Thread by @lewis_goodall

Austin is definitely a story. For minister of one party saying voters should vote for the other is a story.

But the way it’s being treated is revealing.

I think interesting point of comparison about Austin is what the reaction would be if say, Dominic Grieve said, vote Corbyn

Grieve is a good comparator for Austin. Both former ministers. Both estranged from their parties. Both clear beef with their respective leaderships. Clearly it would be a story. A big one. The same people saying Austin isn’t a story would be saying it were and vice versa.

But there wouldn’t be the same veneration of Grieve as somehow the authentic Conservative as there is with Austin as somehow more authentically Labour, or speaking for somehow more authentically Labour people. Rather, Grieve would be portrayed as the inauthentic interloper.

He would be dismissed much more easily. The same press publications hailing Austin would denounce Grieve as a long standing grudge holder and a traitor to Conservatism and the cause.

As ever, it’s all about framing.

There is a wider obsession with the “old Labour” vote in the industrial midlands and north, as if it epitomises an authentic Labourism. Ironically, in the New Labour years, it was often the Left which was portrayed as the forgotten, real Labour.

In the way this story is being treated (indeed the way Mr Austin has self-consciously framed it with talk of “patriotic” Labour voters) it is part of that framing.

What Johnson has on his side, in a way that Corbyn doesn’t, is despite the fact he has surrounded himself with self styled revolutionaries, that he’s said “fuck business”, that he’s trashed many of our political institutions, he doesn’t appear nor treated as the interloper.

So when many senior Conservatives, like Justine Greening, for example, say they won’t vote Tory, it doesn’t have as much weight because it is they, not he, who is considered fringe.

Just something I reckon we should be mindful of.