Managing Trump relatively successfully, a US/UK trade deal, a UK/India trade deal, a new compact with the EU. Despite the devil being in the detail, Starmer should get a pat on the back.

Being PM is a thankless task…

He won’t, of course. None of the above will get the UK back to a pre-Brexit nirvana. They barely get us to the starting line, and few voters will see any immediate impact.

The narrative has been set. All mainstream politicians are useless at best, dissembling voters to hide their inadequacies. Starmer is no exception.

Reform, according to many voters, tells it as it is. Excessive political correctness, an interfering state, too much immigration that Labour lovies secretly like. Then, the government cosies up to Europe, selling the fisheries industry down the river, so to speak.

Just a reminder on the latter, the fisheries industry contributes 0.03% to the UK economy. 70% of agricultural output is sold to Europe. This has been made immeasurably easier because of this week’s deal.

But in a world of populism, there is little rational debate. Scare tactics, yah-boo exchanges, and downright lies dominate debate, not facts.

For Starmer, what can he do? Very little. It will be a hard slog to the next election. He will need to prove NHS waiting lists are falling, immigration is falling, and the economy is growing with tangible benefits, including an increase in housing supply.

It would help if he had a clearer philosophical narrative. This blog likes his non-ideological pragmatism, but it makes it harder to explain the ultimate destination he is trying to reach.

However, he has one major advantage. The increasingly haplessness of today’s Tory Party. Starmer will be able to differentiate himself much more clearly from Reform at the next election than in the days when it used to be a competitive race with the Tories.

Until then, it will be an uphill, thankless battle. Who would go into politics?

They never learn. They never learn. The Party membership is to the right of ordinary Conservative voters and their final, decisive role in choosing the next leader (they vote between the last two leading candidates after MPs have chosen the shortlist) is likely to take the Tories into a cul-de-sac of their own making.

Who are the runners and riders in what (quite rightly) will probably be a lengthy leadership campaign but with no certainty of redemption at the end of it?

A poll of members today confirmed the current favourite is Kemi Badenoch. Why? She has no legislative achievements to her name, is unnecessarily aggressive, particularly with the media, and seems to have made her name by pursuing culture wars. Whilst her views may be sincerely held, that is hardly where the Tories are going to regain voters.

Nobody above is likely to be the next Prime Minister…

Then there is Suella Braverman. To the right even of the most die-hard Tory members although still attracting the votes of 16% of them, she has disgraced herself with an article just before the election damning the Tory election campaign and then this week with her homophobic rant. She is truly awful. Extreme, disloyal and with no sense of public service. The sooner she joins Reform, the better.

Right-wing Priti Patel, another former Home Secretary, is mooted to be standing but is not up to the job. Caught dancing with Farage last year, although now claiming he has no future in the Tory Party, she should perhaps dance off to Reform too.

Finally, on the Right, the smarmy, reinvented immigration hard-liner, Robert Jenrick, who left Sunak’s government in a sulk at not getting a full cabinet post, is simply not credible.

The moderate candidates so far are James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Victoria Atkins. All three are decent people but Cleverly will simply be a short-term, stop-gap leader and it doesn’t feel Atkins is quite ready for it. Tom Tugendhat is the best bet but is unlikely to clear the hurdle set by the Tory membership. Sadly, the estimable Jeremy Hunt has understandably ruled himself out of the contest.

A few points to note. The Tories lost most of their key southern seats to the LibDems. How the hell are they going to regain them by moving to the right? What’s left of the Tory parliamentary party is fairly centrist. Perhaps the membership will surprise us with a more moderate choice if enough have cleared off to Reform by the time of the vote. If the Tories embrace Farage/Reform in any way, it will be the permanent end of the Tory Party. If I were the LibDems, I would already be making plans now to entice moderate Tory MPs to join them if this unlikely occurrence happens. More on that in a future blog.

What is almost certain is the next Tory leader will not be the next Prime Minister. In fact the next leader, whilst fulfilling the important role of trying to hold the government to account, will largely be an irrelevance. Just ask William Hague.

Well, I have to say last week’s pre-election blog was pretty much accurate. As expected, the Tories got over 100 seats (I have won £10 and a lobster dinner!) as Reform fell back a little. Labour romped home, albeit with a disappointing share of the vote and the LibDems had a great night too. Throughout the campaign they looked like the only politicians enjoying themselves. Good for them. The almost total wipe-out of the SNP was perhaps the biggest surprise of the night. That’s Scottish independence on the backburner for a generation.

