Friday, 7 Aug 2020

It doesn’t matter who wins the Tory leadership race

What a refreshing change Rory Stewart makes to the Tory leadership race!

It's so nice to have a Tory whose voting record and policies are deeply unpleasant and easily-argued with, rather than the toddlerish twatstorm of lunatic no-hopers with no ideas and no table manners that we've suffered for the past 3 years.

It would be reason to hope that there are still some intelligent grown-ups in Westminster, if only this particular one were not rapidly approaching the Partridge-Blair nexus that will tip him into messianic madness.

Rory has begun making semi-mystic declarations, such as that he has personally planted a forest no-one can see, and speaking in convoluted fashion about "this great prophet who's going to lead you to the uplands but this prophet is not a real prophet, it is a prophet of negativity, it is a prophet of the no". Pass the pipe, Rory, you've had enough.

More worryingly, he says he reads The Gruffalo every night but appears not to have understood it. What hope for the Withdrawal Agreement, if a mouse outwitting its predators is a bit beyond his ken?

It barely matters, of course. No matter who wins, whoever sups from the next Prime Minister's cyanide-laced chalice will have turned to dust by Christmas.

Imagine if Rory were to be PM. Once he'd agonised over the kill letters to our nuclear submarine commanders, he'd be confronted with a Conservative Party evenly divided between those determined to rapidly smash the economy to pieces for ideological reasons, taking the BBC and NHS with it, and those who want to "protect business" and destroy things more slowly with a careful, planned, agreed withdrawal from the biggest market on Earth.

He's still got the Northern Irish border to contend with, a need for one part of our country to have a customs union and freedom of movement across an invisible and unchecked border, and the rest of it to have none of the sort.

And he's still unable to treat any one of our 4 nations differently to the other 3, still has a hung and bolshy Parliament to battle, and an EU which says "there's your deal, now show us your unicorns".

Rory may be a former member of the Labour Party, an international diplomat in the cloak-and-dagger department, and have once promised to resign if he couldn't fix the prisons. But even a Leftie James Bond who's located a moral compass can't control an uncontrollable border, or unite a party with half the guests on crack and the other half on downers.

And what if the PM was Boris? Same problems, compounded by the fact they'd be tackled by a randy rugger-bugger who never reads his briefs, never says the right thing, and never tells the truth when he could tell you an inverted pyramid of piffle instead.

The fact Boris thinks it's his turn is no reason to give him it. The fact the 160,000 Tories will probably do so, despite having clear proof that he doesn't have character flaws so much as a San Andreas fault of the soul, just goes to show how desperate the party's position is.

It demanded a referendum. It demanded Brexit. It demanded a deal.

It rejected the deal, its MPs have rejected most of the Brexits they were offered, and asking Britain to vote again in 2017 only removed ability to deliver even the bodge which is simultaneously the best they could hope for and the thing they hate most.

It doesn't matter a damn whether the next Tory leader is Sajid, Dominic, Andrea, Esther, Gove, or that guy no-one knows. They've got the same irreconcilable quandary, the same Parliamentary arithmetic, and the same voting population whose opinion has been Remain for two solid years so far and is just waiting for the chance to tell them so.

Raab could win and prorogue Parliament. He'd face a vote of no confidence and be out on his ear the moment he reopened it.

Boris could win and force a No Deal Brexit. He'd face a vote of no confidence and lose itwithin days of the first empty supermarket shelves, queues at Dover, and missing NHS prescriptions.

Gove could delay Brexit for a better deal. He won't get one, and his party would strip him for parts. There'd be a vote of no confidence and off he goes to rehab.

What the Tory Party cannot admit is this: its most successful leader of modern times consigned it to the slaughterhouse. Its next leader removed its ability to legislate. And its members' unreasonable idea of what Brexit should look like is exactly why they won't get it.

Some fool will be PM, but they can never win. The Tories can't deliver, fix or beat Brexit. They can't win a general election either, and the fact that the Labour Party currently couldn't win a raffle is the only reason the most hidebound Parliament in living memory hasn't been forced to reboot.

It is not Conservative policies or ideas which have shoved the party into a spiral of self-harm. It is not a resurgent Labour, and nor is it something you can blame the EU for.

It's Brexit. It's the very concept of doing something half of us don't want, none of us can resolve and which cannot be done without irreparable harm. Despite the fact it's killing them, the Tories still want it. They will only realise where they chose poorly when they lose power – and whichever PM they choose, that'll be before Christmas.

The best we can hope for is that they give the job to the person who most deserves to be made the figurehead for this unmitigated disaster, and whose screaming evaporation into the political netherworld will be cheered wildly by the audience.

Boris for PM. Please.

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