For years now, Conservatives have given up on reality-based politics and committed exclusively to character-based politics
Good afternoon. Whatever you do, don’t turn on the TV or open social media. The former is full of the worst kind of supine royalism and the latter is full of indignant republicanism. Just go and enjoy the long weekend. It’ll all be over soon.
But before you do, let’s take a moment to watch something die. There’s a grim fascination to observing the Conservative Party enter a period of sustained ideological breakdown. The news this week kicked off with the revelation that actually, no, Boris Johnson hadn’t gotten away with “Partygate”, and was, yes, in really quite a lot of bother.
The letters from Tory MPs to the 1922 Committee kept dripping in. A YouGov MRP poll found that the party would lose 85 of their 88 most marginal seats to Labour. Even Johnson’s own seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip looked like it was turning red.
The story just refused to go away. Even with the Gray report in and every minister under the sun insisting it was time to “move on”, new angles kept emerging. Harriet Harman would chair the standards committee inquiry into whether the Prime Minister misled parliament. Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, fired a salvo over Johnson’s dithering about his concerns. And reporters could smell the distinct whiff of blood over a Downing Street gathering on the evening of Johnson’s birthday – which the police and Gray inexplicably failed to pursue.
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