This is a message to all my beloved fellow Conservatives – and in particular any other Tory defectors. I mean Tory MPs who even now are being groomed by the Russia-loving agents of the other side.
You know the party I am talking about: the one whose leader has repeatedly blamed Nato for Putin’s murderous attack on Ukraine. The one whose Welsh party leader, Nathan Gill, turned out to have been actually bribed by Russia – to the tune of at least £40,000 – to spew pro-Putin propaganda.
It seems incredible that any Conservative should want to join this party but, if reports are to be believed, there are more defections to come.
We had the equivalent of Burgess and Maclean over this past week. But is there still a Philby among the ranks of Tory MPs? Is there a Blunt?
Some say that there are at least five more. Well, we don’t know who you are; but whoever you are, you are on the terrible secret itinerary of treachery.
You have sat next to your handler on the bench in Regent’s Park, talking out of the corner of your mouths. You have been to the basement flat in Bayswater, and you have been offered the vodka and the little bits of smoked salmon on brown bread.
Former Tory MP and justice spokesman Robert Jenrick after defecting to Reform UK, pictured with leader Nigel Farage on Thursday
Together with your case officers you have already discussed the crowded, shouting press conference, the one that will celebrate your heroic defection. Comrade Secretary General Farageski himself will hail your arrival!
With fingers as trembling and nicotine-stained as Brezhnev himself, he will pin the Order of Lenin on your lapel. It can’t quite be confirmed, but you get the distinct impression that you will have a place in the Politburo. It may be the economic brief.
Or has that already been promised to another defector? Hmm. Never mind. Whatever it is will be better than nothing.
You are thinking: prestige! Power! Range Rovers! So, you are drafting and re-drafting your statement in which – by agreement with your new masters – you will ladle scorn and vitriol on the Conservative Party, and everything that you tried to do in government.
You’re psyching yourself up to tell your wife, before making the midnight dash for Moscow; and so now – before it is too late – I urge you very sincerely to drop it. Can the whole thing before you make a total chump of yourself.
I am speaking entirely in your interest.
You may have persuaded yourself that you are actuated by the highest principle – but I am afraid that is not how the public see it. They are getting a bit fed up with the whole thing. As far as the average voter is concerned, this defection business is all a load of narcissistic does-my-bum-look-big-in-this careerism.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is doing well and has handled the splitters well. She deserves maximum support
They don’t care what Tories think of their colleagues, or ex-colleagues. They care less and less about the scathing attacks that Tories mount on each other – about the alleged failings (in my view greatly exaggerated) of a party that has now been out of office for more than 18 months. They think it’s all a bit tedious and irrelevant.
The voters are keen students of the constitution, and they think the job of the Tory Party in Parliament is to do everything in its power to hold Starmer to account. They don’t want His Majesty’s Opposition to talk about themselves, not for a nanosecond.
They want to hear about how they are going to protect them, the public, from the worst government of modern times. Look at the state of things.
There is a reason Keir Starmer has the lowest satisfaction ratings of any PM since 1977 – and that is because there has been no one so impotent or incompetent since the last days of Jim Callaghan.
Whatever he may personally think, he is the prisoner of Left-wing dogma of a kind the public think is nuts. They don’t think people should be locked up for instantly deleted tweets, while tens of thousands of criminals are let out of jail free – with 60 per cent recalled to jail for breaking the terms of their release and some even committing murder.
They don’t want their local council wasting their money on a new set of bizarre gender-neutral pronouns – ze, zir, and zem. No, I don’t know what they mean either; sounds like pidgin French; but Labour says that’s how some people want to be known, and that local government must comply.
Labour’s deranged Lefty ideology is now really starting to hurt the country – not just the farmers and the pubs and the private schools, but the entire economy. Since Rachel Reeves’ catastrophic opening budget there have been 84,000 jobs lost in the hospitality sector and about another 45,000 in retail.
Those are big numbers. It is the fastest jump in unemployment – outside a global pandemic – for a very long time. Be in no doubt that this is a Labour-generated disaster. When I left office in 2022, unemployment was at a 50-year low, and youth unemployment at a 45-year low.
They suspect that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is too politically feeble to hold down spending
The overall jobless rate is now north of 5 per cent; and with every job Reeves has killed, she has of course cost herself tax revenue. By unnecessarily raising payroll taxes in 2024, she clobbered growth – the construction industry is still flatlining, for instance – and weakened her own fiscal position.
In response, she has totally failed to do the obvious thing – and cut wasteful government spending. The truly incredible thing about the Reeves-Starmer duo is how they contrive to be so unpopular, while at the same time chickening out of so many supposedly unpopular measures. They didn’t reform disability benefits. They didn’t reduce cold weather payments – and that’s the problem: the markets have seen that weakness. They suspect that Starmer is too politically feeble to hold down spending.
So, they demand other evidence of fiscal responsibility – and that is one of the reasons taxes are now at the highest level in modern times – about 37 per cent of GDP. Our stagnant economy and crippling taxes are both thanks to the sheer blithering Lefty ineptitude of the Labour Government.
I travel a lot and suspect that some readers do not quite appreciate the damage Labour is doing to the UK reputation abroad. As a proud Brit, I feel strongly that some of the criticism is unfair – especially the attacks on London, which is now presented in America as an Islamist warzone.
But there is no doubt that under Starmer this potentially amazing economy is starting to exude the halitotic smell of uncollected garbage. It is the smell of socialism.
Britain isn’t broken – I never liked that phrase, even when Dave Cameron started to use it in Opposition in 2009. This is a great, great country, and basically unbreakable.
The thing that is broken is Starmer’s government. This country is already crying out for a strong, patriotic, centre-Right government able to put Britain back on its feet – and since that will mean cutting wasteful welfare and standing up to Russia, among other things, that party must be the Conservatives.
Kemi Badenoch is doing well and has handled the splitters well. She deserves maximum support.
As for the rest of us, we need to get a grip, stop talking about ourselves, and start slotting Labour in the slats. That’s what the public want to see.
