You've Never Had it So Bad
The Fall of the House of Tory
In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the anonymous narrator of the grieving widow Roderick Usher is invited to spend time with his old school friend at the Usher family home. It being an Edgar Allan Poe story, the visit doesn’t go well: Usher’s twin sister is showing signs of catalepsy; Usher himself has fallen victim to some mysterious neurotic wasting disease that makes any sound or light or colour unbearable.
Even the ancestral home has slipped into ennui and morbid paralysis. Approaching it, ‘through a singularly dreary tract of country,’ the narrator feels ‘an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.’
Many of us will have experienced similar sensations with regard to the Conservative Party and the twelve years of calamitous misgovernance that the party has inflicted on the nation. But now Tories themselves appear to have been afflicted with the ‘air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom’ that surrounded the House of Usher.
It’s true that not all of them are gloomy. This week Matt Hancock, looking sprightly from a diet of camel’s penis and sheep’s vagina, resigned before his local constituency party could sack him. With his weird combination of banality and slippery amorality, Hancock is a more disturbing figure than anything Poe came up with, and his claim to have discovered ‘a whole new world of possibilities’, that will enable him to find ‘new ways to reach people’ outside politics is as dishonest as you would expect.
Hancock’s resignation letter would be as worthless and meaningless as the man who wrote it, except that it follows a string of similar announcements from Tory MPs. Dehenna Davison, William Wragg, Sajid Javid, Chloe Smith, Crispin Blunt, Charles Walker - all these MPs have announced they will not be standing at the next election, and regardless of what they say about their need to spend time with their families, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that, like Hancock, they are leaving before they are pushed.
Other MPs have been courting their constituents with renewed vigour in an attempt to prevent this outcome. Liz Truss - the political equivalent of Roderick Usher’s cataleptic sibling - no longer posts Instagram photos showing her staring into the face of destiny or wearing pussycat bows.
Now she is back in Norfolk - humble, honest Liz in humble, honest Norfolk - campaigning for a local hospital as she tries to reassemble the still-smoking ruins of her political career. Steve ‘Hard Man’ Baker, Simon Clarke, and Boris Johnson have all made the same pilgrimages back to the constituents who polls suggest are already turning away from them.
Some of them were found on ‘small business day’ last Saturday expressing support for the small businesses they have so comprehensively undermined and ignored these last seven years. Rear-Admiral Penny Mordaunt took a different tack, rocking up in Portsmouth to boast about opening three new ‘food pantries’ - a popular Tory hobby that always comes with a photograph and never seems to address the issue of why more than two million people now rely on food banks after twelve years of Tory governments, in one of the richest countries in the world.
None of this seems able to lift the funereal gloom amongst the rank and file. In parliament, Tory MPs sit, like Roderick Usher, ‘gazing upon vacancy for long hours in an attitude of the profoundest attention’, unmoved by the attempts of their ineffectual leader to rouse them from their torpor.
Beyond Westminster, Tory members are deserting the party in droves, while Farage and Tice - the Burke and Hare of post-Brexit politics - scour the country warning of migrant invasions and ‘climate lockdowns’ and dreaming of outflanking the ‘Consocialists’ from the right.
Farage and Tice may be getting above themselves, but the polls point again and again to a Tory wipeout in the next election. Some pundits predict that the ‘most successful party in the Western world’ will be out of power for at least ten years, while changing demographics suggest that the party’s traditional bases of support amongst well-off, middle class southerners will no longer be enough to bring it back to power for even longer.
Regardless of what reservations we may have about their successors, this is a prospect that can only be welcomed by the millions of us who never voted Tory, and the growing numbers of people who did but now wish they hadn’t. Because rarely has political annihilation been so necessary or so richly deserved. And never has a political party so comprehensively unravelled itself.
Only three years ago, a smirking Boris Johnson held up a pint in Tony Blair’s Sedgefield seat and promised a ‘One Nation Conservative government…a people’s government.’ Now the man who promised to ‘get Brexit done’ has gone, and Brexit has turned to dust in his hands and brought his party to the brink of destruction.
Brexit was always incompatible with the notion of a ‘One Nation’ Conservative government. Having driven the more intelligent and moderate critical voices out of the party, Johnson led a parliamentary cohort that owed its allegiance only to him, until his behaviour made such allegiance detrimental to its own political interests. When Johnson’s MPs turned against him, the party lurched even further to the right and further away from One Nation Conservatism with the Truss/Kwarteng mini-budget.
When that fantasy burst, nearly taking the economy with it, some of the same MPs who had once voted against Johnson and voted for Truss, began calling for Johnson to return. Instead they got the Sunak/Hunt tandem, whose impact on Tory political fortunes has so far been zero.
Throughout this calamitous tale of ideological zigzags and policy U-turns, and downright fantasy, the Tory Party has attacked or abandoned nearly all the ideas and institutions it once claimed to stand for. The Union, business, farmers, the church, the national interest, fiscal rectitude and responsibility - all these traditional hallmarks of Toryism have been discarded, to the point when not even Tories seem to know any longer who or what they represent and what their party stands for.
This poverty of ideas is also reflected in the quality of the politicians who represent them - a dismal procession of chancers, opportunists, ideologues, abject loyalists, charlatans and incompetents who seem to have no allegiance to anything except themselves, or to the parasitical hangers-on who see the Tory Party as a conduit to peerages and contracts.
No wonder so many Tory MPs look stony-faced. Most of them seem to have no idea what they want, and those who do have no idea how to get it. In their headlong pursuit of Brexit-at-all-costs, they have dishonoured themselves and inflicted immeasurable harm on the country they claim to love.
Beyond draconian and increasingly fascistic proposals to ‘stop the boats’, rhetorical assaults on ‘wokedom’, or absurd attempts to blame Labour for our ongoing ‘winter of discontent’, they seem to have no coherent arguments about anything at all.
These MPs are the architects of Brexit and the beneficiaries of Brexit; too cowardly and self-interested to acknowledge the almost daily evidence of the negative impact of Brexit, let alone think their way out of the calamity they are responsible for.
No wonder their party is crumbling, and its representatives sit staring into oblivion. Like Poe’s anonymous narrator they can feel the ‘fierce breath of the whirlwind’ as the rotten building that they built collapses around them.
And the rest of us can also see it, as we limp on through this bleak winter. And no matter what comes next, we can only look forward to the election that will finally bring the House of Tory down, when we take our cue from Margaret Thatcher and shout ‘Rejoice, rejoice.’
Whoops! Even worse…Thanks. Corrected.
In my opinion a fair analysis