Keeping track of Conservative party plotters is becoming like keeping track of Hollywood abusers during the #MeToo peak. Having notched up three prime ministers in two years, there have now been so many of them, given to such grotesque feats of self-indulgence, that you can no longer even quite remember who has been exposed as one. Or, indeed, has exposed themselves as one.
Much as I once did with rogue entertainment horrors, I find myself glimpsing a photo of this or that backbencher or former minister and thinking: “Is he …? Did I read something saying he was …? Or was that the other one …?” You really need flash cards to keep across it.
There’s probably safety in numbers, even as the country faces a series of interconnected challenges and crises actively exacerbated by this oxygen-sucking behaviour, and in some cases effectively caused by it. When this is all over – if the Conservative party’s war ends as the polls suggest – I expect they will melt insouciantly away into new lives, having not been held to account for the self-centred chaos they have visited upon the very people they were supposed to serve.
For now, let’s have another slug of medicated daiquiri and take a look at this week’s developments. Fallout continues from the MRP poll released to the Telegraph last week showing the Tories on course to completely shit the electoral bed under Rishi Sunak’s leadership. I paraphrase the words of the Daily Telegraph, but only barely. This poll was commissioned by something called the Conservative Britain Alliance, which convention insists we style as a “shadowy group” of mutinous MPs, donors, ex-spads and so on.
Any named names in the poll-adjacent plot? Well, do please welcome to the discourse a character called Will Dry, who we were told was a 26-year-old former No 10 spad turned anti-Sunakite. And yet, that does feel like such a placeholder name. Will dry what? “Will Dry For Food”? “Will Dry For Column Inches”? “Will Dry Humping the Hard Right Bring You Within a Million Miles Of Winning The Election?” But it turns out he is real, and his name was either leaked by Downing Street to expose the low-level calibre of the plotters, or by Suella Braverman’s lot, to imply that milady’s coup attempt was snowballing.
Either way, this outfit seeks to get rid of Sunak and install yet another new leader, who will lead a thrillingly re-energised Conservative party to general election victory. Or as one plotter informed Politico this week, in answer to the charge that the public might be on the point of having absolutely bleeding had it with Tory regicide: “That’s nonsense – the public doesn’t care … as long as they’re appealing and people like them, then voters would get used to the idea within a week.” (Drink again from the daiquiri and do a strained side-eye to an imaginary camera. I know I just did.)
This poll showed not a whole lot more than all the other polls readily available and trackable for the past however many months, but has oddly been treated as though it were a spilled state secret on a par with the nuclear codes or how Barney Walsh landed the co-presenting gig on Gladiators. As for who paid for it, former Brexit negotiator Lord Frost has apparently been ordered to reveal who stumped up the £40,000 fee, or face losing the Tory whip. An eventuality you sense he’d be able to live with. He can live with having negotiated the Brexit deal he got us, after all, which seems the immeasurably bigger disgrace.
Other than that, former Boris Johnson and Liz Truss toady Sir Simon Clarke mounted a putsch too embarrassing to cover in full, and joins fellow Johnson ennoblee Dame Andrea Jenkyns as the only other person declared on record to have submitted a no-confidence letter. Lee Anderson, meanwhile, has been de-plotting. Having resigned as deputy party chairman over the Rwanda bill, Lee now regrets this and wants his old job back. And unbelievably, Downing Street has responded with something other than an eyeroll, explaining: “We have a lot of time for Lee.”
But how – HOW –have you got time for him? How have any of them got time for any of this nonsense? Public services are falling apart, as is infrastructure, the courts system and army recruitment. It must be said that for all the gerontocratic battle shaping up in US politics this year, Britain feels like a very old country. Apart from being given to what we might politely term “episodes of confusion”, it has ailments it no longer seems able to fix, with the best option being learning to cope with them in some way or another. Even Labour at present only seems to be offering solutions in the pain-management area.
We’ll play out with the news that Open Democracy has published a story reporting the sale of the Kigali homes that Suella Braverman once claimed would house the asylum seekers Britain was soon to deport there. Back when she was home secretary, you’ll recall, Braverman flew to Kigali and was pictured laughing it up round various sites apparently earmarked for deportees. But this week, it emerged that Open Democracy’s reporter had found the properties had largely already been sold.
If so, you can quite see why. There seems something acutely symbolic about the fact that Rwanda is – unlike our current government – capable of a) building some housing and b) moving on sensibly and in timely fashion when something is clearly never going to work (in this case, ironically, our current government’s Rwandan policy). Being gazumped by realists who are finally sick of waiting … it’s a little on the nose, message-wise – but even then there’s no earthly indication it’ll get through.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
