Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
It's customary for parties to swing to their radical fringe after a crushing defeat, before sobering up and realising that perpetual failure lives there.
I don't think that the Tories can resist going down the Reform rabbit hole.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
No sensible folk in the north or white van men in the south ?
In reality the Conservatives need to make gains from various groups in various parts of the country.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
However, it's quite possible that those nice voters in nice places are lost to the Conservatives, at least until the next wave election. The record of new Liberal/Lib Dem MPs putting down roots and being blooming hard to shift is extremely strong.
I don't think that showing some ankle to the Reform-curious is any sort of strategy for government; I doubt that it wins enough votes net and it would be a disaster if enacted. But I can see the logic of doing it.
As was said before the election, the Conservative problem is that they have managed to annoy both the wets and the nationalists, leaving a really narrow band of cod Thatcherism. It's going to be tricky to rebuild from there.
My GE prediction for London was Labour 61, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 5.
The actual numbers were Labour 59, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 6 and Jeremy Corbyn.
London is complex but has effectively four main conflict types - the main one remains Conservative-Labour across most of the capital. The Conservatives have been driven right back to the far edges of London losing a dozen seats including any remaining presence in the centre of the city.
The second is Conservative versus Liberal Democrat in the south west - the LDs gained back both the Sutton Borough seats and took Wimbledon (aided, it has to be said, by boundary changes which brought some Kingston Wards into Wimbledon).
You have the Labour vs Independents/Greens which is emerging in the inner eastern and southern areas such as Lewisham and Newham. How this will play out through the period of the Labour Government I'm not sure but it makes the 2026 London locals of considerable interest.
Finally, Labour vs Reform in Barking and some other eastern inner suburbs and it's worth noting Reform were second in Hornchurch & Upminster.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
It's customary for parties to swing to their radical fringe after a crushing defeat, before sobering up and realising that perpetual failure lives there.
I don't think that the Tories can resist going down the Reform rabbit hole.
Will Reform want the Tory Party in their rabbit hole?
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
My GE prediction for London was Labour 61, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 5.
The actual numbers were Labour 59, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 6 and Jeremy Corbyn.
London is complex but has effectively four main conflict types - the main one remains Conservative-Labour across most of the capital. The Conservatives have been driven right back to the far edges of London losing a dozen seats including any remaining presence in the centre of the city.
The second is Conservative versus Liberal Democrat in the south west - the LDs gained back both the Sutton Borough seats and took Wimbledon (aided, it has to be said, by boundary changes which brought some Kingston Wards into Wimbledon).
You have the Labour vs Independents/Greens which is emerging in the inner eastern and southern areas such as Lewisham and Newham. How this will play out through the period of the Labour Government I'm not sure but it makes the 2026 London locals of considerable interest.
Finally, Labour vs Reform in Barking and some other eastern inner suburbs and it's worth noting Reform were second in Hornchurch & Upminster.
They were also second in Dagenham & Rainham, as well as Barking.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
However, it's quite possible that those nice voters in nice places are lost to the Conservatives, at least until the next wave election. The record of new Liberal/Lib Dem MPs putting down roots and being blooming hard to shift is extremely strong.
I don't think that showing some ankle to the Reform-curious is any sort of strategy for government; I doubt that it wins enough votes net and it would be a disaster if enacted. But I can see the logic of doing it.
As was said before the election, the Conservative problem is that they have managed to annoy both the wets and the nationalists, leaving a really narrow band of cod Thatcherism. It's going to be tricky to rebuild from there.
The Tories have been performatively crassly right wing and in practice statist and left wing. They've been doing it since May and her ridiculous 'Go Home' vans. Actually they were doing it before that, with Cameron and Osborne and their manufactured public spats (and less public capitulations) with the EU.
I agree they need to be more honourable, I agree they need to be more hard-working, I agree they need to be more serious. What they mustn't do is jump on board the stale centrist consensus, with the Liberals, Labour and Greens all appealing to the same narrow band of voters, just as it is losing and in retreat all over Europe.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
It's customary for parties to swing to their radical fringe after a crushing defeat, before sobering up and realising that perpetual failure lives there.
I don't think that the Tories can resist going down the Reform rabbit hole.
Will Reform want the Tory Party in their rabbit hole?
Probably not. Farage is only interested if he is the unchallenged boss, so very likely the Tories will try to out Farage Farage and lose.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
All I have heard from the Tories today is complete nonsense, very similar to what I heard from Jezza and co after the 2019 defeat.
Saying the country is "instinctively conservative" implies they somehow own the voters, they don't. It's also hard to conclude that when the Tories just got their lowest voteshare and seats in history.
