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July 11, 2022 - 5:40pm
Westminster
This lunchtime I would estimate that the temperature in the Churchill War Rooms, where Tories were gathering for the relaunch of Conservative Way Forward, but were actually there to watch several leadership contenders make stump speeches, was 27 million degrees. About the same as the sun’s core.
It was hot. It was so hot that Nadhim Zahawi’s head shone like a new lightbulb. It was so hot that I was worried Mark Francois would overheat, tremble, and simply explode in a pink sleet of scalding blood and shardy bone, taking an entire generation of Tory think-tankers with him. It was so hot that all the present Tories looked like they were hallucinating. The same thing: Margaret Thatcher. She was in the room. A living presence.
Conservative members have (incredibly) enjoyed the last three years less than the general public. Do they want to level up, expand the state and summon its interventionist powers, raise taxes? Well. Would Margaret Thatcher? The priority is to take us into the future by going back to the past. It’s Thatcher or quits.
So the MPs trudged into the sauna-bunker, pestered by Beth Rigby. “It’s getting nasty isn’t it Mark?” she shouted after Francois, who snorted. Below, a journalist tells me she was eating lobster at the weekend. It’s what everybody in the looks like. The competition for sweatiest man in here is a brutal free-for-all. Anybody could win.
This is, said Steve Baker, “literally the hottest event in Westminster.” Speeches are made. Pledges follow them, like tails. Nadhim Zahawi (13 MPs) is going to get hacking away — he will lower the base rate of income tax to 19p next year and 18p the year after; some VAT will be vaporised; he will reverse the corporation tax hike. He praised Rishi Sunak. When Rishi rolled out furlough the public understood it, because a free lunch is always comprehensible. Now, the new Chancellor said sadly, nobody “understands our plan”. So he will cut taxes, and free lunches will fall from the sky. And under Zahawi there will be freedom. To buy petrol. To buy “chocolate bars”.
Suella Braverman (11 MPs) told the melting candles in the crowd that they shouldn’t vote for her because she’s brown. “Vote for me because I love this country and I’m a conservative”. Freedom is the product of a smaller state, lower taxes, and money in people’s back pockets.
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SubscribeSo despite facing challenges from the Lib Dems in some of their more middle class pro EU seats, all the potential leaders seem to want to alienate their new working class red wall voters by copying the woman who was despised in many of those constituencies? Seems a sensible solution….
I’m amazed by the grip that Thatcherism still has on the Tories even though pretty much every one of her policies has been proven wrong and/or been rejected by the electorate. Integration into the single-market, deregulating the financial sector, de-unionising the workforce, selling off public assets, etc. All of which have contributed to our increasingly individuated, isolated, hollowed out society. And their answer is more of the same? No thank you!
At least Johnson had a clue about what the electorate want (more economic and societal protections against the headwinds of globalisation), even if he wasn’t competent or interested enough to deliver it. But this lot are utterly clueless.
Yes, she went everywhere too far. But she had those elements of no-nonsense leadership and statesmanship that are sadly lacking in today’s political class
Love the Churchill quote – where is it from exactly?
Stuck in the 20th century with Maggie. The same as Labour stuck in the 20th century with failed Soviet regimes.