For now, everybody should hope Starmer succeeds…

But the Tories’ 121 seat defeat was the worst result in their history. After 14 years of missteps (that’s putting it politely…) where does this well-deserved defenestration leave them?

Do you remember the raison d’etre of calling the Brexit referendum in the first place, which sowed the seeds of their ultimate demise? It was to cure the Tory Party of its internal splits on Europe. Err… that went well, didn’t it…?

Here we are 8 years on, and the hugely diminished Tory Party is now plagued by a resurgent anti-Europe, anti-immigration Reform UK party, with 4m votes and 5 seats in parliament. All that cosying up to the Right by Sunak and his predecessors came to naught. The ridiculous Rwanda plan was a perfect example. Peddled in the dying days of the last government by a Prime Minister who didn’t really believe in it, it was a waste of time, making the Tories look unpleasant, and incompetent at the same time.

There is only one solution for the long term recovery of the Tory Party. Tackle Farage and Reform UK with their dog whistle rhetoric head on. To paraphrase Matthew Parris, the more you compromise with the populist Right, the more ground they want. Now is the time to give them nothing.

With Labour securing 412 seats on only 34% of the vote and a largely sympathetic LibDem Party, the country will need thoughtful, moderate, centre-right Opposition. One that outlines the benefits of effectively controlled immigration, that advocates closer ties with Europe both economically and to sort out the boats crisis, that praises the advantages of a multicultural Britain, that understands the economic pressures on poorer voters and comes up with solutions that don’t simply involve talking about taxes and lashing out at minorities/the EU. The Tories also specifically need to pivot to offering policies for a younger generation of voters. They should support Starmer, where he is getting things right (not follow the ridiculous advice from the anti-patriot Johnson who advocates attacking him from the start). They should regain a reputation for steady, quiet competence.

The Tories lost voters to a range of parties, not just Reform. Notably the LibDems in the south. It was their clowning incompetence that did for them, not being insufficiently right-wing.

There is a gaping hole in the centre-right of politics from where elections are won and the Tories must move there, understanding recovery may take ten years. With careful analysis, a new leader, who almost certainly will not become the next Prime Minister, should take time to root out Farage/Reform at their source and let them wither on the fringes of politics. It is where they belong.

By that, I mean whether the Tories gain over 100 seats or not… reinforced by yesterday’s YouGov poll.

In what will be a well-deserved calamitous result for the Tories, they will face a wipe-out across the country, not so much due to a huge swell of support for Labour but a combination of the collapse of the SNP, resurgent LibDems in the South, Reform attacking from the Right and tactical voting to oust as many Tories as possible. It is time for a change.

Tories fighting to clear 100 seats…

I confess that I have had two bets on the election outcome for some time. Neither will make me rich, and neither are due to insider knowledge… One is with a colleague for £10 and one with a journalist for a lobster supper, and both are based on my view that the Tories will gain over 100 seats. Why?

There is a genuine fear amongst some of the electorate that Labour’s majority will be too great. Probably even Starmer doesn’t want a 200 seat majority. Imagine the indiscipline and lack of mandate based on 40% or so of the vote. Enough former Tory voters may well pull back from the brink of voting Reform, who will still have a reasonable night regardless.

What will not help the Tories’ cause is the last minute, almost insulting appearance of Boris Johnson on the campaign trail. No doubt emboldened by the resurgence of Donald Trump, this ludicrous, narcissistic character believes he can perhaps be the Tories’ post-election saviour when, in reality, he is the principal architect of the party’s demise. His appearance will simply remind floating voters of this.

What a battle lies ahead for the soul of what is left of a once impregnable Tory Party, already written off by a deeply unhelpful article in yesterday’s Telegraph by the charming former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. But that is for another day. Sunak, who has fought a somewhat ill-judged but brave campaign, deserves better.

As France toys with fascism – there is no other word for it – and Trump prospers at the expense of a clearly too frail Biden, the UK, for all the problems the country faces, could be a beacon of stability in a sea of polarisation after today. And if for no other reason, that is a note of optimism on which to end this overly long, tedious election campaign.

Happy voting!

That is if they survive, of course… Incredibly, the election continues to get worse for the Tories. The latest opinion polls, on average, have them winning just a hundred or so seats maximum with Labour’s majority being 250 plus. Reform UK may scrape a few seats, but only the LibDems seem to be the ones having some FUN. I won’t hear it against Ed Davey. His stunts are getting him publicity, and his role caring for his son has really resonated. They may surprise on the upside, adding to the Tories’ woes in the South/Southwest.