But I have heard no solutions thus far from any of the potential candidates about how they intend to return to the centre ground or to win back people they lost. We've had let's just add Reform's votes to the Tories, neglecting all the voters they lost to the Lib Dems and Labour, we've had "immigration is the issue" despite it not being even on the top three list of the concerns of voters. We've had "there's no enthusiasm for SKS", despite him having just won the second largest Labour majority ever.
None of this has changed my mind that at this rate, the Tories will be out for a decade. There seems to be no want to understand that any voter under about 65 does not and will not vote Conservative and that going down a more right wing path will not bring these people back.
The Tories are dead as of right now. Let's hope for all our sakes, they decide to look at what Sir Keir did after 2019.
By contrast. I'm mildly surprised, and extremely content, that we've heard so little from the Tory Party since Thursday. I'm not sure if this is shock, or a pause to take stock? Either way. It's a blessed relief, and I'm not keen to have it end any time soon.
I’d expect more shock, but hopefully it becomes a pause. A knee jerk reaction is usually wrong.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
High turnout in today’s potentially cataclysmic French election is confirmed by the official figure at 5pm Paris time – 59.71%, compared to 59.39% at the same time in the first round last week
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
The idea of a broad church is that everyone puts their ideas in, and then the leader decides, and everyone goes along with it. That's what should happen. Ideally no-one will be fully happy, but everyone gets something.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
'Loyalty' isn't stabbing your leader in the back.
Tell that to Rishi Sunak.
Sunak had several issues: one of which was that his predecessor got rid of a fair few competent conservative right-wingers who were not quite right-wing enough for him. As a consequences, the party Sunak led was fairly to the right - and that wasn't his fault.
In winning in 2019, Johnson seriously damaged the party. That's quite an epic achievement.
Firstly, Sunak left the D-Day commemorations early, a catastrophic political misjudgment which made his personal ratings plummet. He left just after the King, something his aides did not want to brief during the campaign because it would have dragged the monarchy into it.
The King who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer and is presumably knackered?
I’d cut him some slack. Sunak not so much.
Yup, that King.
Leaking about it is such shitty behaviour.
The King's early departure was covered on the day itself, with his ongoing treatment given as the reason. He'd been advised not to travel at all, if I recall correctly. The PoW was there to deputise for him at the international event, and had been on hand throughout the British events in case he needed to step in.
It's a really bad look for Sunak's aides to be "well, acutally"-ing about this...
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
Firstly, Sunak left the D-Day commemorations early, a catastrophic political misjudgment which made his personal ratings plummet. He left just after the King, something his aides did not want to brief during the campaign because it would have dragged the monarchy into it.
The King who is currently undergoing treatment for cancer and is presumably knackered?
I’d cut him some slack. Sunak not so much.
Yup, that King.
Leaking about it is such shitty behaviour.
The King's early departure was covered on the day itself, with his ongoing treatment given as the reason. He'd been advised not to travel at all, if I recall correctly. The PoW was there to deputise for him at the international event, and had been on hand throughout the British events in case he needed to step in.
It's a really bad look for Sunak's aides to be "well, acutally"-ing about this...
Especially since they are now irrelevant for four years and nobody cares any more.
High turnout in today’s potentially cataclysmic French election is confirmed by the official figure at 5pm Paris time – 59.71%, compared to 59.39% at the same time in the first round last week
Estimated final turnout of 67%. Not much indication of folk sitting on their hands when their preferred candidate has been eliminated. Not sure what result that presages, mind.
My GE prediction for London was Labour 61, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 5.
The actual numbers were Labour 59, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 6 and Jeremy Corbyn.
London is complex but has effectively four main conflict types - the main one remains Conservative-Labour across most of the capital. The Conservatives have been driven right back to the far edges of London losing a dozen seats including any remaining presence in the centre of the city.
The second is Conservative versus Liberal Democrat in the south west - the LDs gained back both the Sutton Borough seats and took Wimbledon (aided, it has to be said, by boundary changes which brought some Kingston Wards into Wimbledon).
You have the Labour vs Independents/Greens which is emerging in the inner eastern and southern areas such as Lewisham and Newham. How this will play out through the period of the Labour Government I'm not sure but it makes the 2026 London locals of considerable interest.
Finally, Labour vs Reform in Barking and some other eastern inner suburbs and it's worth noting Reform were second in Hornchurch & Upminster.
Hornchurch and Upminster is one where it would be fascinating to know the geographical distribution of votes for Conservative, Reform and Labour. The three parties were within about 2500 votes of each other.
(Upminster itself is best described as leafy. It has a Waitrose and all that. But the constituency also includes Harold Hill, one of those massive LCC estates that went right-to-buy to private rental. Hornchurch is somewhere in-between; nicer than Romford but not massively so. On Havering Council, Harold Hill is now reasonably solidly Labour again, but has dallied with Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP in recent decades. The rest of the constituency is a mixture of united Residents' Associations and other Residents' Associations who have nothing to do with them. Havering Council politics is bonkers.)
