The Tory Party Has Doomed Itself.

The Tory Party has a death wish. And the electorate is about to hand it a belt and shoe laces.

My job, on Election Night 1997 was a simple one. I had to take a bus load of Princess Diana lookalikes down to Tory HQ, just by Parliament, and then provide a live link back to the TV studio in West London, as they looked for, and then comforted, defeated and demoralised Tory troops, whose spirits had been shattered by the unstoppable onslaught of Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

We didn’t have far to look for broken Tories. The pavements and grass verges of Smith Square were littered with them. Drunk on ironic champagne, their cheeks damp with tears, our Princess Dianas had their work cut out for them.

While I mopped up the casualties on the ground, hovering above, popular actress (we could still say ‘actress’ back then) Sally Phillips, in stockings and suspenders, our show’s ‘Whore in The Helicopter’ (yep, different times) was ready to swoop down and give succour to any member of John Major’s defenestrated  ‘Back to Basics’ government she could identify from two hundred feet up.

The official Election Night TV coverage continued through til dawn, but our satirical alternative, wrapped sometime around midnight. And I exited Westminster, picking my way past the shattered Tory corpses, dumping my squabbling de-wigged Dianas on the way, to join my friends and colleagues in a sweaty Green Room at BBC TV Centre.

Eventually the sun came up. Tony Blair walked into Downing St. And I went home.

I have worked more or less every election night since. But this, my first, will always be, the absolute Daddy.

It was exciting. Change was in the air. And as bright young TV go-getter I really did feel that Things Can Only Get Better. And I’m sorry to trigger some of you. But under Blair, for a while, they absolutely did.

This was a seismic event in British politics, and represented a genuine changing of the guard. Labour (sorry ‘New’ Labour) won 418 seats. The Tories were annihilated. Losing 133 seats, ending the night with just 165.

The Lib Dems? Dunno. I haven’t bothered looking it up.

Fast forward to today and the Tories are about to get annihilated once again.

How bad is it going to be next year? I expect the Tory Party will be relieved if it ends the night with 165 seats. I’ve heard predictions that they could end up with as few as 100 MPs. Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Nope.

It would be an absolutely stunning reversal of fortune for a party which just four years ago won its largest majority since 1987.

This week Sir David Frost lamented his party’s chances at the next year’s election. He described Tory voters as ‘disgruntled’.

Yeah sorry Frostie, but ‘disgruntled’ doesn’t cover it.

The truth is that the Conservative Party isn’t about to lose to Labour. It is about to be eviscerated, by ex-Conservatives.

And it’s all its own fault.

The current Tory leader, Rishi Sunak, is many things.

He’s Britain’s first Hindu Prime Minister. Married to a billionaire, he’s essentially a billionaire.

He’s a technocrat, a globalist, a manager, an out of touch member of David Goodhart’s class of rootless, international ‘Nowheres’.

He’s also a charisma free personality vacuum, and weirdly sexless. The plodding caretaker Prime Minister of a fag end administration. In many ways he’s John Major, as reimagined by a diversity obsessed Netflix casting director.

But most of all what Rishi Sunak is, is utterly, comprehensively, and totally, useless.

In his first, and second to last, year as Prime Minster, Sunak has never failed, to fail to rise to a challenge.

When voters demanded action on immigration, the Health Service and the cost of living. He gave them a smoking ban, fewer railways, and double maths.

And when they asked for a crack down on anti-Jewish hate marches, an end to the housing crisis, and relief from the highest tax burden since the 1950s. He turned his laser like focus on to the problem, leapt into immediate action, and in a moment of inspiration, pulled the lever marked ‘David Cameron’.

Never much of a dish, even in his heyday, last Tory Prime Minster but four, David Cameron, now appears as if he’s been constructed entirely from uncooked sausages.

Dave is now our Foreign Secretary. A job which seems to mainly entail flying around the world and offering people in other countries piles of our money.

Cameron has been in Gaza promising the blameless victims of naked Israeli aggression (Don’t judge me, I’ve been watching a lot of BBC News) an extra (yep extra) £30 million in aid money 

Which the Gaza authorities have promised to exclusively spend on food, fuel and medicine. And to definitely not spend, on rockets.

But will spend on rockets.

Great to have you back Dave.

The return of podgy-gal son David Cameron isn’t the only reason we’ve got to celebrate.

This week we were also treated to the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement.

Surprisingly that statement wasn’t

’Hello, my name is Jeremy Hunt, and I’m rubbish’.

Hunt gave his financial statement with all the economic acumen of a fairground horse stamping out the answer to a simple sum, with its hoof.

In an attempt to soften us up for his too little too late tax policies, the chancellor has been busy over the last couple of weeks, claiming government credit for falling inflation.