If they don’t self-destruct, the Tories become interesting again… on a 10 year view…

This blog feels the Tories will do a little better on the night as former Tory voters peer into the abyss and pull back from Reform. They will at least remain the second largest party, but it is pretty clear Labour is on course for a huge majority. The interest on election night will be less about the outcome and more about the scale of the Tories’ defeat and results in individual seats.

The Tories will be out of power for a generation and deservedly so. Attention will initially be on the new government and some actual policies, but Labour will have an opaque mandate, and over time the focus will switch to a decent Opposition holding the government to account.

So, back to the Tories. Despite relative moderates being well represented in parliament on most election outcomes, courtesy of its inglorious members, the Tory Party will almost certainly move to the Right. Moderate MPs, who are usually hopeless in leadership elections, will not be organised enough to block this and will get tripped up by the membership if they were. But therein lies electoral oblivion. A move back to centre ground beckons second time around on a long-term view. The question is who can be bothered to wait?

In the meantime, there is Farage/Reform. They will not merge with the Tories, and if they did, the Party would irrevocably split. Incidentally, if Boris Johnson tries his hand at leadership again, it would be the same result. No more Tory Party. Whilst new centre ground parties have a terrible record of succeeding, the total defenestration of the Tories would present unique territory for them to thrive.

So, on the basis that the electorate will want a competitive political landscape, attention will eventually turn back to the Tories or, if they self-annihilate, their successors. Whatever path is taken, the Opposition will probably have a good 10 years to even draw level.

I have an idea to rejuvenate the Tories’ election campaign. They should adopt Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign tune, ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ by D:Ream on the basis things can’t get any worse…

The Tory campaign has been a disaster and it showed in Sunak’s body language in the Sky News interview last night. He looked utterly dejected and gave the impression he couldn’t wait for the whole awful experience to be over. California beckons whatever Sunak says.

Unfortunately for Sunak and the Tory Party, Sunak is no politician…

What has gone so badly wrong? Well, the obvious reasons are launching the surprise campaign in the rain on an unprepared Party, flinging untested policies into the arena such as National Service and then the D-Day debacle. Sunak’s colleagues are not with him, and he paints a lonely campaigning figure. He may be the most decent Tory leader of recent times (not much competition there), but he is a hopeless politician. Why an earth didn’t he wait? By November there would have been at least one interest rate cut and Rwanda flights which never resonated with the electorate anyway (only Sunak knows why he tied his future to this ridiculous policy) may or may not have taken off. It wouldn’t have really mattered. Sound stewardship of the economy, proving he was on top of its recovery would have been his best bet. Unless, of course, he thinks economic news will only get worse over the summer, a point not lost on the electorate.

And then there is Reform UK and the dog whistler, Farage. The Brexit referendum in the first place, the populism of Johnson, the disastrous tax cutting Truss, Rwanda and countless other nods to the Right including the initial appointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary were all meant to assuage these folks and see them off. As one surveys the wreckage of the Tory Party, you wonder how the Foreign Secretary feels… Sunak, coming at the fag-end of a long Tory administration, was always going to have a tough time but he should have tacked firmly to the centre on day 1 and faced down his right-wing critics. The more you give, the more they take… We are now in the position where Reform are snapping at the heels of the Tories and Farage has a reasonable chance of becoming an MP before ‘taking over’ a defenestrated Tory Party.

Incidentally, the fight for the soul of a shrunken Tory Party after the election, ex-Sunak, should be one Tory moderates relish. There are many blogs on this to come…

Then bizarrely today, we have a Sunak aide being investigated by the Gambling Commission for pre-election betting on the date of the General Election. A case of insider dealing it seems… but why only place £100 at 5:1? A win of £500 does not seem sufficient compensation for a ruined career… Tory advisers can’t even get this right.

In the meantime, Starmer and the Labour Party generally look confident. They have barely put a foot wrong, and their safety-first approach gives the appearance of a government in waiting. It appears a largely effortless march to power. Of course, there are dangers in this but not too many.

Week 3 to Labour then. In fact Week 3 to almost everyone except the hapless Tories.

In The Times yesterday, surveying the wreckage of the local election results, Rishi Sunak was quoted as saying Britain was heading for a hung parliament at the general election with a Labour government having to be propped up by smaller parties. Nice try, Rishi, but you have got to be joking…

It could barely have been worse for the Tories…

The results were a disaster for the Tories. The fact that Labour only got 34% of the vote is irrelevant, being obscured by all sorts of local factors that won’t be repeated at a general election. Labour won almost everywhere they had to, often very comfortably and the LibDems and Greens had good results too. What was remarkable is that Labour, in particular, for the first time in a generation, are distributing their votes efficiently rather than simply piling them up in inner cities where they were already doing well. That is a very, very bad omen for the Tories.

