Tory Leadership - They’ve got to be Rude

And some thoughts on Damian McBride

J’accuse won’t offer running commentary on the leadership campaign and the various runners and riders - partly because this is a Paper of Ideas - but to concede also that Guido Fawkes et al., have a structural advantage when it comes to their catalogue of the various ‘poachkeepers turned gamekeepers’ lumbering about ‘the village’ with distinctly English names (Elizabeth Bennington and James Duldridge from the Back Boris campaign).

The boozy backroom brokering is of course important in so far as which ‘faction’ holds power; informing which ideological flavouring and stylistic approach the main party of opposition to Keir Starmer will face as his minions dissolve the country. Mercifully, so far, neither candidates of the Right nor Left of the Party in this contest so far have even a whiff of Postliberalism about them.

Tugendhat, a ‘one-nation’ candidate, supported Liz Truss for leader and made the case for tax cuts - Patel is of James Goldsmith extraction and worked for a PR firm which supported British American Tobacco. Braverman battled the evil windfall tax on oil and gas. Mrs Badenoch has sensible views on the future of Royal Mail. Jenrick did try to build the bloody houses in the South where they belong. We have not heard a sniff about ‘state capacity’, and discussion on ‘our failure to deliver’ have been about immigration and tax instead of not splurging enough of my money on the ‘red wall’.

This is a victory, although a slight one, because so much else is missing and will, I suspect, stay missing for the entire time that the Conservative Party is in opposition. Labour’s fanatical destruction of Westminster’s authority has begun, the ‘devolution revolution’ announced by our Ange - to utter acquiescence. This is partly because, as the Dragon explained, the party made the mistake of opting for a drawn out contest so Sunak has three months to applaud Keir Starmer as he decapitates our oil and gas industry and floods the country with refugees - but it is also because devolution is an issue that they are genuinely dogmatic about.

Daniel Hanaan’s prognostications about ‘localism’ in the pages of the Telegraph in the mid 2000s still holds tremendous sway over what they think they have to think. ‘Delivery of public services will always be better if Local Leaders are Empowered’ is their version of ‘Diverse Teams create better outcomes’. It seems no amount of evidence to the contrary (e.g all of Local Government bankrupting itself, NHS Trusts spending billions on EDI consultancies) will sway them from this perspective.

If you believe in a Unitary State in Britain, as I do, your two choices are between a Labour Party which wants to simultaneously devolve power to the extent that all governing is ‘collaborative’, while creating centralised ‘mission boards’ which can use brutality to implement the demands of neutral institutions like the Civil Service - or a Conservative Party which subscribes to the wisdom of ‘local democracy’ and so rolls out tepid money wasting schemes like Police and Crime Commissioners - lucrative sinecures for regional spivs.  

But let us lead aside Policy Arguments for a second and discuss presentational style. Keir Starmer’s specific weaknesses lend themselves very well to abrasive attacks. This was evidenced in part by how much better Boris was at keeping the North London Lefty Lawyer in his place than Ricardo Soonak - remember the nervous wobble that the media had over Boris using the Savile attack line.

At some point in this Parliament, the ‘mosaic of stories’ that Guido and Left Wing anonymous accounts have been putting together about Keir Starmer’s personal life will be published in a National Newspaper, and whoever leads the opposition at this point will have to use their Parliamentary Privilege to it’s maximum extent to denounce his behaviour. This person has to be willing to spew putrid bile. Nobody deserves to have their personal life more thoroughly ‘scrutinised’ than a Top KC who wants to trample Democracy through Ethics Committees.