This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter for Reaction. Subscribe to Reaction here.
Things are so terrible for the Tories that it has become almost boring to read about. And if you are bored reading about the terminally terrible state the Tories are in, imagine how bored the writers are when it comes to addressing that topic.
Labour has a lead of more than twenty points and nothing – the budget, speeches, media gimmicks, social media drives by the Prime Minister – shifts the public from its settled view that it wants the Tories off its TV set and out of power where they can be forgotten about for a few years, so they might get their act together and be worth listening to again some time early in the next decade.
But just because the Tories are stuck does not mean that there is an absence of interesting things happening elsewhere in the system.
Look at Reform. I was an early proponent of the idea that the insurgent Reform threatened to turn the general election from a Tory defeat into a historic rout. Knowing how Farage behaves when he is about to mount one of his operations, the signs were there late last year. As when he used UKIP more than a decade ago to scare the Tories into promising a referendum on leaving the EU, and again in 2019 when he led the Brexit Party in a successful effort to spook the Tories into delivering Brexit.
