Looming hung parliament will be death knell for the Tories

“Be in no doubt, it is time for a change and we are out.” Oh, sorry, what Rishi Sunak actually said at the conclusion of his speech was: “It is time for a change and we are it.” Right, so, some malignant entity has been messing up the country for thirteen years, but the Tories have arrived to sort it all out.

This was the speech of the leader of an incoming party, in the immediate aftermath of a general election, who has found the country in an appalling state due to the incompetence of the previous incumbents and is devising a wide-sweeping programme of recovery. Its highlight is an ultra-statist, Orwellian ban on smoking, under which the nanny state will eliminate the noxious practice entirely. You could not ask for more potent evidence that the totalitarian mentality engendered by lockdown has become the default position of the Conservative Party.

The applause from the audience sent out the message to the wider world that the Tory Party, once the guarantor of personal freedoms, has degenerated into an extreme exponent of state control of the minutiae of our lives. No doubt Churchill’s trademark cigar will be erased from pictures of the great national leader: his party no longer espouses such irresponsible notions as personal autonomy and individual decision making. Welcome to North-West Korea.

For anyone who once believed in, supported, voted and worked for the Conservative Party, the spectacle of this conference was a melancholy experience. It was sad, as wakes inevitably are, behind the enforced conviviality. The corpse in the room cast a blight on the proceedings. In every respect, this shabby assembly proclaimed the imminent demise of the Tories as a political force.

In a cringe-making, American-style (well, after all, Sunak refers to California as “home”) gimmick, the Prime Minister was introduced by his wife. A prime minister’s spouse should be present and prominently visible – Denis Thatcher invariably obliged – but not an active participant. Wives are unelected, but the recent Tory Party has ignored that. David Cameron admitted that what drove him to bulldoze same-sex marriage onto the statute book was his wife: that arbitrary act, for which no demand had been made, opened the floodgates to all the gender nonsense that followed.

The appalling imposition of net zero similarly resulted from pressure exerted by Boris Johnson’s wife: now Britain is committed to bankrupting itself with impositions calibrated in trillions of pounds, an expensive expedient to save Boris from sleeping in the spare bedroom. It is astonishing the frivolity and caprice with which Tory leaders have committed taxpayers to massive expenditure.

HS2 was the paradigm of Tory prodigality with taxpayers’ money. Sunak’s announcement of its cancellation, after this decision had leaked from the sieve-like cabinet far in advance and overshadowed the entire conference, was the dampest squib in recent political history. In further breaking news, Queen Anne is dead and we won the Battle of Waterloo.

HS2 should have been cancelled a decade ago. If the Conservatives’ coalition with the Liberal Democrats was an obstacle, it should have been scrapped, at the latest, in 2015, after the Lib Dem incubus was removed. Even in today’s announcement it was emphasised that the money saved by scrapping HS2 would not be left unspent – perish the thought! – but would be applied to other transport projects. In other words, there will be no saving to the taxpayer, but at least the cash will be spent on useful projects. 

In a blur of road numbers, Sunak reeled off the bewildering number of highways that would be improved, only stopping by the time he had Church Lane, Stoke Poges converted to a dual carriageway. Why was all this improvement not embarked upon in 2015? As it is, it will be the 2030s before the inhabitants of Red Wall seats will see any benefits.

With the self-conscious demeanour of a naughty schoolboy, Sunak proclaimed: “A man is a man and a woman is a woman – that’s just common sense.” The tumultuous applause that greeted a remark that, ten years ago, would have seemed a redundant statement of the obvious, testified to how far, in the intervening decade, the articulation of such commonplace scientific realities has come to seem transgressive. And who has been in charge of the country during that period in which extreme leftist insanity has conquered the commanding heights across our society? 

The Tories were unaware – actually, too timid to interfere – that the NHS had intruded men into women’s hospital wards, in deference to gender “identity”. Over the past five years, 11,880 sexual assaults have been reported on NHS premises, yet women were denied the safety of all-female wards. It is good that that scandalous situation is being ended, but outrageous that it ever occurred in the first place. Has the health secretary no idea what is going on in hospitals? Why did he not instantly forbid the allowance of a year’s paid leave to male staff supposedly undergoing “menopause”.

