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Baldrick’s cunning plan has come unstuck. The one tactical victory that Rishi Sunak’s supporters (outside of CCHQ an endangered species) claimed on his behalf was that his surprise springing of a summer election on the public had put Nigel Farage out of contention. Tee-hee. What a coup! Zombies dancing in the streets may not be a pretty sight, but Downing Street was full of the Tory Undead celebrating their Machiavellian leader’s brilliant initiative.
That it was an initiative he had not shared with his cabinet or campaign managers, who might have told him his own party was not ready to fight an election, began to become evident in the succeeding hours, while the waterlogged Prime Minister was drying out, both from the deluge and the intoxication of the moment.
However, some of us who were well disposed towards Reform UK were convinced that Sunak had blundered and that Nigel Farage, freed of the incubus of fighting a constituency, would be a more effective campaigner, roving the country and waging guerrilla warfare against the legacy parties. That was a mistaken perception, proving how challenging it can be for commentators to read the runes in the early stages of a general election.
By the end of a week, despite Farage’s spirited campaigning in his traditional energetic style, it somehow did not feel right. Reform sympathisers made it clear to Farage that they expected him to lead the party and to be a contender for a parliamentary seat. Nobody has better attuned political antennae than Nigel Farage, so he caught the mood and responded to it by returning to the leadership of Reform UK and announcing his candidature for Clacton.
His arrival in the constituency at noon on Tuesday signalled how profoundly the election had changed overnight. The huge crowd that greeted him, despite the fact that less than twenty-four hours previously there had been no notion of him being a candidate, signalled the readiness of the disinherited conservatives of Britain to rally to the Reform standard. If the Conservative Party looked doomed even before this development, it is as good as dead and buried now.
Can anyone imagine either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer commanding the loyalty and affection that millions of Britons feel towards Nigel Farage? At the last general election there was a counterfeit facsimile in the affection evinced by Red Wall voters towards Boris Johnson; but Boris, the practised seducer, proved faithless. Farage is the real deal, with the track record in the European parliament, the Brexit campaign and, most recently, his crusade against the arrogant banks to prove it. The excitement of his launch at Clacton, even the moron throwing a milkshake, demonstrated that the good old-fashioned British hustings is back in business.
That is something we have not seen since John Major on his soapbox in 1997. The sterile, cellophane-coated presentation of political leaders that began with Tony Blair’s choreographed campaign, with every step stage-managed by Alastair Campbell, has turned general elections into virtual events. Real contact with the public is practically eliminated, in circumstances as clinical as pandemic lockdown. Leaders are steered by aides into carefully prepared venues populated by supporters, with challenges sedulously avoided.
Farage is different. He represents a return to the old campaigning traditions of the big beasts who, historically, dominated British politics, when people would cycle 20 miles to hear Lloyd George speak in a chilly village hall. When asked why he attracts so many projectile milkshakes (the same thing happened to him in 2019), Farage replied: “Because I go out and meet the public, nobody else does.”
There was something else on display in Clacton: the unmistakable signs of poverty and deprivation. Clacton is like many other towns across Britain, sunk in decline and neglect. Ask its inhabitants about the Tories’ “levelling-up” pledges and you will provoke a cynical laugh. The archipelago of decaying towns scattered across the country, of which Clacton is one of the worst-hit (one of its areas ranks as the second most deprived in Britain) is the equivalent of America’s “flyover states”, a patchwork of mini-Detroits.
On both sides of the parliamentary aisle, for the past couple of decades, the distinguishing characteristic of honourable members has been indifference and contempt towards the little people, like the residents of Clacton, whom Nigel Farage is calling to arms. The citizens of Gaza, the members of vanishingly small minorities as well as illegal immigrants are the objects of solicitude to parliamentarians; but the people of Clacton and dozens of similar communities do not so much as register on their consciousness.
The impoverished residents of Clacton have to watch while illegal immigrants are installed in four-star hotels. The £3.1bn spent in the year to March 2024 on housing immigrants could have transformed many places like Clacton, had that been a priority for the “levelling-up” Conservative government.
Any analysis of the problems of towns such as Clacton invariably shows they are rooted in the failure of small businesses: it is SMEs that have suffered badly from the supposedly pro-business Tory party, in hock to large corporations and their demand for cheap labour. Conservative policymakers since 2010 seem to have wakened up every morning and asked themselves enthusiastically: “What can we do today to alienate our natural supporters still further?”