There are serious and credible allegations being made on Twitter against one of the new Labour intake. It looks like it could be the first scandal to hit Starmer.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
There are serious and credible allegations being made on Twitter against one of the new Labour intake. It looks like it could be the first scandal to hit Starmer.
The account making the allegations joined in 2020, which fits with the age of the people involved. Obviously, could be bollocks, but the allegations are very serious and potentially criminal.
There are serious and credible allegations being made on Twitter against one of the new Labour intake. It looks like it could be the first scandal to hit Starmer.
Has it been discovered that they supported & campaigned for Corbyn in the 2017 & 2019 GEs? Perhaps even some incriminating retweets!
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
As to what's going to happen, given how all the immediate post election predictions of December 2019 turned out, perhaps we should just wait and see. How Starmer handles his first "crisis" will be informative. I'd also note it's not the big things which cause problems but the little things becoming big things because they are not sorted.
Before wittering about immigration or whatever, the Tories need to think hard about the 4 things they have lacked or deliberately abandoned in recent years.
1. An understanding of Burkean principles - the idea that conservatism is about preserving the best of what we have built but also about building on that for the next generations - to leave the country in a better state than they found it. So it is not enough to focus only on one elderly generation but to remember those that are and those to come and to make life and opportunities better for them. (Why in God's name did a Conservative government kill off Sure Start? - to give just one example.)
2. Chesterton's Fence: you don't just randomly and angrily attack and destroy institutions and conventions just because they stand in your way. You are meant to be grown ups not tantruming toddlers. The attacks on the rule of law, on any standards of integrity and political decency, on independent institutions etc was pathetic, dangerous and, well, unconservative. See point 1.
3. Competence: obvious but forgotten. Just try to do your tasks well. Good administration, thinking about the consequences, thinking ahead, getting advice, planning, sorting out mistakes, learning from them, small practical improvements instead of snake oil promises backed by nothing more than bullshit etc. You forgot that. You will have to relearn this and try to demonstrate it where you can - in how you run your party and whatever councils you control. It will take time and you won't be listened to for a long time. But unless you do start doing this now, forget the rest.
4. Character: the single most important factor. The moral character, the integrity, the honesty of those who lead your party and those in it and how they behave says more about you than any manifesto. You chose some dreadful leaders in a Faustian pact which has well and truly bitten you on the arse. You abandoned all standards of political decency. You allowed corruption and shadiness and spivs in public office to fester. You gave the impression that duty and public service were jokes. The one abiding image for your years in power was parties in Downing Street while a widowed queen sat alone at her husband's funeral. That image stood for many who did their job while you treated their old-fashioned virtues with contempt. Really, how dare you call yourself conservative and behave like that.
Get these right. Then you can start worrying about policies. The current government will eventually make mistakes in all these areas. (I mean, Jacqui Smith, really?) But they won't listen to you until you've admitted you fucked things up and have changed.
Available for consultation at £1,3750 per hour + VAT or its euro equivalent. An absolute bargain.
Everyone Conservative MP should have to read it and every Conservative wannabe leader should have to give their thoughts on it.
I'm afraid I can't agree, because unlike @DeclanF's first set of points on the matter, which came over as high-minded and was universal enough for conservatives of all colours (including me, who 'liked' the post) to get behind, this set of requirements is narrowly political, and frankly reads as yet another PB post dolorously opining that the Tories must 'avoid a swing to the right', despite (and probably because of) the centrist position being utterly destroyed in a test with real voters. Time and again, those on the right have urged the building of the same coalition that Boris made into a landslide victory. The post-electoral arithmetic clearly shows this to be the case. Starmer's victory is based on an utterly shallow pool of voters, and it's incredibly self-serving of his supporters to urge the Tories to pull their punches against Labour, leave the right of British politics unrepresented, and attack Reform instead.
Absolutely not. No sensible tactician would urge the Tories to go back to chasing after some white van man in Redcar. It’s the sensible folk of Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire and Wiltshire and Somerset and Devon and Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire and … that you should be worrying about. By and large, they don’t want a government of ideological obsessives, and right now, that’s you, not them.
No sensible folk in the north or white van men in the south ?
In reality the Conservatives need to make gains from various groups in various parts of the country.
Top three Conservatives target in Yorkshire:
Rother Valley 998 maj Doncaster E 2,311 Scunthorpe 3,542
Compare with
Harrogate 8,238 Shipley 8,603 York Outer 9,391 Selby 10,195
The places most likely to be Conservative gains next time are going to include some places which have rarely voted for them before.
