The people who quit GB News because it’s too populist are as much a mystery as the people who quit the Conservative Party because it’s too conservative
What do these people think they’re signing up for? Why do they always insist against the obvious reality? Why is it so hard for an insider to understand something nakedly transparent to everyone else?
It’s a serious question, by the way. You used to see it when people quit UKIP because it was too xenophobic or now when people resign as advisers to the Tories because they aren’t taking race or LGBT rights seriously enough. What evidence did they ever have to the contrary?
Bottom line: if everyone you know and respect is looking at you with horror when you announce your new job, maybe they’re not the ones who don’t understand it
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Seriously: what more must Boris Johnson do to show Red Wall voters that he despises them?
It’s a serious point because it cuts to everything Johnson is. These moments are not slip-ups. They’re fresh gambits in the permanent game of satisfying Johnson’s adrenaline narcissism.
Johnson’s shtick is not to do a good job, change people’s lives or effect substantive policy. It is to make fools of the people who support him - to push them, fail them, humiliate them and still retain their support. This is the heart of the con. And he’s still pulling it off.
If it’s #PMQs it must be Johnson claiming credit for Hancock’s resignation and boasting about Europe’s fastest vaccine rate even though we currently have the highest levels of Covid
Starmer raises the case of a leukaemia patient whose family were unable to visit because of Covid rules. Johnson sounds bored and talks about the Westminster bubble. Starmer sounds genuinely appalled and calls for Johnson to withdraw the remark. Shameful, shameless.
Johnson refuses to withdraw the remark and instead tells the naked lie that we wouldn’t have been able to manage our own vaccine rollout inside the European Medicines Agency
I feared the ‘Blue Wall’ was wishful thinking, that there would be too many loyal Tories in the south and the anti-Tory vote would always split too much to make a difference. But this was not a slender win. It was a landslide. Change is possible if you actually vote for it.
This is the Tories’ key danger. They’re replicating Labour’s key error, taking their traditional vote for granted and complacently assuming that a radical change in emphasis can win new supporters while also magically keeping the old ones. Sometimes the magic runs out.
The other point here is that Labour was utterly, utterly destroyed. The party is playing by the old rules and will be defeated by them. If Labour wants to take power ever again it needs to work with other parties, hold noses, make agreements.
‘My government will protect the health of the nation,’ trolls the Queen
The government will address the nation’s finances after the pandemic, apparently. Presume that means a massive amount of austerity while blaming Labour.
‘The government will strengthen and renew democracy, ensure the fairness of elections, protect free speech’. This is not worthy of a democratic nation. It is industrial-level gaslighting to seize power.
The problem with analysing electoral trends is that sometimes it’s the grand sweep of history, and other times it’s specific circumstances that get quickly forgotten.
Maybe the Brexiters wouldn’t have won the referendum if they’d hadn’t put Turkey front and centre of the campaign - but Turkey has now been entirely erased from our collective memory of that event.
Maybe Corbyn would have done just as well in 2017 if May hadn’t led such a dire campaign and catastrophically botched her social care plans - but that, too, frequently gets excluded from the narrative.