It’s all over for the Tories

I t’s all over bar the weeping and wailing and gnashing of Tory teeth – Rishi Sunak can afford to go to a private dentist and has never needed to worry about the struggles involved in getting registered with an NHS dentist – so as he ruminates upon the magnitude of the well deserved electoral humiliation which awaits his miserable party, he can gnash his teeth to his heart’s content without having to worry about losing a filing.

On Wednesday evening, Sky News hosted a debate between Sunak and Starmer, yet again, Scotland was ignored. Well, it was billed as a debate, but the two leading proponents of centre-right Anglo-British nationalism did not actually debate one another, rather they were each individually questioned by host Beth Rigby before taking questions from the audience in the auditorium of the town hall in Grimsby, a town in which almost 70% of the population voted to leave the EU, so you knew that neither Tweedledee nor Tweedledum was going to be asked hard questions about the immense damage that Brexit is causing to the British economy.

Rishi Sunak had previously given us a cringeworthy moment during an interview broadcast earlier on ITV, this was the interview that he’d buggered off early from the D-Day commemorations to get to. As it turned out, the interview merely compounded his D-Day woes, as he began it by apologising for showing up a bit late, claiming that the D-Day events had overrun. The interview contained just one moment of note, the multimillionaire Sunak’s bid to blag himself some relatability by telling us that he had to do without Sky TV when he was a kid, opinions are divided over whether this was because – as Sunak would have us believe, his mum and dad were scrimping and saving in order to send him to an expensive private school – or because middle-class social climbers in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought that having a big satellite dish bolted to the side of your house merely advertised how common you were.

This is what he left the D-Day ceremonies early for, the reason he’s so apologetic about that now is because he realises how little it was worth it.

Still, young Rishi would have been spared the humiliation he suffered during the Sky News Not Actually a Debate where, in another doomed bid to appear relatable, he told Beth Rigby that he ate far too many Haribo sweets. He couldn’t have been more embarrassing if he’d done the child voice that characterises that company’s adverts.

But then it was on to the more usual political embarrassment. Sunak, at times, appeared genuinely lost and crestfallen as he was grilled on his failure to fulfil the five pledges that he’d told us to judge him by. You’d almost feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a lying entitled bastert. He was genuinely discomfited as he was booed by the studio audience after he blamed striking junior doctors for the lengthening waiting lists in the NHS. Sunak had pretty much mentally checked out by this point, wishing he was sipping a Mexican Coca-Cola on a private executive jet en route to his luxury beachfront apartment in Malibu.

Starmer was his usual glib and evasive self, stammering a bit when asked by an audience member why he was such a political robot, there was a glitch in his programming. He gave a singularly unconvincing non-answer when asked why he’d wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister in 2019. Beth Rigby asked him: “You said, ‘I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister’, did you mean that?” But all that weasel words Starmer would say in reply was: “I was certain that we would lose the 2019 election.” That would be in no small measure due to the fact that Starmer and his allies on the right of the Labour Party were doing their utmost to undermine Corbyn from within.

It wasn’t that Starmer did well in the debate but that Sunak did appallingly. In that respect, the programme encapsulated the general election campaign in miniature. The post-debate poll found that 64% thought Starmer did best while 36% opted for Sunak, proving only that 36% of people are idiots. There’s no love or enthusiasm for Starmer’s Tory-lite Labour party, but the actual Tories are just so hideously appalling that everyone except that 36% are actively repelled by them. And even many of that 36% won’t vote for them.

The Tories know the game is up. Earlier this week, the Minister for multiple personalities, Grant Shapps, warned of the danger of allowing Starmer to win a supermajority. That’s not the sort of thing that a man who is convinced his party is going to do well would say.

At First Minister’s Questions in Holyrood, Douglas Ross was a shadow of his normally obnoxious self. His heart just wasn’t in it, he couldn’t work up the energy or enthusiasm for his usual snide interjections. He knows he’s yesterday’s linesman, he’s lost the trust of his own party due to his nasty carpetbagging, stabbing a sick colleague in the back in order to get himself a seat in which he stands a better chance of getting himself back into the Commons, which is where he really wants to be, not in some devolved parliament whose very existence he most likely secretly despises. But he overreached himself and discovered, to his chagrin, that there’s a level of despicable behaviour that’s too much even for the Tories. Now, it’s him who is facing allegations of misuse of parliamentary expenses. The anger generated over his disgusting treatment of sitting Tory MP David Duguid means that he faces an uphill battle to get back into Westminster. Hell, mend him.

Meanwhile The Guardian reports that the Tory campaign on the ground is descending into disarray with a chronic lack of staff and volunteers and a rising sense of panic even in seats which were once considered so safe that the party had never had to campaign to keep them.

The original Tory strategy was the so called 80:20 approach, mounting a spirited defence in their 80 most marginal seats while trying to win the 20 most marginal seats held by other parties. But this strategy has disappeared as Tory MPs struggle for political survival. One party official told The Guardian: “The 80:20 plan no longer exists, if it ever did. We are diverting resources to safer and safer seats. People in seats which have been Conservative forever are basically shitting themselves. There is no strategy – it’s pretty much disarray.”

With the Tories in this much of a mess, Labour absolutely does not need Scottish seats to depose the Conservatives. Don’t fall for the lies. Starmer wants to trounce the SNP not to defeat the Tories but to shut Scotland firmly back into the Union flag-themed Great British shortbread tin.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Wee Ginger Dug and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 16 June 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/The Conservative Party. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)