That is the visible fruit of 14 years of Tory rule. The scale on which the population of Clacton, and the whole of the country, have been lied to by the Conservatives is gargantuan. Neither they, nor millions of others, will believe anything the Tories say, ever again. The lack of self-awareness among the Conservative leadership about how their remorseless mendacity has deprived them of all credibility, forever, is astonishing.
Farage’s announcement on Monday prompted a reaction from Rishi Sunak the following day: he dusted off a tired old pledge to consider restrictions on immigrant visas; just two weeks ago he abandoned a plan to restrict graduate visas in the face of cabinet opposition led by Lord Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and Gillian Keegan. Only Cameron’s seat is safe: the other two turkeys voted for Christmas. On Tuesday, James Cleverly hinted that the government might consider withdrawing from the ECHR if it could not secure the reforms it wanted.
Could anything better illustrate the scale of the delusions prevailing in the Tory bunker? The Conservatives have had 14 years to curb immigration, reiterating pledges to reduce it to the “tens of thousands”. They intensified that commitment during the Brexit crisis, assuring the public that they would “take back control” of Britain’s borders. In fairness, they did so, and used that power to import 2.4 million immigrants over the past two years, on Johnson and Sunak’s watch. What kind of insanity induces a government to impose such figures on a country facing a housing crisis and the meltdown of all public services?
There is something very significant going on, of which Nigel Farage’s candidature is a product. The country has decided to take back control. The public is tired of being lied to by politicians and has come to the realisation that, if things are ever going to improve, it is necessary to destroy the legacy parties; but that cannot be done simultaneously, so it must be done sequentially. So, the plan is to annihilate the Conservative Party in 2024 and the Labour Party in 2029.
The present malaise has deep roots. An academic historian would probably date it back to 1965. That was the first significant occasion when the two main parties collaborated to override the public will by abolishing capital punishment, in the face of majority public opposition. That emboldened them to enforce immigration, despite the fact that polling in 1968 showed 93 per cent of those surveyed wanted immigration halted completely. Since then, the ability to enforce mass immigration in the face of public opinion has become a virility symbol for the establishment, a demonstration of who is in control.
Gradually, that situation expanded to embrace many other issues, as what Gordon Brown called the “progressive consensus” collaborated to suppress the public will. In theory, Britain was a parliamentary democracy; but voters discovered that, on many issues, the two main parties shared a common view. The “progressives” had, by psychological bullying, seized the moral high ground, so that nominal Conservatives deferred to the consensus on social issues. Even so, David Cameron could not gain the support of the majority of his MPs for same-sex marriage, so he passed the legislation on the back of Labour votes.
A culture emerged whereby parliamentarians attributed to themselves an insight into what was right and acceptable that was often in conflict with their constituents’ views. This form of Gnosis was the prerogative of those in authority, honed over dinners in Islington and kitchen suppers in Chipping Norton, where a quasi-priestly caste defined the dogmas to be obeyed. These wise gnostics were referred to as “the adults in the room”; whenever a momentary bushfire of independent, maverick Tory thinking was quashed, it was signalled by the announcement that “the grown-ups are back in charge”.
That announcement preceded every disaster perpetrated by the idiots posing as wise men who brought the Conservative party to its present pass. It was the Brexit crisis that loosened the grip of the solemn fools on the Tory Party, when they went too far and tried to reverse the verdict of a national referendum. They regained control eventually by inserting Rishi Sunak, already rejected at a leadership election, into 10 Downing Street, where he followed Boris Johnson’s lead in opening the floodgates to mass immigration.
Today, finally, the Conservative party is paying the price for submitting to the rule of the buffoons who posed as “moderate”, authoritative figures. Yet even today, the idiot tendency is perpetuating itself, by parachuting its clones into the parliamentary seats most likely to survive an extinction event. Of 46 candidates being allocated to short lists by CCHQ, 10 are special advisers, which is to say, the people most responsible for the demise of the party. This ensures that the surviving rump will be of the same character and calibre as the present government, further easing Reform’s future path to conservative hegemony.
For it is all over now. All that remains is for Conservative MPs – those that have not fled the field – to await the sentence of the returning officer. At this election, it would be appropriate if he wore a black cap, like a judge passing the capital sentence, a neat reminder of where the great betrayal first began.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.