A day on from the latest leadership ballot and still no one in the Tory party can quite work out how Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick made it through to the last two. So what chance do the rest of us have? All we can do is applaud them for their comic timing.
In one corner we have KemiKaze. A woman who is actively dangerous. And in the other we have an overgrown schoolboy who is dangerously stupid. Honest Bob makes Jimmy Dimly look like an intellectual giant.
Far be it from me to interrupt the Tory party as it turns farce into annihilation. Already some Tory MPs are wandering around Westminster looking ashen faced. Shell-shocked. Unable to comprehend what they have collectively done. You can find them begging to turn back time, so that they can have a second chance to make things better. To do something relatively sane for the first time in ages.
Yet their pleas go unheard. Reality cannot be reverse-engineered. They had their opportunity to vote for a man whose main pitch to the party was that he was a bit more normal than the others and they laughed in James Cleverly’s face. He could shove his reasonableness where the sun don’t shine.
They were rushing on their run and there would be no sleep until existential futility had been achieved. They guessed but they just don’t know. All they have done is to ensure the Tories remain a political irrelevance for the next two years. Until they elect a new leader. And even then there is no guarantee they won’t make the same mistake all over again. Remember Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.
The cock-up theory of history is the preferred explanation among the small clique of the Conservative thinking class. That what they have always liked to believe is the “most sophisticated electorate in the world” (TM) had a collective brain-fart. Got too clever for its own good in trying to manipulate the result, so that their preferred candidate would be left to slug it out against the weakest opponent. Given that Grant Shapps was running Jimmy Dimly’s campaign, this can’t be entirely ruled out. The Shappster doesn’t exactly have a great track record for delivery.
There again, sometimes you have to take things at face value. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s probably a duck. So the reason the Tory MPs did something seemingly deranged is because they are deranged. The message they have taken from their July electoral humiliation is that what the country really wants is even more of the stuff that made them so unpopular in the first place. It’s not the Tories that need to change, it’s the voters.
This seems to be very much the message that Honest Bob wanted to drive home at his central London speech on Thursday. He was adamant there had been no bungled horse-trading of votes. Every Tory MP had voted for the candidate they thought best suited to becoming the next party leader. And he and Kemi were deservedly the two frontrunners. The two with their fingers on the insanity pulse of the party. It won’t be long before Conservative MPs are asked to take an IQ test before being allowed to stand for selection.
You can generally get a good idea of a leadership hopeful from the company they keep. Safe to say that Mark Francois, Edward Leigh and Danny Kruger – three middle-aged men not overly blessed in the synaptic department – were in the audience for Honest Bob’s latest contribution to inanity. They weren’t to be disappointed. Because he is one of the least convincing and uninspiring speakers you could hope to hear. He looks like a desperately needy 15-year-old schoolboy. He acts and sounds much younger. If Honest Bob is the answer to the country’s problems then we are all hopelessly screwed.
“It’s great to be here,” he began. Speak for yourself, Bob. Speak for yourself. Most of us were there under duress. He then treated us to five minutes on the chaotic failure of the Labour government. And you then had to wonder if Honest Bob was actually psychiatrically unwell and had been in a fugue state ever since he was elected to parliament as a soaking wet remainer Cameroon in 2014. Because he seemed to be under the impression that Labour had been in power for the last 14 years. He’s going to have a hell of a shock when he comes out of his K-Hole and realises Keir Starmer hasn’t had much chance yet to do anything to reverse his own party’s decline.
But Honest Bob finds delusion to be a comforting safe space. It’s where he likes to go to talk to himself. To imagine he’s got something worth saying. For the next five minutes, he lapsed into a Faragist rant about foreigners. There were too many of them. We needed to leave the ECHR. Even KemiKaze does her best not to sound that mad. One day he will realise that chasing Reform votes will lose him the support of the centre of the party. But not yet.
Still, all that was positively coherent compared with what followed. He was going to grow the economy. But how he was going to do that was so secret that he couldn’t possibly tell us. Even he hadn’t been told by his operator. But he definitely wasn’t going to borrow billions and he was keen to cut taxation. It was all nonsense. He was reading the words in deathless phrases from the autocue but he couldn’t even connect with himself. A single cell being has more charisma, more style than Honest Bob. It was painful to watch him struggle. The longer he spoke, the more he haemorrhaged support.
“There will be no more platitudes,” he said. A little self-knowledge would be a help. He was going to shrink the NHS because too many people were being treated for nothing. “It’s time to get serious.”
He might well be right. But as long as Honest Bob and KemiKaze are the only choices, the Tories will remain a joke.
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Taking the Lead by John Crace is published by Little, Brown (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live.