The clear message is that most voters are heartedly sick of the Tories and will go to any lengths to get rid of them. It really doesn’t matter how relatively unpopular Starmer is versus Blair in his hey day. It is time for a change and the huge anti-Tory coalition will swing into place ruthlessly in the Autumn voting tactically to wreak the most damage; LibDems in the South/South West and Labour everywhere else including Scotland which of course wasn’t voting last week. Reform UK will undercut the Tories from the Right, everyone else from the Left. Oh dear indeed…

This blog currently predicts not a hung parliament but a Tory wipe-out. They will be lucky to survive with a 150 seats.

And only some while after the next election will the Tories get interesting again. Every government needs a decent opposition and Labour with an inherited economic mess and no clear mandate in terms of policy commitments will quickly become unpopular. There may at least be some curiosity about what lessons the Tories have learnt from their defenestration.

The problem is that, today, there are very few indications from leading Tories they will learn anything. With rumours of a Johnson/Farage realignment of the Right of politics using the vehicle of a hugely weakened Tory Party a year or too hence, with good moderate Tories going/gone (the former West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, being one of these) and the existing left of the Tory Party seemingly (self) defeated, the Labour Party regardless of their competence may be in power for a very long time.

Time for a new centre-right party you might think. Well, however laudable, we have been here before and it seems as likely as one of Sunak’s unintended jokes about a hung parliament.

No one political event this week requires a dedicated blog. Three occurrences have all raised issues of importance, none of which fill you with optimism…

The tin ear of Sunak

This blog rated Sunak as a competent technocrat who would restore a degree of sanity to the Conservative Party. At the same time, it also predicted he wouldn’t particularly resonate with the electorate. Too true. His lack of political nous is somewhat of an understatement. He has tried to re-boot his premiership many times in many different directions and yet to no beneficial effect whatsoever. He was to be the competent steady ship with a firm grasp of economics, but then became an agent of change, cancelling HS2 of all places in Manchester and announcing a longer-term ban on smoking having just said he wanted to cut government interference in people’s lives. Then in a huge U-turn, in comes Cameron (no change there then…) and a bunch of moderate Tories to the Cabinet having partly given up pandering to the Right of his party. The only policy Sunak has been consistent on is Rwanda, which he doesn’t even believe in, and it has been a disaster. This week, in an interview with the vile Piers Morgan, he even got drawn into a £1000 bet that he would get illegal migrants on a plane to this wonderful place before the next election. What was he thinking of?

Adding insult to injury, on Wednesday, at PMQs, still pursuing culture wars as a dividing line with Labour, Sunak makes a crass joke about transsexuality whilst the mother of the murdered teenager, Brianna, is in the parliamentary building. Oh dear. He should stick to his core economic competencies, ignore the Tory Right (they have nowhere to go this side of an election) and protect his dignity. He is no political tactician and now we all know it.

Hobson’s choice…

Labour’s £28bn U-turn

Subsidising green initiatives has been a huge boost to the US economy. But Labour has now run scared of a similar policy in the UK, which was one of its few differentiating election pledges, cancelling the commitment on Thursday. The party seems to stand for nothing now except not being the Tories. Starmer comes across as believing in very little, has created confusion about what he wants to achieve in government and, frankly, looks shifty. The Tories are in such a dire mess, it probably won’t make any difference come election time. Labour is set for a huge victory, but it bodes ill for its competence in government.

Biden’s cognitive decline

This blog thought he could get away with it. Biden would beat Trump regardless, having actually run (even if by delegation) a competent administration. Trump has his own issues with cognitive decline, and, in a highly polarising election, voters would ultimately rally around Biden in the face of the awful consequences of a second Trump presidency.

Hobson’s choice again…

This may still be the case but just recently Biden has mixed up Mitterrand with Macron, Kohl and Merkel and Ukraine with Iraq. Now, devastatingly, the Special Counsel appointed to examine Biden’s handling of top secret files found he had mishandled them but declined to pursue a legal case on the basis his memory has “significant limitations” and accordingly Biden would present himself “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. In a press conference to dismiss these findings, the outraged Biden subsequently confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt when asked to comment on the Middle East. Oh dear indeed. Three quarters of voters, whilst being no fans of Trump, have voiced serious concerns about Biden running again. It seems the Democrats are taking a huge gamble with Biden, and it is at the whole world’s expense.

Sunak, Starmer, Biden, Trump? What a choice…

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