Dave Murray, Essex Socialist Party
In the olden days, Tory leaders emerged from a procedure that involved only the grandest of the party’s grandees. Like the Catholic church of old, the Tory Party was an organisation with a membership of millions whose rituals were conducted in a language that was not understood by most of it, and which was ruled by people of higher social rank – something that many of those members found a perverse comfort in.
This is no longer the case; the Conservative Party membership now expects to be spoken to in its own language, to elect its own leader and numbers tens of thousands rather than millions – 147,000 voted in the 2022 leadership contest, and (sorry if this is a little morbid), given the age profile of this group, there will be far fewer of them this time around. The Conservative Party of today is less like the Catholic Church than a weird, inverted version of the Miss World organisation.
In the Tory equivalent of the bathing suit round of the competition, the 121 Tory MPs, survivors of the 2024 mass extinction event, narrowed the choice down to two from a field of six, in a series of elimination votes. It speaks to the character of the party’s upper echelon that the last to be eliminated is said to have hit on the strategy of asking his supporters in parliament to vote for candidates other than himself. The fact that this candidate is called Mr Cleverly, does make you wonder if, as some conspiracists say, we are actually living in a super-sophisticated computer game.
Bear with me here – the lead character in videogame Grand Theft Auto V, Trevor Phillips, is said by its author to be “purely driven by desire and resentment.” This chimes with what people who’ve worked with final two candidate Kemi Badenoch say about her. During the course of her leadership campaign, she has pined for a time when women had fewer rights, but more babies, asserted that British culture is superior to other cultures and maintains that people with an autism diagnosis have an unfair advantage in life.
Robert Jenrick, the other contestant, famously insisted that murals of cartoon characters at a detention centre for refugee children be painted out, called for the immediate arrest of people making the Muslim declaration of faith in public and was involved, as housing minister, in a story that involved a large political donation, a disreputable billionaire and an unlawful decision to grant planning permission. As ex-Tory peer Baroness Warsi commented: “He is such a tool”.
The Conservative Party has always been like a criminal enterprise, it’s just that once they were the party of grand larceny, or “The Empire”. Until recently, the most successful capitalist party in the world. It should be no surprise that in the absence of empire it is now a party of petty con artists and political grifters. The pity is that whoever wins, the current alternatives, both in and out of government, are also tools. Let’s change that.
