The Tory modernisers’ project approaches annihilation

Who is advising him? Who on earth is giving advice to Rishi Sunak? Who thought it was a good idea to send the Prime Minister out to stand isolated, in darkness, on a wet street, behind the lectern that everybody knows he will stand behind within a few months to concede defeat and resignation – to describe as “beyond alarming” the winning of a by-election by a man who could be mistaken for one of the Blues Brothers?

Conventionally, a speech from a lectern on Downing Street is reserved for the announcement of a general election, a prime ministerial resignation or Russia invading Poland. Apparently, the election of George Galloway ranks, in the panic-stricken ambience of Number 10, alongside such apocalyptic events. Apart from Rishi Sunak, the only individual in Britain likely to subscribe to that notion is George Galloway.

What happened to the political axiom that when an opponent perceived as dangerous secures election, the golden rule is to play down its significance, to prevent contagion? The spectacle of the Tory party collectively, and the Prime Minister specifically, clutching their pearls in terror and proclaiming the advent of the Apocalypse must have been highly gratifying to Galloway and his supporters: it validated their own inflated idea of their significance. To the rest of the country, it was simply further evidence that Rishi Sunak and his party had lost the plot.

One sycophant in the mainstream media was moved to describe this superfluous oration as “Rishi’s greatest speech”, admittedly with a low bar to overcome. The sad reality was an acute embarrassment. A lone figure in the television lights, addressing an empty street, a parable of the abandonment he and his party have provoked, talking to himself, as the Tories have done for 14 years. It was probably to the benefit of the Conservatives that no one was listening, for it was all balderdash.

Sunak spoke of “our great achievement… in building the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy”. He actually said that. The things that politicians say have for so long not just departed from reality, but contradicted it, such is their lack of self-awareness, that the public has stopped paying attention. If we are living in the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy, why was Sunak standing on his doorstep proclaiming a state of emergency, due to events in Rochdale?

Apparently, Rishi had detected Nazis under the bed: his speech, as is now de rigueur in establishment discourse, was peppered with warnings against the “far right”. Where exactly does this “far right” exist? From time to time, some weirdo is hauled out of his bedroom in his mother’s house and charged with planning right-wing terrorism – and that is about it. So urgent is the need of the liberal consensus to find “far right” culprits that last week a man was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for putting up stickers denouncing mass immigration.

“Islamist extremists and the far right feed off and embolden each other,” declared Sunak, in an attempt to equate a few isolated cranks with the massive mobs flooding central London every Saturday. Like every government communication, it was predicated on the British public possessing IQs in the high fifties. But the hilarious bit came when he announced: “This week I have met with senior police officers and made clear it is the public’s expectation… that they will not merely manage these protests, but police them.”

The public has no such expectations. It knows the police are a woke monopoly, with two-tier policing a firmly established practice. We have just learned that, in 48 per cent of neighbourhoods in England and Wales last year, the police solved no burglaries at all and in the remaining 52 per cent only 3.9 per cent of burglaries resulted in a criminal charge, let alone conviction. But look at the statistics for “non-crime hate incidents”, for arrests of Christian preachers or women praying silently inside their heads, or for other persecutions of the law-abiding public and it becomes evident our police are far from idle.

“We will also act to prevent people entering this country whose aim is to undermine its values,” said the man who last year admitted 745,000 legal immigrants, with no effective checks whatever; who in the past year has issued 1.4 million visas; and whose next net immigration statistic is forecast to amount to 850,000. As for “stopping the boats”, Monday of this week saw 386 channel crossings in one day.

A smooth system of delivery has been devised whereby the French coastguards escort dinghies as far as British waters where, having radioed ahead, the RNLI and British coastguards are waiting to escort these mainly young men, with no identity papers, to Britain. Travellers to the continent might wish the commercial ferry services worked so efficiently. A further outrage has just emerged whereby illegal migrants who find Britain uncongenial and attempt to return to France are detained by the police at Dover and returned to accommodation at the British taxpayers’ expense.