Which it caused in the first place by printing £410bn of Magic Money to pay for the unnecessary, destructive, and counter productive COVID lockdowns.

But you know, our wages and savings are only being eroded at half the rate they were a year ago. So well done Tories. You set fire to the house, and are now claiming credit, because the flames never quite reached the shed.

Announcing he had £13bn of  ‘fiscal headroom’ Hunt ‘gave’ everyone a 2% cut in their National Insurance contributions. But what exactly is ‘fiscal headroom’? Well it’s a complicated economic term which only really clever people like Jeremy Hunt can properly hope to understand.

But basically...

You know when you buy shoes in the sale, for £50 instead of £75? And fool yourself that you’ve actually made £25? And then spend your imaginary £25 ‘profit’ on second hand records? And allow yourself to be impressed by your own amazing financial smarts?

It’s that.

Our National Insurance bill might be going down, but the overall tax burden is going up. Way up.

It’s projected to account for a peace time record 38% of GDP by 2029. And that’s if Labour don’t increase it further. (Spoiler Alert: Labour will increase it further). So don’t be fooled, you’re not getting a tax cut, you’re getting an increase.

Plus if they can ‘cut’ taxes now. The Tories could have cut them a year ago. Under the hapless Liz Truss. (The Prime Minister after the Prime Minister after David Cameron, and the Prime Minister before Rishi Sunak.)  The claim of course is that the economy is in a significantly better position than it was a year ago.

But it isn’t. In fact it is significantly worse.

I know, I know. Falling inflation. Lower energy costs. Boost in consumer confidence. Blah blah blah.

But we’ve just wasted another year without any meaningful growth. Our debt pile has grown bigger. We’ve spent another £111bn we haven’t got on the interest on that debt. The number of people claiming out of work benefits has gone up. And there’s even less time remaining to fix the economy before Labour gets in and inevitably kicks the living crap out of what’s left of it.

So yeah. Worse.

Actually Labour leader Kier Starmer claims that Poland’s economy will be bigger than the UK’s by 2030. Although whether that is a warning, or a Labour target, he does not say.

As well as inadequate, poorly timed tax cuts. Hunt’s other wheeze to reinvigorate our slowly croaking economy is to waste invest £2.5bn of your money in building a quantum computer.

Which actually makes perfect sense. Britain is already a leading computer manufacturer. We are of course home to the world beating Sinclair Spectrum.

Because it is currently 1982.

How can we expect our government to build something as complicated as a quantum computer, when it struggles to build something as simple as a house?

But don’t blame the Tories for the Housing Crisis.

The government has nothing to do with it. Except controlling, through planning regulations, most of the supply. And through its open borders,  strictly ‘points based’, immigration policy, much of the extra demand.

Talking of immigration, a slightly thinner David Cameron, famously announced back in 2010 that he would get immigration down to ‘the tens of thousands’ [a year]. Thirteen Tory years and a Brexit later, it currently sits at around 672,000.

Turns out, predictably, and appropriately, Cameron was telling porkies.

Obviously, and tediously, the immigration issue has devolved into nothing but a series of arguments and accusations about race and racism.

But it’s not about racism, it’s about maths. Which admittedly, is now racist.

Terrified of being labelled a xenophobe, no one ever seems to ever ask the most basic question.

Why do the Tories keep importing all these people?

It’s not as if we’ve got a shortage of workers.

We currently have five and half million people reliant on out of work benefits.

Surely they can’t all be unemployable.

And yet we keeping stuffing the country with more and more people.

The government is like a nana in a Channel 5 documentary about hoarders.

It’s cramming people in everywhere. The airing cupboard is full of Romanians. The front room is floor to ceiling with Afghans. And you can’t even get into the downstairs loo because it’s overflowing with 30 year old Albanian men pretending to be 13 year old Ukrainian orphans.

And yet still they come.

Maybe we shouldn’t worry. All our unemployed will soon be working in ‘green jobs’ thanks to that other brilliant Tory Policy. Net Zero. Brought in, (three prime ministers ago), by Theresa May.

But what’s so great about ‘green jobs’ anyway ?

If you scrap your petrol driven tractor, and get twenty men to pull your plough instead, then well done, you have created nineteen ‘green jobs’. But it’s hardly progress.

Jobs are a cost. Not a benefit. We want fewer workers creating the same amount of energy, not more. There’s a productivity problem in this country. And with their obsession with ‘green jobs’, the Tories are essentially boasting, they want to make it worse.

I have fun detailing the madness of Net Zero here . Lots of great feedback on this piece so maybe take a look if you get the chance.

Sunak might have forestalled some of the Tory’s most suicidal Greta Thunberg inspired excesses recently,  but the overall direction remains the same.

