Kemi Badenoch should now defect to Nigel Farage‘s Reform Party. She might as well get it over with, and it would be a neat revenge. On what grounds can they refuse her, given the way she has become more and more Faragist since taking over the job?
If Robert Jenrick is welcome there, they can hardly say that Mrs Badenoch is politically unacceptable.
This could be an opportunity for a general reshuffle of everyone. Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson could then, as part of his endless efforts to avoid publicity, defect from the Tories to the Liberal Democrats. They are probably closer to his actual opinions than the Tories have ever been.
Sir John Major and Michael Heseltine could join him there, along with Theresa May. And Ed Miliband could slip across to the Tories, who did so much to pursue his mad green agenda that he really owes it to them.
In fact, if we had a thorough realignment of our whole political system, in which all MPs and Lords were totally free to go where they most fitted in, there really is no limit to what might happen. Many of them are so interchangeable that there really is no way of telling where they would fetch up.
I would personally enjoy the emergence of a small Marxist Party, containing Sir Anthony Blair, Sir Keir Starmer and Lord Mandelson. All of them have Marxist pasts which they have done little to repudiate. They could refuse to admit Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott on the grounds that they are too Right-wing (for in fact both of them are far to the right of New Labour, and always have been).
While all this would amuse the nation, would it serve any serious purpose? I would say that it would, in that it would help explain to voters just how little serious difference there now is between and among the major parties.
Even Mr Farage, as he slides closer and closer to office, is beginning to wonder what he will actually be able to promise at the next election.
Robert Jenrick’s defection could be an opportunity for a general reshuffle of everyone, writes PETER HITCHENS, such as Boris Johnson to the Lib Dems or Ed Miliband to the Tories…
He knows he cannot stop the boats. He knows he cannot easily get spending under control, as Reform’s capture of local authority seats has shown that this is very hard to do.
He is far too bright not to realise that promising too much on these or any other topics will sink him very quickly. As Sir Keir Starmer has shown, even a government with a huge majority can become wildly unpopular and terrifyingly weak in a very short time.
You may be hoping that I will now offer a better alternative. Alas, I cannot. This mess is the direct result of David Cameron’s takeover of the Tory Party in 2005. This was in fact a palace putsch organised largely by PR men and liberal journalists, especially BBC types. Its aim was to force the Tory Party to accept the ultra-radical Blair revolution of 1997, which Cameron did. The last chance to stop it was in 2010, when conservative patriots could have refused to vote for Cameron’s Blairite Tory Party.
Fascinatingly, at that election, the Blairites – especially the big fundraisers – were scornfully deserting poor old Gordon Brown. He was, as is increasingly obvious, well to the right of Cameron.
I often wonder what would have happened to this country if Mr Brown had hung on to Downing Street in 2010 and slippery David Cameron had flopped, so causing Tory voters to dump him and rediscover conservatism.
I can’t help thinking we would be better off in many ways. As it is, I have defected into internal exile.
The strangest country I’ve seen? My own
It IS 25 years now since I joined The Mail on Sunday, a quarter of a century in which I visited many countries most people would wisely choose not to go to, from North Korea, Venezuela and Iran to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But the strangest country I have visited in this time is my own, which has in the last quarter of a century undergone a revolution as great as the ones which swept France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.
We are not the same people, our towns and countryside are not as they were, we do not even speak the same language.
The second plane hijacked by Al-Qaeda flies into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001
We are all extraordinarily free to do what we like in bed but we are not free to speak our minds, and over all still glowers the ghastly image of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the signal and pretext for a new era of state power at home and war abroad, from which we cannot escape.
The Cold War world I grew up in was, by comparison, open and full of light and freedom. Now I see a future of darkness, war, surveillance and closed minds.
Do a Trump and seize our trains, Macron
If you want to travel on the pitiful trains which have the nerve to use the honoured title ‘Great Western’, please be kind to the poor staff who must daily try to explain this vastly expensive privatised flop.
You need your sense of humour turned up to maximum to cope with the endless excuses, especially for the failure to provide trains with enough seats.
But on Thursday night there was a rare moment of joy amid the delays, hard seats, excuses and dreary overcrowding.
Our ‘train manager’ spoke French as well as English and was able to list our stops in both languages (‘Worcester Shrub Hill’ is pretty hard to say in French).
I wondered for a moment if President Macron had suffered a Trumpian moment and seized Herefordshire. But not so far. I wouldn’t at all mind if French (or better still Belgian) railways would seize our trains.
