And in case I don’t see you…
What would you do if you ran things?
This will be my last ToryDiary. It’s fair enough, really – one can only write so often about how the Conservative Party is barely in the newspapers before the question of how many full-time journalists are really needed to cover its remaining operations rears its head. Mutatis mutandis. So it goes.
One would hardly have imagined the party reaching its current pass back in 2013, when I first joined the team as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland columnist after nagging Paul Goodman long enough. At that point, David Cameron was doing a fine job of smothering the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had not yet won the 2014 European elections.
Several shining Tory almost-hegemonies have come and gone since then. There was whatever Cameron was supposed to make of majority government in 2015, held up by some Remainers as a lost Hyperboria of tackling this country’s real problems. There was also the ‘Age of Osborne’, a term which seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Then there was the imperial premiership of Theresa May, promised when she was leading Labour by 25 points in the polls. Then there was going to be a decade of Boris Johnson.
And yet, here we are. An existentially bad general election, followed by what must be at least a near-historic first in going backwards at the subsequent local elections (and not just backwards, but two-thirds-of-seats-defended backwards). Today, the party is geed up by a rally in the polls which, whilst real, still leave the party 2.5 points down on the general election and 6.5 down on when Kemi Badenoch became leader.
It all seems quite explicable in retrospect, as things usually do. The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.
Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some …
What would you do if you ran things?
This will be my last ToryDiary. It’s fair enough, really – one can only write so often about how the Conservative Party is barely in the newspapers before the question of how many full-time journalists are really needed to cover its remaining operations rears its head. Mutatis mutandis. So it goes.
One would hardly have imagined the party reaching its current pass back in 2013, when I first joined the team as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland columnist after nagging Paul Goodman long enough. At that point, David Cameron was doing a fine job of smothering the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had not yet won the 2014 European elections.
Several shining Tory almost-hegemonies have come and gone since then. There was whatever Cameron was supposed to make of majority government in 2015, held up by some Remainers as a lost Hyperboria of tackling this country’s real problems. There was also the ‘Age of Osborne’, a term which seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Then there was the imperial premiership of Theresa May, promised when she was leading Labour by 25 points in the polls. Then there was going to be a decade of Boris Johnson.
And yet, here we are. An existentially bad general election, followed by what must be at least a near-historic first in going backwards at the subsequent local elections (and not just backwards, but two-thirds-of-seats-defended backwards). Today, the party is geed up by a rally in the polls which, whilst real, still leave the party 2.5 points down on the general election and 6.5 down on when Kemi Badenoch became leader.
It all seems quite explicable in retrospect, as things usually do. The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.
Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some …
And in case I don’t see you…
What would you do if you ran things?
This will be my last ToryDiary. It’s fair enough, really – one can only write so often about how the Conservative Party is barely in the newspapers before the question of how many full-time journalists are really needed to cover its remaining operations rears its head. Mutatis mutandis. So it goes.
One would hardly have imagined the party reaching its current pass back in 2013, when I first joined the team as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland columnist after nagging Paul Goodman long enough. At that point, David Cameron was doing a fine job of smothering the Liberal Democrats and UKIP had not yet won the 2014 European elections.
Several shining Tory almost-hegemonies have come and gone since then. There was whatever Cameron was supposed to make of majority government in 2015, held up by some Remainers as a lost Hyperboria of tackling this country’s real problems. There was also the ‘Age of Osborne’, a term which seems to have been scrubbed from the internet. Then there was the imperial premiership of Theresa May, promised when she was leading Labour by 25 points in the polls. Then there was going to be a decade of Boris Johnson.
And yet, here we are. An existentially bad general election, followed by what must be at least a near-historic first in going backwards at the subsequent local elections (and not just backwards, but two-thirds-of-seats-defended backwards). Today, the party is geed up by a rally in the polls which, whilst real, still leave the party 2.5 points down on the general election and 6.5 down on when Kemi Badenoch became leader.
It all seems quite explicable in retrospect, as things usually do. The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.
Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some …
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