I did my first ever sprint triathlon. beating my target time and without drowning, and then I came home to watch the only GP of the year I can watch live, and Lewis wins!
An interesting question is what the election would have looked like with a higher turnout. Perhaps a lot of potential Tory -> Reform voters ended up not voting and if they had turned out, 5 seats might have been a lot higher.
A higher turnout would have likely meant less Conservatives sitting it out.
Those who wanted to vote against did so.
Were you not unable to find any such people? What insight do you have into their thinking?
There were plenty who didn't want to vote Labour, and were unconvinced by LibDems or Reform on the edges. We knew who they were; some we persuaded to come out to vote; others could not support a Party with their vote that they felt had performed very poorly.
As I said, I suspect a 10% increse in turnout would have gone at least three-quarters to the Conservative vote.
But it didn't happen. And we lost a bunch of MPs as a consequence.
I think you are just seeing what you want to see. I think the same can be said about your reports from the front line during the election campaign.
"Historically, government in Northern Ireland has not been as good as it might be in income generation. That is something the executive is going to have to look at." Hilary Benn puts his foot down on no more money to buy off Stormont. Great start.
A clear signal to the NI Executive that they should finally get off their arses and use their powers to reduce Corporation Tax to 12.5%, matching the rest of Ireland, and do whatever it takes to get more inward investment flowing...
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
The first big win for SKS will be if he can end the Junior Doctor strike.
And the rail strikes. Without stuffing mouths with gold.
Avoiding rail & junior doctors’ strikes didn’t seem to give many brownie points to the government of one part of the UK.
What was it Jim Hacker said about the Eurosausage? Preventing a problem isn't news. Better let the problem become a crisis, because that makes you a hero when you solve it.
And whilst some of the problem is going to be about pay rises (sorry, but junior doctors can play in a global market for their services), the art is going to be to do as much as possible as cheaply as possible, by somehow making working conditions nicer for people in the public sector.
(Not easy I agree. But to take an example, I know of two pathways of CPD that used to be available to teachers that have had their funding cut by the outgoing government. And ongoing training is the sort of thing that not only makes people better at their jobs, it makes them enjoy them more as well.)
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
Sir Lewis Hamilton joining Ferrari instead of remaining at Mercedes for 2025 is up there with the worst strategic blunders in history.
People said exactly that when he moved from McLaren to Mercedes.
We don't know what he saw in Mercedes' or Ferrari's offer for 2025 and beyond. It may be another brilliant move.
But: even if he's only done it towards the end of his career to say he's driven for Ferrari, fair dos to him. It's not like he's moving to Sauber, and Ferrari offer wins most years.
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
And sadly a loss to Labour in Harlow mainly due to votes lost to Reform.
I think use the conference as an extended hustings once all candidates have declared and to allow MPs and members to see their proposals and how they perform. We are in opposition now not government so no need to rush electing a new leader as we are not selecting the PM, Rishi or Dowden can stay caretaker in the meantime.
Starmer keeps delivering. Women's cricket team, England to Semis of the Euros and Lewis wins the the UK GP. If he keeps this up I may vote for him myself.
Starmer keeps delivering. Women's cricket team, England to Semis of the Euros and Lewis wins the the UK GP. If he keeps this up I may vote for him myself.
Starmer keeps delivering. Women's cricket team, England to Semis of the Euros and Lewis wins the the UK GP. If he keeps this up I may vote for him myself.
The first big win for SKS will be if he can end the Junior Doctor strike.
And the rail strikes. Without stuffing mouths with gold.
Avoiding rail & junior doctors’ strikes didn’t seem to give many brownie points to the government of one part of the UK.
What was it Jim Hacker said about the Eurosausage? Preventing a problem isn't news. Better let the problem become a crisis, because that makes you a hero when you solve it.
And whilst some of the problem is going to be about pay rises (sorry, but junior doctors can play in a global market for their services), the art is going to be to do as much as possible as cheaply as possible, by somehow making working conditions nicer for people in the public sector.
(Not easy I agree. But to take an example, I know of two pathways of CPD that used to be available to teachers that have had their funding cut by the outgoing government. And ongoing training is the sort of thing that not only makes people better at their jobs, it makes them enjoy them more as well.)
Probably so, but even on that basis it’s still mystifying to me why the Cons didn’t fix this before the GE with appropriate trumpeting of their wisdom and solution provision. Just part of their general crapness, exaggerated fear of appearing weak or something else?
Starmer keeps delivering. Women's cricket team, England to Semis of the Euros and Lewis wins the the UK GP. If he keeps this up I may vote for him myself.
His record is a bit patchy on the weather front.
Yeah, but that produced a genuinely brilliant GP.
Sir Keir understands a little discomfort is necessary to improve the country right now, what a leader he is.
