Catwalk of the Damned

The Tory Leadership Contenders

Maybe it’s because we’re a nation of animal-lovers, but the English language has a astonishing range of collective nouns for describing groups of animals. There are so quotable and resonant combinations: a shrewdness of apes and a cauldron of bats; a sounder of boar, a clouder of cats and a kindle of kittens; a murder of crows, a bloat of hippopotami, an exaltation of larks.

Despite this richness, it is a struggle to find the right term to describe the current crop of Tory leadership contenders. I’ve oscillated between a skulk of bastards, a cackle of charlatans or an unkindness of ravens, before giving up, because it is an insult to animals to compare any species to the dismal spawn of Big Dog who have now come a-smiling through the airwaves, with their ‘slick’ videos and their personal stories and their soggy, over-ripe patriotism.

We always knew it would be like this, but did we really know till this week how bad it would be? Some readers may remember the old horror film, The Thing, in which a shapeshifting alien life form assimilates its victims and then replicates them, imitating their memories, characteristics and all other traits. Even when The Thing is cut in half, it does no good, because the two pieces become autonomous creatures. As Kurt Russell’s character puts it in the John Carpenter remake:

This thing doesn't want to show itself; it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies. Nobody left to kill it. And then it's won.

This, in a way, is an apt description of what has happened to the modern Tory Party, because this is now a party that has been comprehensively taken over and hollowed out from the inside. The alien life form responsible might be Brexit, or it might be Boris Johnson himself, but either way the cheerless conga of contenders now competing to take the place of the worst Prime Minister in British history is an eloquent testament to how monstrous the party has become.

To listen to any one of them is to be reminded of a fundamental truth about the events of the last few weeks: that the fall of Boris Johnson was never, in itself, going to make the Conservatives any better than they are, and was certainly not going to make the country any better than it is.

Not a single one of these contenders has shown any acknowledgement of their own responsibility for the man who thankfully will be leaving Downing Street in September. For these Tories, politics means never having to say you’re sorry. So they talk of ‘clean starts’, and ‘restoring trust’, or concentrating on the ‘ship’ rather than the leader, without ever explaining why a ‘clean start’ is necessary, or why trust needs to be restored, or why they allowed the ‘ship’ to be steered towards an iceberg while the captain and his pals were vomiting all over the party deck.

Instead, most of them have actually praised the ‘achievements’ of the man who they only last week called on to resign because his unfitness for office had finally become impossible to ignore, whose lies they covered for or refused to challenge time and time again, until the moment it became clear that it was no longer in their political interest to continue doing so.

Yesterday the ONS revealed that 200,000 people have died in the course of the pandemic. Not one of these contenders acknowledged that tragic, avoidable and shameful ‘achievement’.

Low taxes and micro-states

At a time when the country is careering towards recession, all of them, with the exception of the smarmy Sunak, have engaged in a classic Tory tax-cutting competition. Zahawi - thankfully out of the race - proposed to make 20 percent cuts to government in order to pay for his cuts. The ghastly pretender Kemi Badenoch wants to introduce a low-tax ‘micro-state.’

How does she think we would have got through the pandemic with a ‘micro-state’? How will public services be paid for through tax cuts? How will the NHS be maintained, let alone get the increased capacity that it needs? How will the poorest in society be protected against the economic storms that are already plunging millions into fuel poverty? How will social care be paid for if the national insurance hike is cancelled?

None of the contenders seems to have even asked these questions, let alone tried to answer them. They all insist that they ‘love their country’, but none of them show any concern for the people who actually live in it - especially the people at the sharp end of the economic downturn that Tory governments are partly responsible for.

On the contrary, some of them have engaged in the old competition-of-the cruellest, with Suella Braverman and Badenoch attacking ‘welfare scroungers’. Inevitably, migrants are in the firing line, as each contender lines up to insist that they intend to continue deporting to Rwanda - a brutal policy aimed primarily at people of colour, regardless of Tory boasting about the diversity of the leadership challengers.

All of them have been at pains to demonstrate their ‘anti-wokeness’, with Badenoch leading the way to the point when she has even dismissed legislation to limit online bullying and harassment as a misguided attempt to protect ‘hurt feelings.’

Given that Badenoch regards the current net-zero climate policy as ‘unilateral economic disarmament’, one can’t be entirely surprised by such language, even though it is depressing to imagine how someone so young managed to develop the viciously tin-eared views that you could expect from an elderly Daily Mail-reading relative.

Michael Gove has praised her ‘courage’, but you don’t have to be courageous to toss polarising chunks of red meat to the extremist Tory base. And courage without sense is actually reckless self-aggrandising bravado that we really don’t need right now.

This summer the impact of climate change is evident all over the world, from storms and heatwaves to the record depletion of Lake Mead, which feeds the Hoover Dam. All this suggests that we need to develop solutions and policy responses - now.