Insane? Of course, but so is everything official in Britain today. The police, the NHS, the universities, large corporations, the civil service, local authorities – even once totemic institutions such as the National Trust, the organisations supposedly protecting rural England but now denouncing it as “too white”, the museums, the British Library and almost any other body you can think of are in the grip of ideologues promoting a trans, race and Gaza obsession. How are normal people supposed to have a scintilla of respect for elites that insist there are 107 sexes?

“We will demand that universities stop extremist activity on campus,” declared the Prime Minister. Even as he was uttering those words, a large mob of Manchester University students was assembling to scream abuse, spit and engage in actual violence against a small group of fellow students who had formed a pro-life group and were attempting to attend a meeting to discuss practical support for women who wanted to keep their babies rather than abort them. The police made no arrests, the university imposed no sanctions on the perpetrators, but insisted the pro-life students suspend activities for the remainder of the term, thus handing victory to the forces of intimidation.

Rishi Sunak can hardly blame George Galloway, who by common consent made the best pro-life speech in the Commons in living memory, for that riot. The simple question that, on every issue and by every metric, haunts Sunak is: who has been in charge of this country, now approaching the status of a failed state, for the past 14 years? That is why the Conservative party can now only be spoken of in the past tense. It is doomed to extinction by its own hand.

For the auto-destruction of the Tory party began considerably more than 14 years ago, as one would expect: it inevitably took a long time to liquidate a political culture dating back to 1681. The election of David Cameron as party leader in 2005 was a watershed moment in the subversion of Toryism, but even that ominous event was not the beginning. Theresa May, another paradigm of failure, started the programme of self-hate by denominating her colleagues “the nasty party”, in her conference speech in 2002.

By 2005, she was emboldened, in rebuking supposed reactionaries, to use the words “There is no place for you in our [sic] Conservative party”, thus signalling that ownership of the Tory party had passed from the membership to the platform. Cameron’s rigging of candidate selection with his system of “A”-list protégés, over the heads of constituency associations, was an expression of the same mentality of entitlement. When trampling on the aspirations of Tory voters, the complacent mantra of Tory grandees was “They have nowhere else to go.” We do not seem to hear that so often these days, with Reform at 14 per cent in the polls, to the Tories’ 20 per cent.

But the elephant in the room, the fatal attraction that has led the Conservative party to destruction, was its leadership’s conversion to Blairism. David Cameron and George Osborne referred to Blair as “the Master”. To sensible and moral people he was and remains the Great Charlatan. It was a measure of that enslavement to the Blairite myth that the Conservative government, even after ridding itself of the Liberal Democrat incubus in 2015, not only refused to repeal Gordon Brown’s Equality Act 2010, but has recently extended it. That legislation is the toxic Magna Carta of wokeism and hugely damaging to the country.

It says everything about Cameron’s remoulding of his party that, in 14 years in power, it could not muster a majority to reverse the tyrannical ban on hunting. The large number of Tory Remainers, the obstruction of the public will in Parliament, the stubborn refusal to leave the ECHR – all that, cumulatively, has inspired the mountains of ballot papers that will pile up against Conservative incumbents at this year’s general election. The Tories are in denial, inhabiting a fantasy world, as evidenced by Rishi Sunak’s embarrassing peroration as he stood, with the demeanour of the second string in a school debating team: “So let us go forward together…” 

Aw, puleeze, Rishi, not the faux Churchill bit – not from you. “Confident in our values and confident in our future,” was his payoff line. Confident in what values? The values of the scoundrel who lied to Parliament about Saddam Hussein’s armaments, to precipitate us into war? If Rishi Sunak and his party are confident in their future, they are even more deluded than they appear. 

The enduring image from last Friday, of a lone figure in the darkness babbling the clichés of the legacy consensus, of the social democratic uni-party, was an accurate representation of the last days of a political culture that had much to offer, but elected instead to court existential disaster. The great project of the Tory modernisers is approaching its culmination.

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