There are serious and credible allegations being made on Twitter against one of the new Labour intake. It looks like it could be the first scandal to hit Starmer.
Blimey,they were quick off the blocks. Minority Government by Christmas?
These are hard and so my rates will have to increase significantly. But still a much much better bet than Levido and whichever Cummings-look alike cretins have been advising you up till now.
Leadership
1. See the basic principles from my earlier post on previous thread. People with a loose understanding of integrity should not even be in contention. That rules out Braverman and Jenrick - also on the grounds of competence.
2. Take your time. No-one wants to hear from you right now and they certainly don't want to hear retreads they've just blown a gigantic raspberry at. See also point 1.
3. Your new leader needs to be a new face or, at least, one capable of creating a new face for themselves and the party. Tetchy arrogance is not a good look. So think next generation or the bridge to it. If there is no-one ready yet look for another Michael Howard and accept this will be a long game.
4. Whatever you do stop looking for the next Cameron or Thatcher. You're meant to remember your granny not turn into her.
5. They will need one thing above all: courage. First, courage to speak some truths to the membership. Preserving and building on the best of the past does not mean living in it. If they don't like that message, the party will die. Be blunt and don't pander. Second: they will need the courage to tear up party shibboleths, be ruthless with the drama queens and be largely irrelevant for a while. That lack of attention gives some space to rebuild.
Opposition
This will be hard. You don't set the agenda. You will be blamed for everything. Find an answer to the obvious blame statements. One good one is: You're in power now so expect to be put under scrutiny for what you are doing now. Develop a thick skin.
You do have a lot of experience of government so you should know where the traps are. Plus you have quite a few ex-MPs who can give you useful intelligence. Use them.
Work on the competence and delivery angle: this is where governments come unstuck. So patiently ask questions, get into the detail, know your briefs and keep on asking questions and probing and pointing out errors etc.,. Think Jason Beer KC. Remember it's not whether they're doing things as you would like them to do. It's whether the government achieves what they have promised. That's what you attack and probe and target. That - if you do it well - is what will undermine voters' faith in a government and start the process of them looking at alternatives.
New faces please and ones who communicate as humans.
Ditch the entitlement: no group of voters belong to you, not Reform, not Blue Wall, no-one.
Do not copy the USA.
Remember: you are planning for the 2030's and beyond.
You’re forgetting the change curve. I think the Tories will find this all exceptionally difficult, at least for a while.
I was elected to my former council in 1994, and at that election an unbroken series of Conservative majorities since the council had been created came to an end, with the council going balanced and a minority Labour administration taking office for the first time.
All but a handful of the Conservative councillors were used to making decisions and having the council carry them out, and being in opposition came as a massive shock. At the first budget setting meeting, we had sorted out the budget with the Labour Group in advance, and the Tories simply couldn’t cope with the reality that all their amendments were simply going to be voted down. They reacted by raising points of order and recorded votes and making lengthy speeches, such that we carried on through the night and the budget was not actually set until 4am the following morning.
How many of the current bunch of Tory MPs are new to parliament, and won’t have to go through the denial stage?
Here they are, the let's-hope-some-of-them-are-magnificent 26:
Alison Griffiths Bognor Regis and Littlehampton Ashley Fox Bridgwater Charlie Dewhirst Bridlington and The Wolds Peter Fortune Bromley and Biggin Hill Bradley Thomas Bromsgrove Lewis Cocking Broxbourne Patrick Spencer Central Suffolk and North Ipswich Aphra Brandreth Chester South and Eddisbury John Cooper Dumfries and Galloway David Reed Exmouth and Exeter East Greg Stafford Farnham and Bordon Andrew Snowden Fylde Harriet Cross Gordon and Buchan Ben Obese-Jecty Huntingdon Joe Robertson Isle of Wight East Shivani Raja Leicester East Blake Stephenson Mid Bedfordshire Peter Bedford Mid Leicestershire Rebecca Paul Reigate Neil Shastri-Hurst Solihull West and Shirley Sarah Bool South Northamptonshire Rebecca Smith South West Devon Lincoln Jopp Spelthorne Katie Lam Weald of Kent Nick Timothy West Suffolk Jack Rankin Windsor
Obese-Jecty, Cocking, Fortune are a disreputable firm of solicitors in a minor Dickens work. Lincoln Jopp was a minor character edited out of Star Wars at an early draft.
Aphra Brandreth straight outta Hardy.
Had to edit auto correct that gave me Ashram for Aphra
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
And sadly a loss to Labour in Harlow mainly due to votes lost to Reform.
I think use the conference as an extended hustings once all candidates have declared and to allow MPs and members to see their proposals and how they perform. We are in opposition now not government so no need to rush electing a new leader as we are not selecting the PM, Rishi or Dowden can stay caretaker in the meantime.
