Britain Burns As Tories Bicker

I last wrote about UK politics at large on Saturday 15th October, commenting on the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor. A week is indeed a long time in politics. Sinlabeling appointment, a few minor things have happened:

• Jeremy Hunt effectively erased Kwasi Kwarteng's budget. [source]
• Suella Braverman was forced to resign as Home Secretary after labeling Labour and the Lib Dems as "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati." [source]
• Grant Shapps was appointed as Home Secretary. [source]
• Labour called a vote that the Tories decided to treat as a vote of confidence in the government, ordering MPs to vote for fracking. At the last hour, they changed their mind and said it wasn't a vote of confidence, resulting in both the Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigning and physical scuffles in the Houses of Parliament. It was later claimed they didn't quit, but as was confirmed to me by someone in the Conservative Party, they did quit in quite spectacular fashion. They simply unresigned later. [source]
• Liz Truss became less popular in the polls than Prince Andrew. [Source]
• Liz Truss then resigned after dozens of Conservative MPs filed letters of no-confidence to the 1922 Committee, and at 44 days made herself the shortest serving Prime Minister in British political history (by far!)
• The 1922 Committee announced that they will ordain a new Prime Minister by next week, using an online ballot of members if a unity candidate is not selected. [source]
• Boris Johnson immediately gets on a plane back to Britain, seeing himself once again as some Churchillian saviour. It is now believed he may have enough support to get on the ballot. [source]

I really hoped that I was done having to write about Boris Johnson. Yet here we are again, with droves of Conservative MPs dribbling over the prospect of their great blonde leader returning to power.

I think one Labour Party source described the situation perfectly: “In some sense, him running is the dream. Droning on about how they need a sensible, serious person to fix the mess they’ve made then that honking pudding turns up with his traveling circus trailing behind."

The return of Boris Johnson would be the end: a fitting climax to the revolving door of Conservative Party entitlement and egotism. He would be popular enough amongst the public to ease the dire polling numbers somewhat, but not popular enough to call a General Election. His rhetoric would sway the more malleable and populist members of a suffering society, but he would bring with him none of the answers to fix a dire economic situation. We would return to the sleaze and corruption, but this time Johnson would likely know he has a time limit to get it all done. The last remaining public assets would be for sale to the highest bidder (or, more likely, the lowest bidder if they're a good chum of his). The Tories would still lose the next General Election in 2024/25.

Britain is already in the hospital bed, and it's on life support. It cannot take another round of Tory surgery, with flailing lunatics holding the scalpels.

Why does it have to be Boris Johnson? Mordaunt doesn't. Rishi Sunak, loathsome in his own way, at least as the economic understanding to steady the ship in conjunction with Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt. I wrote in my blog last weekend that I thought it was possible that Jeremy Hunt had an agreement in place with Sunak and Mordaunt to retain the Chancellor's office in the event of their accession, and this was pretty much confirmed on The News Agents podcast with Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall yesterday. I believe there is a plan in place for Sunak to take the Prime Minister's position, with Hunt retaining Chancellor and Mordaunt moving to Home Secretary.

The 1922 Committee also set a threshold of 100 MPs to get on the nomination list – a much higher figure than usual. This is likely – as Alastair Campbell suggested last night – an attempt to keep Johnson off the ballot for the good of the party. But it may be still in reach, and if Johnson reaches 100 alongside another candidate, it will go to a vote of the members – not the MPs. In the event of a vote amongst the party members, I cannot see Johnson losing, and he'll be back in Number 10 next week.

And we're all screwed.

The latest Westminster poll from PeoplePolling, released this morning, was as follows:

• Labour - 53%
• Conservative - 14%
• Lib Deb - 11%
• Green - 6%
• SNP - 5%
• Reform - 5%
• Other - 5%

Labour holds a 39-point lead in the polls. That is staggering, even in the midst of current events. What would that look like if there were a General Election?

In short, nothing other than total annihilation. The Conservative Party would be left with 5 MPs. Five. Labour would return 523 MPs, with the Lib Dems bringing in 57. Labour would have an unassailable and total supermajority of 470 seats. As much as I think that's an improvement on the current situation, it wouldn't be great for our democracy. There would be no room for checks and balances.

The headline though is that in triggering a General Election, almost every Conservative MP would be voting themselves out of a job. If Johnson returned, there would be no general election. He would simply resume talking about his 2019 mandate and claim that would be sufficient for him to govern until the end of the current electoral cycle (early 2025).

And so it seems pretty certain that the Conservatives will avoid a General Election at all costs. Ideally, I think they'd also like to avoid an election amongst their own members given that this led to Liz Truss in the first place. I can get on board with that. If you're going to be undemocratic about the entire thing, at least have the sense not to ask the National Lunatic Asylum.

I don't see any route now to which the Conservatives can win the next General Election. The scale of the problems is too vast, and the party itself is too tainted to recover these kinds of numbers in the polls. The shrewd political move for the good of the Conservative Party itself would be to call a General Election. The hardship and misery facing the economy and society now baked in, Labour won't be able to make it right without a huge deal of suffering beforehand.

The Tories milked the 2008 Financial Crash for a decade, blaming it on Labour. And it worked. People resonated with that and they listened to that. If they were to abandon ship now and let Labour oversee the upcoming mortgage rate rises, more inflation and almost certainly a long recession, then they could be back in power before the end of the decade.

If they cling to power now and oversee all of these, they may not return to power for 15 to 20 years. It could be close to 2050 before a Conservative Government returns to Downing Street, all depending on what happens this week. I suspect they will cling to power, much like limpets hanging onto a rusting shipwreck.

As usual, this is the worst possible outcome for the British people.

Oh, and in case you were thinking of having the audacity to protest about all this, think again. The Public Order Bill that was passed in the commons this week was described by George Monbiot as the "most draconian legislation of the modern era".

Why so? Well, because the bill means that peaceful protestors, whether convinced of any crime or not, can be:

• electronically tagged
• forced to report to the police
• forbidden to associate with others
• attend or encourage any further protestors

It can also be used to stop strikes by preventing workers from joining picket lines and gives police powers to stop and search people or vehicles even if they have "no reasonable grounds" to do so.

According to OpenDemocracy, leading human rights groups say that the bill, which passed a final vote in the Commons, would align the UK's anti-protest laws with those in Russia and Belarus.

This bill was the brainchild of xenophobic nutjob Suella Braverman, last week's Home Secretary. As it turns out, the moves (designed to target Extinction Rebellion firstly) were first proposed by a Tory-linked think tank backed by an oil company. Funny, that.

Fingers crossed that the House of Lords knocks the bill back and that if Sunak's team gets into power it doesn't return. Cue Johnson and his band of clowns entering stage right. A few more ennoblements in the House of Lords for cronies and Russian oligarchs ought to do the trick.