He still plans to ban the sale of petrol (ICE) cars by 2035. The fantasy being, that by then, we will all have gone electric.

No we won’t. As far as personal transportation is concerned. Electric cars are a dead end. They simply don’t work for most people in most cases. They are too expensive. They are too heavy, for our roads, bridges and car parks. Once alight they are almost impossible to extinguish, perhaps because when they burn, they burn half as hot as the surface of the Sun. They have no resale value. Practically speaking, they cannot be repaired. They rely on rare earth metals, many of which are mined by Chinese slave labour. There is nowhere to charge them. And they have the range of a 1976 milk float.

But who cares? Elon Musk has got spaceships to launch and the Chinese slave industry has got adorable young mouths to feed.

All this comes under the auspices of Rishi Sunak’s oxymoronic new government ministry, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Yeah, you can have one, or you can have the other, but you cannot have both.

In her defence, Liz Truss (briefly Prime Minister after Boris Johnson and before Rishi Sunak) did try and kickstart British energy production, and take a tentative step towards self sufficiency, by overturning a moratorium on fracking. Although she did so at the same time as nationalising everyone’s energy bills.

Sunak immediately ditched the fracking. And kept the subsidy.

These are not serious people.

The Tories have failed everywhere.

Their destructive, pernicious, resolutely anti human COVID policies were introduced in large part we were told, to ‘protect the NHS’.

Well, not only did they ruin our economy. Wreck our children’s education. Effectively destroy the Civil Service. Unleash Joe Wicks on an ungrateful nation. Empower an army of snoops, snitches and busy bodies. And kill an awful lot of old people in care homes.

They successfully transformed ‘Our NHS’ from walking wounded, to basket case.

There are almost eight million people currently languishing on the NHS waiting lists. That’s almost the population of Israel.

Unless of course the Guardian reading be-kind crew gets its way.

In which case it will be about eight million more than the population of Israel.

I could go on, but I’d better wrap this up.

The Tories have turned their back on their natural voters.

Declaring war on home owners, motorists, small business owners, landlords, and the self employed.

While betraying anyone who, in Boris Johnson’s (last Prime Minister but two) words, ‘lent them their vote,’ in 2019.

They have stood by and allowed the illiberal left to re racialise our society with the cancer of identity politics. To spread hatred, distrust and division among our people, of whatever race or colour. To ghettoise our cities, to demonise men, and the white working class.

The Tories have surrendered every institution from the BBC to the Civil Service, from the National Trust to the RSPB (The RSPB!) to this divisive ‘woke’ orthodoxy.

They have allowed radical progressives to undermine free speech, family values, women’s rights, children’s welfare and even gay rights.

They relinquished control of our streets to the race baiting Marxists of BLM

Our roads to the ambulance blocking, Malthusian narcissists of the Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil Doomsday Cults.

And by their inaction, helped facilitate, across our major cities, the sickening celebrations of rape excusing, terrorist worshipping ‘Pro Palestinian’ Jew haters.

While clamping down hard on anyone protesting against Lockdowns, or vaccine mandates. Resisting anti-democratic efforts to overturn the EU Referendum. Anyone suggesting that women only spaces should perhaps not be thrown open to creepy men in dresses. Or mourning the victims of rapist policemen.

The Tories have failed on absolutely everything. There is not a single policy they got right.

Every opportunity wasted. Every chance squandered. Every gift horse stared resolutely in the mouth.

At every juncture they made the wrong choice. At every fork in the road they marched off in the wrong direction.

Like a bunch of hapless clowns. Whenever they turned up you could be sure that the doors would fall off their car, they’d trip over their own shoes, and they’d end up flat on their faces.

Time and again they were offered the chance to save themselves, time and again they chose oblivion.

The Tory party has a death wish.

And the electorate is about to hand them back their belt and shoes laces

The good news is this is surely the end of the Tory party, at least in its current state.

The bad news is things can only possibly get worse under Labour. I’ll save a proper analysis for another day. (Yes that right. ‘Analysis’. That’s what this is.)

But essentially, Labour will inevitably double down on all the things that voters don’t want. The same things the Tories are about to be punished for. So look forward to…

More immigration. More identity politics. More tax and spend. More ULEZ. More Net Zero. More bureaucracy. More asylum seekers. More institutions sabotaged. More counterproductive housing policies. More nanny state scolding. More censorship. More devolution. More money poured into the insatiable, greedy maw of the unreformable NHS.

In 1997 wandering through a devastated Smith Square, it felt like the end an era.

This is beginning to feel like the end of a civilisation.

Overly dramatic?

We’re about to find out.

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Thanks so much for reading Low Status Opinions.

This is the first of two articles I have planned. This one about the outgoing Tories, the next about the incoming Labour Party, and what their policies might mean for all of us.

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