No idea who might replace Brady as 1922 chair
How much political time is there in the next few months? The King's Speech is on the 17th of this month, there can't be many Commons days after that before the summer holidays. Then back for a couple of weeks in September before the conference season.
On the other hand, the "look at the calendar and decide what makes sense" approach didn't work at all for predicting the General Election date.
McLaren really messed that up. Not double stacking Norris and Piastri and their tyre choice cost them a potential 1 2.
They definitely looked the fastest for large chunks of that race. But I'm just delighted for Lewis. Lando will, in my view, be the next British World champion but today belongs to Lewis.
Not a bad weekend for our new Secretary of State either. What do I have to do this weekend? Hand out the gold cup to the winner of the British GP. Who's British. His job is all downhill from here.
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
On Neil Hudson, a vet, generally good bloke, and formerly my MP in Penrith and Border, he has a bit of good fortune. He got bounced from the Penrith seat this time, with boundary changes, in favour of Workington's Jenkinson (sub optimal compared with the decent Hudson), so had to go carpet bagging. Got Epping and won. Penrith along with the whole of Cumbria told the Tories where to go - clean sweep. Neil Hudson had a once in a lifetime's luck.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
Starmer keeps delivering. Women's cricket team, England to Semis of the Euros and Lewis wins the the UK GP. If he keeps this up I may vote for him myself.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
Just eight in 2015 but that doesn't matter.
The key is to strengthen the constituency bases so that when the anti-Government mood kicks in there is some protection and the residual 30 seats could be the balance in a future Hung Parliament.
So the wheel turns...(if you assume the old symmetry will return).
The Conservatives clearly have a lot of thinking to do - the first question they need to answer, based on what I read here from so-called "conservatives" is defining conservatism for the 21st century.
Not a bad weekend for our new Secretary of State either. What do I have to do this weekend? Hand out the gold cup to the winner of the British GP. Who's British. His job is all downhill from here.
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
Looks like we no longer need to be up from Survation who have fallen from most accurate pollster at the last 3 general elections back to middle of the pack. Instead Verian, Norstat and BMG take the crown this time.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
A comfortable hold for Neil Hudson in Epping Forest but a huge swing to Reform in Brentwood & Ongar.
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
And sadly a loss to Labour in Harlow mainly due to votes lost to Reform.
I think use the conference as an extended hustings once all candidates have declared and to allow MPs and members to see their proposals and how they perform. We are in opposition now not government so no need to rush electing a new leader as we are not selecting the PM, Rishi or Dowden can stay caretaker in the meantime.
No idea who might replace Brady as 1922 chair
How much political time is there in the next few months? The King's Speech is on the 17th of this month, there can't be many Commons days after that before the summer holidays. Then back for a couple of weeks in September before the conference season.
On the other hand, the "look at the calendar and decide what makes sense" approach didn't work at all for predicting the General Election date.
That bet on Rishi's exit year being 2025 is certainly worth thinking about, with the consensus moving towards "let's take it slow".
Was available on Betfair at 60-1, now in to 33-1 (albeit with v. small volumes).
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
As a lifelong Liberal and Liberal Democrat supporter and one time Party member, it's incredible to think we now have 72 MPs. I remember the thrill of 46 MPs in 1997 and thinking of that as a breakthrough but to imagine after the dark days of 2015, we now have 2 LD MPs for every 3 Conservatives - almost unbelievable.
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
But 71 Lib Dem seats in 2024 matter a lot less than a dozen did in 2015, because Labour's majority is so huge and they will obviously be mostly gone when the public want Labour out, whenever that is. Most of the public would be hard pressed to name a single LibDem policy I think. That's the way with protest votes, whether they are Reform, LibDem or Monster Raving Loony.
LibDems do a great job as "not the Tories!" Can they do the same as "not bloody Labour!"? Jury is very much out on that one.
To be fair, after 2001, being opposed to the Iraq War worked pretty well. The Conservatives under IDS were even more gung ho about intervention than Labour - not that it did them any good.
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election. Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252. The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.
All figures net since 1945.
One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.
Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.
Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.
Ask Marcus Fysh.
A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".
Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.
On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".
He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party
Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh? Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.
I didn’t say that.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
Incoherent garbage from Fysh.
Though this won't get noticed, the huge gap at the moment in the Conservative movement generally is intellectual. Once upon a time there were interesting thinkers broadly aligned with anti authoritarian right wing thinking both popular and academic - Worsthorne, Joseph, Scruton, Hayek, Friedman, Carswell to name a few.
The UK world has changed and the field has thinned. I don't know of a decent long article or book by the current players outlining what a coherent UK conservatism looks like. Matt Goodwin (not popular with PB) is, like so many, good on analysis of the populist world but, like Reform, less good on the coherence of a conservatism that might work.
