It’s not a lot of fun being chair of the Tory party these days. Just one damned thing after another. Trying to keep people’s spirits up as the party lurches from one disaster after another. It’s really not that bad, you keep saying. But it is. It really is. It’s worse than that, in fact.
Then you have to keep the money rolling in so you can afford another car crash of a party conference next year. Christ, no one in their right mind would donate to the Conservatives just now. Except maybe the odd certified lunatic or wannabe money-launderer.
To top it all you’ve got 30p Lee as your deputy. A man who has never knowingly passed up an opportunity to be unpleasant or cause offence. No wonder all you can do is endlessly post the same tweet about Liam Byrne saying there was “No Money Left”. Jesus. That was nearly 14 years ago. Everyone knows it was a joke then. But it’s not now. It’s just pathetic. But it’s all you’ve got. It’s about now that you realise that the person who gave you the job must really hate you.
Rishi Sunak was away. Of course he was. Not a man to be seen near the scene of his crime. The prime minister had chosen the two days around the byelection to make his essential mission to the Middle East. Because what the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Saudis – don’t mention the murdered journalist – and the Egyptians had really been waiting for was advice from Rishi. Thank God you’ve turned up, Rish! Our saviour. In times of war, who does the rest of the world look up to? Our man with all the charisma and gravitas of a sixth-former cosplaying a prime minister.
So it was left to Greg Hands – all his other colleagues had also mysteriously melted away, presumably to submit their CVs to potential employers for when they lost the next election – to face the media in the aftermath of the Tories losing the Mid-Beds and Tamworth byelections. Seats they had previously held with majorities well in excess of 20,000. A result that confirmed the Conservatives’ most gloomy predictions. What we got was the Tory chair at his most deranged. Uncool Hands Greg, untethered. The filters down. Just a total stream of unconsciousness. He may never recover if he bothers to play back the TV clips.
“I don’t detect any great enthusiasm for Labour,” said Greg confidently. His finger unerringly on the pulse as ever. Er … let’s think this one through. There’s just been a swing of more that 20 percentage points to Labour and you think Labour have had a bad night. Because Labour would be really gutted that they had just won one seat – Mid-Beds – they had never previously held. You could just hear Keir Starmer. “This has been a bad night for Labour. We will go away and reflect on the result. And in the meantime we will concede the seat to the Tories as not as many people turned out to vote for us as we hoped.”
But Greg was adamant. Sure, he was a little bit disappointed. But it was Labour who had most reason to be unhappy. It was far better to have voters who really, really disliked everything about your party and would never dream of voting for you at the moment than to have supporters who were a bit apathetic and were grudging about casting their votes for you. He would have hated to have had those people voting Tory.
It was put to Hands – delicately of course – that he was something of a halfwit who couldn’t distinguish up from down. Surely what the results showed was that Sunak’s reset at the party conference had failed. Rish! had said the country needed a change and the country had agreed with him. It wanted a change from him.
Weirdly, no one was that excited by his promise to make things slightly less unaffordable or to increase growth by 0.2%. Nor did they want longer hospital waiting lists and schools that were falling down. Most bizarrely of all, they had rejected the excitement of cancelling a major rail infrastructure project, letting prisoners out because there was no room in the jails and repealing laws that didn’t exist about seven bins.
“Not a bit of it,” insisted Greg. A man who had clearly relaxed his own drug laws. What all this showed was that the Tories were bang on track. He would have been worried if the Conservatives had won the byelections. And Rishi was the man with the big ideas. Ones the country was enthusiastically embracing. He would lead the party to a bright new future. AKA oblivion.
Just one last thing. Did Hands endorse the Tory candidate, Andrew Cooper, storming off in a hissy fit before the Labour winner could make her victory speech at Tamworth? “Absolutely,” said Greg. He had approved telling voters on benefits to fuck off during the campaign and that remained Tory party policy. So it was totally on brand for him to fuck off now that he was technically unemployed.
With that, Greg signed off for the day. He was going to lie down in a darkened room and let Sister Morphine do her worst. Certainly no more media appearances. If Tory central office wanted another spokesperson they could look elsewhere. They did. Step forward the dim-witted Gillian Keegan. Labour hadn’t won the elections, she said. She might like to recheck the results. It was a Tory victory for making the party totally useless and unelectable. This wasn’t the slam dunk put-down she had imagined. Inevitably, the education secretary was bundled away from the microphone by her minders.
That just left David Frost and Danny Kruger to explain the results for the Tories. When you’re down to them, you know you’re screwed. They both thought that the reasons that the Conservatives had lost was because they had not been nearly rightwing enough. Er … and Labour won because it adopted the centre ground? Their logic left a lot to be desired.
But this was it. No matter that the Tories had really plummeted in the polls after the Liz Truss adventure, what was needed was more unfunded tax cuts that would crash the economy and send interest rates rocketing even higher. Plus, we needed to be much, much more unpleasant to foreigners, allow people to drive as fast as they like, forget about net zero because we were all going to die long before 2050, and we should embrace the 4% drop in GDP caused by Brexit.
Plus we should all have lots, lots more babies. And for any single women out there, Danny was their man. He was the Great Impregnator. It was all just nonsense. For Labour, they needed to do little more than let the Tories speak on their behalf. Greg, Gillian, Frosty and Danny are the best recruiting sergeants Starmer could want. More and more, the Tories resemble a death cult. Scrabbling for their own extinction.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy and save 18% at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
