can take on Farage are their only chance of winning.
In over 80 seats won by Labour, the Tories would have won if Reform UK hadn’t taken their votes.
It is not done on vote share. And only about one in seven Labour gains was on the Red Wall, a term that no one uses anymore. Meanwhile, the Tories even lost two seats to the Greens, as well as scores to Labour and to a party with a manifesto commitment to re-join the Single Market and the Customs Union.
DeleteLabour won a supermajority largely off the back of a divided Reform/Tory vote (as P. Hitchens predicted would happen). However the stats show not only did Reform stop the Tories winning over 80 seats-they’re also an increasing threat to Labour. Both parties now know they need to (at least rhetorically) genuflect to the Right. Hence Starmer’s visits to Meloni and the Tories picking two rightwing leadership candidates. Of course first past the post “isn’t done on vote share”: I simply said Reform UK are now Britain’s third biggest party in terms of public support.
ReplyDeleteIn European systems, by contrast, where vote share is reflected in seats, the Right are winning elections from the Netherlands to Austria.
The Tories changed the boundaries to make the Southern middle class the key swing voters again: Thatcherite, socially ultraliberal, and ferociously pro-EU. That way, even if they lost, then they would have lost because they had not sold themselves as sufficiently like that, requiring them to do so the next time. And here we are.
DeleteYes, the Lib Dems swept the Tory heartlands because those areas are full of well off, liberal Remainers. Labour did so to a lesser extent and the Greens in two places but they all pulled it off. If the Tories want those seats back they need to go that way again, a Leader who didn't do that would be replaced live on television like IDS was.
ReplyDeleteThat was how they won their unexpected victory in 2015. Largely at the expense of the Lib Dems.
Delete