Can any PBers point me in a direction to look at or has the serious right given up?
Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.
You can't take the Scottish electorate for granted. Zero party loyalty. It looks like that trend is extending to England now too.
Yeah that's what I posted yesterday afternoon.
Quite a few SNP MPs past and present follow me on Twitter and lurk on here, from Alex Salmond downwards.
(Another PBer did say the Argyll, Bute, and South Lochaber seat had parts further south than Stirling though.)
Ooooh, does Joanna Cherry come here? If so, may I just say
I laughed when you lost
I’d heard that Transwars was the BIG issue in Scottish politics. Perhaps so, just not in the way people thought. After all the 2 parties that voted unanimously for the GRA bill did ok.
Comments
I don't think that the Tories can resist going down the Reform rabbit hole.
In reality the Conservatives need to make gains from various groups in various parts of the country.
I don't think that showing some ankle to the Reform-curious is any sort of strategy for government; I doubt that it wins enough votes net and it would be a disaster if enacted. But I can see the logic of doing it.
As was said before the election, the Conservative problem is that they have managed to annoy both the wets and the nationalists, leaving a really narrow band of cod Thatcherism. It's going to be tricky to rebuild from there.
My GE prediction for London was Labour 61, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 5.
The actual numbers were Labour 59, Conservatives 9, Liberal Democrats 6 and Jeremy Corbyn.
London is complex but has effectively four main conflict types - the main one remains Conservative-Labour across most of the capital. The Conservatives have been driven right back to the far edges of London losing a dozen seats including any remaining presence in the centre of the city.
The second is Conservative versus Liberal Democrat in the south west - the LDs gained back both the Sutton Borough seats and took Wimbledon (aided, it has to be said, by boundary changes which brought some Kingston Wards into Wimbledon).
You have the Labour vs Independents/Greens which is emerging in the inner eastern and southern areas such as Lewisham and Newham. How this will play out through the period of the Labour Government I'm not sure but it makes the 2026 London locals of considerable interest.
Finally, Labour vs Reform in Barking and some other eastern inner suburbs and it's worth noting Reform were second in Hornchurch & Upminster.
A while since we’ve heard that.
They're striking as much in protest at it being broken as anything.
A 'broad church' isn't the right wingers getting everything they want. And sadly, the right-wingers seem to want everything their own way. There can be no compromise - as we saw over Brexit. And they were not exactly loyal, were they? They weren't loyal to Major, to Cameron, to May...
'Loyalty' isn't stabbing your leader in the back.
I agree they need to be more honourable, I agree they need to be more hard-working, I agree they need to be more serious. What they mustn't do is jump on board the stale centrist consensus, with the Liberals, Labour and Greens all appealing to the same narrow band of voters, just as it is losing and in retreat all over Europe.
It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be
High turnout in today’s potentially cataclysmic French election is confirmed by the official figure at 5pm Paris time – 59.71%, compared to 59.39% at the same time in the first round last week
https://x.com/mij_europe/status/1809966978011914566
Stuffing their mouths with gold, for example, would end the strike but wouldn’t be a “big win”.
But it will be interesting to see what deal the doctors will accept from a labour government that they might not have accepted from the Tories
Hamilton: "Leave me to it mate"
In winning in 2019, Johnson seriously damaged the party. That's quite an epic achievement.
It's a really bad look for Sunak's aides to be "well, acutally"-ing about this...
To be fair, the exit poll was tweaked several times during the night.
Also shocked Matt Goodwin's pollster came last and to top that the result ended up closer to 1997 than Canada 1993 for the Tories and Farage is not LOTO as Mystic Matt had hoped. If Le Pen doesn't win a landslide this evening how will the poor man cope?
Well done Sir John Curtice for another broadly accurate exit poll
Not much indication of folk sitting on their hands when their preferred candidate has been eliminated.
Not sure what result that presages, mind.
(Upminster itself is best described as leafy. It has a Waitrose and all that. But the constituency also includes Harold Hill, one of those massive LCC estates that went right-to-buy to private rental. Hornchurch is somewhere in-between; nicer than Romford but not massively so. On Havering Council, Harold Hill is now reasonably solidly Labour again, but has dallied with Conservatives, UKIP and the BNP in recent decades. The rest of the constituency is a mixture of united Residents' Associations and other Residents' Associations who have nothing to do with them. Havering Council politics is bonkers.)
There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?
I've often said on here the party I joined and worked for died in the fires of the coalition but, phoenix-like, that party has risen from the ashes of 2015 and has targeted ruthlessly to achieve such a result. Ed Davey is a product of ALDC and the campaigning techniques of that organisation (as was Farron) and it's perhaps no surprise the party has gone back to the future. Yes, a lot of it was the classic "high tide floating all boats" but that doesn't mean each and every gain wasn't the result of hard work.