Under the Conservatives, Britain has become a neo-Marxist lunatic asylum, with the complicit indifference of the government. It is not uncommon to hear deluded Westminster back benchers say: “We need to make the public aware of our record in government.” Er – no, Sir Bufton, that is the last thing you should do.

Immigration is now the most concerning issue in British politics. Following Brexit, there was a widespread supposition that Britain had regained control of its borders, so that public focus on the issue temporarily relaxed, emboldening the so-called elites to indulge in more aggressive open-borders irresponsibility. The British public wants immigration cut to a trickle, while the existing burden is rationalised; the establishment wants an unregulated inflow of cheap labour, regardless of the effects on national culture and living standards.

At the time of Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech on immigration, 93 per cent of the population demanded drastic cuts in immigration (Hansard, House of Lords, 14 May, 1968). The establishment response was to increase migration, end Powell’s career and gag critics of the process with intimidatory laws. Today, 14 per cent of the population is foreign born, but Sunak handed out 1.1 million visas and net migration totalled 606,000 last year.

Worry not, Suella Braverman is on the case. In her speech, the Home Secretary treated the conference to a rhetorical tour de force, inveighing against immigration. This was it, thought the hopeful listeners. She must be about to announce we are leaving the ECHR. She did not even mention the ECHR. Without dropping that ball and chain, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – that Britain can do about illegal immigration. But the establishment will not contemplate breaking free: it is one of those taboos that the elite regard as sacred, if they are to maintain credit among their peers.

Braverman marched her troops up to the top of the hill and marched them down again. As all Tory ministers invariably do, on any issue of substance. These limits are imposed upon them by “the adults in the room”. This is a technical term for the buffoons who aspire to preside over Britain’s managed decline: whenever you hear the fatal claim “The grown-ups are back in charge”, you know that the serially incompetent elite has again snuffed out some modest bid to regenerate Tory instincts and Britain’s well-being.

Suella Braverman emerged as a Cassandra, forecasting a hurricane of immigration, but proposing no solution. Impotence was the leitmotif of this gruesome assembly of the walking dead. The Tory eunuchs, over thirteen years, have failed to repeal the Equality Act, the statute that is the root cause of social disintegration under woke prescription and especially the extinction of free speech. The Online Safety Bill is the useful idiots’ latest contribution to the censorship agenda.

What the Tories have done to this country over more than a decade is unforgivable. Feeble attempts to roll back the damage are abandoned due to the opposition of MPs who have no attachment whatsoever to conservatism. The party is lost beyond retrieval. When people are queuing down the street to listen to Liz Truss, desperation does not come any more extreme. 

This conference was all the worse for the unavoidable contrast with another gathering held last May: the National Conservatism conference. The coherent philosophical beliefs articulated there, the intellectual credentials of the speakers and content of their speeches, the clear sense of purpose to deliver Britain from the rampant control of the intruder state, to restore freedom of speech and end the far-left colonisation of our institutions, all demonstrated that conservatism is not only alive, but clever, creative and eager for battle – just not within the ranks of the faux Conservative Party.

Many of the more intelligent attendees at this week’s charade knew it was all over. After what they have done, the Tories do not have a prayer at returning to power at the next election. Their worst nightmare is not outright defeat by Labour, but a hung parliament, when the Lib Dems and other small parties would exact proportional representation as the price of their support, which Keir Starmer could not refuse.

The end of first-past-the-post would mean there would never be a non-coalition Conservative government ever again. No wonder Nigel Farage, the spirit of Christmas Future haunting the event, in the intervals between singing duets with Priti Patel, was looking around him with the unmistakable air of an asset stripper eyeing up an acquisition.

Rishi Sunak, notably, prefixed all his claims with “I will”, like the head of an incoming administration. That, self-evidently, was because, after thirteen years in power, no Conservative leader is in a position to say “I have done”. Everything this useless government has done has been damaging and speeches from the tumbril will not save the Tories from defeat at the next election. It cannot come too soon.

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