Yet, Badenoch wants to use the ‘cost-of-living crisis’ as a justification for rowing back from the net zero commitments we have made and still have to live up to, even as the lake dries up.

Only Tugendhat has refrained - so far - from ‘culture war’ rhetoric and shown some sign of thoughtfulness on the issue of trans rights and gender. But Tugendhat won’t win, and his cowardice on so many other issues means he doesn’t deserve to.

Like all the other contenders he supports the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, regardless of its legal ramifications or a potential trade war. Tugendhat voted to remain in the European Union, and must know how harmful it is for the British government to renege on the treaties it has signed, yet he also knows that Brexit has become the lodestone of Tory authenticity, to the point when the contenders actually had to present their Brexit credentials to Mark Francois and other contenders - another ignominious indication of how low the party has sunk.

And then there is Liz Truss - the gormless but ruthlessly ambitious star in her own TikTok universe, trying to get down with the Red Wall voters by boasting that she grew up in leafy suburban Roundhay, while also taking time out for some gratuitous anti-wokery by slagging off the teachers who supposedly spent too much time lecturing her about racism and sexism and not enough time teaching her how to read.

No one can be surprised by such behaviour. Truss - the Remainer-turned-Brexit ultra -is someone who you suspect would force her own grandmother to clean windows if she thought it could further her career. Truss is another incredible shrinking micro-stater, one of the old Britannia Unchained gang who thinks British workers are too idle. Now she wants to cut taxes from ‘day one’ - day one I tell you!

As things now stand there will be no day one or even day two for the Pork Market Queen, because the current favourites in this dismal race to the bottom are Badenoch and the South Pacific sailor girl Penny Mordaunt, who lied repeatedly about Turkey entering the EU back in 2016, while also tarring migrants and refugees with the ‘terrorism/criminal’ brush in order to drum up a few more racist/xenophobic votes.

This is the same Mordaunt who was found in Atlanta this year, describing the memoranda of understanding she had signed with a handful of American states as breakthrough trade deals, while also attempting to browbeat the US government into supporting Brexit, which she had the mindless gall to compare to the American War of Independence because…colonialism…EU empire or something.

Mordaunt, like Johnson, is not the kind of politician to allow a fact to interfere with a fantasy, and still insists that the UK did not have a veto on Turkey joining the EU, even though it did. Despite - or perhaps because of - this record of dishonesty, and her lack and intellectual shallowness, Mordaunt is apparently the Tory Party members favourite, and supposedly the contender Labour ‘fears most’.

If Labour ‘fears’ a politician for whom Mao’s concept of a paper tiger might have been invented, then it really is time to give up. But not yet, because there is a glimmer of hope in this dismal Tory carnival, though it may take some time before it becomes the light at the end of the tunnel.

Firstly, the leadership contest is revealing exactly how clueless the Tory Party is, while also opening up faultlines even in the hardline Brexit camp, to the point when even Lord Frost can accuse Mordaunt of ‘not being on top of the detail’ (you at the back, stop sniggering).

And though it may be depressing that Tory members consider the likes of Mordaunt and Badenoch to be prime ministerial material, it’s worth bearing in mind who these members are. According to Bloomberg UK, there are 175,000 grassroots Tory members - 0.4% of UK voters. Data compiled the Queen Mary University of London and the Sussex University Party Members Project suggests that 63% of Tory members are male, that their average age is in their late fifties, but four in ten are over 65.

Only six percent of members are aged 18-24. In addition most Tory members are well-off. Eight out of ten belong to the three highest economic and social groups, and nine in ten identify as White British.

In other words, this is an aging party, and according to research by James Kanagoorisam, it is an aging party that is failing to replenish itself. Financially, this doesn’t matter that much, given that the Tory Party receives 25% of its donations from only ten people. But politically it does, because it does suggest that a party which represents such a narrow demographic cannot prosper indefinitely through ‘anti-woke’ culture wars of the type the contenders now propose to inflict on us.

And beyond the Tory Party itself, there are Tory voters, whose loyalties cannot always be taken for granted. Recent bye-elections have shown that many people who once voted Tory despised Johnson, and they may not think much of the heirs who once supported him.

In addition, not all Tory voters believe in micro-states. Polling suggests they want a well-funded NHS and good public services. Last but not least, statistics suggest that the tide is turning away from the Brexit-that-cannot-speak-its-name. In other words, the great Tory election-winning machine that has dominated British politics for two hundred years may not be able to win the next election by replaying the same stale tropes on display this week.

That may be the only way the Tory Thing is finally defeated.

It remains to be seen whether these voters turn away from this visionless embarrassment of chancers and conclude that time is up, not only for the greatest chancer of the lot, but for those who now think - for no obvious reason - that they can do better than the man they brought down.