I strongly suspect there is a significant correlation between local Government success, especially from 2022 onwards, and victory last Thursday and it's to other areas of local strength which were outside the scope of targeting this time the party needs to look for further progress. 2025 has to be about gains at County level and using those to develop organisation in new areas.
Given how some Conservatives enjoyed dancing on the LD graves in 2015, you'll forgive a wry smile as I look at the Conservatives "assessing their losses". The humiliation of 2015 has been avenged. Such is politics, a rough trade as someone once said.
As to what's going to happen, given how all the immediate post election predictions of December 2019 turned out, perhaps we should just wait and see. How Starmer handles his first "crisis" will be informative. I'd also note it's not the big things which cause problems but the little things becoming big things because they are not sorted.
I had tickets to this Grand Prix weekend.
That’s all.
Rother Valley 998 maj
Doncaster E 2,311
Scunthorpe 3,542
Compare with
Harrogate 8,238
Shipley 8,603
York Outer 9,391
Selby 10,195
The places most likely to be Conservative gains next time are going to include some places which have rarely voted for them before.
I did my first ever sprint triathlon. beating my target time and without drowning, and then I came home to watch the only GP of the year I can watch live, and Lewis wins!
I'm really, really happy.
Has Starmer made him an offer?
In your view, should the Party go for a "quick" leadership election (I don't really see the point) or basically use the Conference as an extended hustings?
I presume the reconstituted 1922 will make the decision - any thoughts on who might replace Sir Graham Brady as Chairman?
And whilst some of the problem is going to be about pay rises (sorry, but junior doctors can play in a global market for their services), the art is going to be to do as much as possible as cheaply as possible, by somehow making working conditions nicer for people in the public sector.
(Not easy I agree. But to take an example, I know of two pathways of CPD that used to be available to teachers that have had their funding cut by the outgoing government. And ongoing training is the sort of thing that not only makes people better at their jobs, it makes them enjoy them more as well.)
But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.
The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.
We don't know what he saw in Mercedes' or Ferrari's offer for 2025 and beyond. It may be another brilliant move.
But: even if he's only done it towards the end of his career to say he's driven for Ferrari, fair dos to him. It's not like he's moving to Sauber, and Ferrari offer wins most years.
I think use the conference as an extended hustings once all candidates have declared and to allow MPs and members to see their proposals and how they perform. We are in opposition now not government so no need to rush electing a new leader as we are not selecting the PM, Rishi or Dowden can stay caretaker in the meantime.
No idea who might replace Brady as 1922 chair
Only this morning I was talking to a Green who voted LibDem to get a Tory out.
https://x.com/i/status/1809633657113415997
On the other hand, the "look at the calendar and decide what makes sense" approach didn't work at all for predicting the General Election date.
Biden's cheerful but forgetful bon homie no longer trumps Trump's venal, corrupt, incompetent, incontinent and smelly demeanor.
What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?
It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.
It's a throwback to the time when the Tories weren't shite..
The key is to strengthen the constituency bases so that when the anti-Government mood kicks in there is some protection and the residual 30 seats could be the balance in a future Hung Parliament.
So the wheel turns...(if you assume the old symmetry will return).
The Conservatives clearly have a lot of thinking to do - the first question they need to answer, based on what I read here from so-called "conservatives" is defining conservatism for the 21st century.
I wouldn’t be quite so quick to write him off.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/jul/07/french-election-2024-results-latest-france-news-marine-le-pen-national-rally-emmanuel-macron
Was available on Betfair at 60-1, now in to 33-1 (albeit with v. small volumes).
The Tories will elect a new chairman of the 1922 committee this week. It's likely to be either Geoffrey Clifton-Brown or Bob Blackman. They'll have the unenviable task of being holder-of-the-letters for any future race
https://x.com/kitty_donaldson/status/1809979701294707117
Though this won't get noticed, the huge gap at the moment in the Conservative movement generally is intellectual. Once upon a time there were interesting thinkers broadly aligned with anti authoritarian right wing thinking both popular and academic - Worsthorne, Joseph, Scruton, Hayek, Friedman, Carswell to name a few.
The UK world has changed and the field has thinned. I don't know of a decent long article or book by the current players outlining what a coherent UK conservatism looks like. Matt Goodwin (not popular with PB) is, like so many, good on analysis of the populist world but, like Reform, less good on the coherence of a conservatism that might work.
Can any PBers point me in a direction to look at or has the serious right given up?
https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/live/2024/07/07/en-direct-legislatives-2024-le-taux-de-participation-pour-le-second-tour-atteint-59-71-a-17-heures_6247441_823448.html