This paranoid, belligerent rabble will never offer the effective opposition Britain needs. They could even come staggering back into power, says the Guardian columnist John Harris
I know, it’s a meme at this point “Tories collapse: Find out why this is bad for Labour”
They also seem to be furtively spending some of their time with thugs and bigots: the kind of people whom that great English social commentator Paul Weller once associated with the smell of “pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many rightwing meetings”.
In a similar spirit, Liz Truss decided to try to escape the disgrace of her lost weekend in 10 Downing Street by calmly standing on a platform while a fellow speaker lauded Tommy Robinson as a “hero”.
By way of illustrating the kind of politics such a move would assist, the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick – once an insipid Tory journeyman but now seemingly on a mission to become the full-blooded Enoch Powell de nos jours – has proposed an amendment to the government’s criminal justice bill whereby annual crime figures would include “migrant crime league tables”, based on the nationality and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts (according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, the government’s main concern is about the plan’s practicality, “as ministers have no ideological objections to it”).
In among this daily carnival of nastiness and attention-seeking – regularly enlivened by noises off about National Trust scones, flags on football kits and the other small change of current Tory politics – sits David Cameron, who once sold himself as the representative of something very different.
Next month, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft will bring out a belated and very lucid sequel to his 2005 masterpiece The Strange Death of Tory England, titled Bloody Panico!, in honour of a phrase used by a long-forgotten postwar Conservative MP named Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles.
Keir Starmer’s technocratic approach to politics has obviously worked short-term electoral wonders, but it has also left a space that the re-energised post-Brexit right will sooner or later move to occupy: the one reserved for emotion, stories and narratives about what Britain is.
The original article contains 1,246 words, the summary contains 315 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
They also seem to be furtively spending some of their time with thugs and bigots: the kind of people whom that great English social commentator Paul Weller once associated with the smell of “pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many rightwing meetings”.
In a similar spirit, Liz Truss decided to try to escape the disgrace of her lost weekend in 10 Downing Street by calmly standing on a platform while a fellow speaker lauded Tommy Robinson as a “hero”.
By way of illustrating the kind of politics such a move would assist, the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick – once an insipid Tory journeyman but now seemingly on a mission to become the full-blooded Enoch Powell de nos jours – has proposed an amendment to the government’s criminal justice bill whereby annual crime figures would include “migrant crime league tables”, based on the nationality and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts (according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, the government’s main concern is about the plan’s practicality, “as ministers have no ideological objections to it”).
In among this daily carnival of nastiness and attention-seeking – regularly enlivened by noises off about National Trust scones, flags on football kits and the other small change of current Tory politics – sits David Cameron, who once sold himself as the representative of something very different.
Next month, the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft will bring out a belated and very lucid sequel to his 2005 masterpiece The Strange Death of Tory England, titled Bloody Panico!, in honour of a phrase used by a long-forgotten postwar Conservative MP named Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles.
Keir Starmer’s technocratic approach to politics has obviously worked short-term electoral wonders, but it has also left a space that the re-energised post-Brexit right will sooner or later move to occupy: the one reserved for emotion, stories and narratives about what Britain is.
The original article contains 1,246 words, the summary contains 315 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!