…but with a whimper

This week: the Tories are dying, and it’s less fun than I’d imagined? Also: a new way of mapping urban UK; and some anti-car propaganda from the Walt Disney Corporation.

For some years now, Times Radio has broadcast a long-running politics quiz called “Can You Get To Number 10?” A better question in 2025 might be, “Would you actually want to?” Less than 18 months into his term, Keir Starmer has rarely seemed excited by the possibilities of the office, and frequently annoyed by the realities of it, in a manner unnervingly reminiscent of his immediate predecessor: it seems at least possible that he could one day decide he’s had it and pull the plug.¹

Those Labour politicians keenest to replace him are also, strikingly, the furthest away – because they’ve been recently forced to step down, or because they’re vastly more popular with the press than the members, or because they are inconveniently busy being mayor of Greater Manchester and are not in fact an MP. Even Nigel Farage has been described² as “resigned” to the fact he is going to be Prime Minister – with the implication that, thin-skinned authoritarian egomaniac though he is, he’s also bright enough to understand that actually governing this mess will be a lot less fun than making furious speeches about it.³

All of which makes it seem desperately unfair that one person who really, really does want to be Prime Minister has about as much chance of achieving it as I do.

This week has not just seen Kemi Badenoch’s first conference as Tory leader: it’s entirely possible it’s also seen her last. A Sky News/YouGov poll published Monday found that, just 11 months into her leadership, fully half of Tory members want her gone before the next election; Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, described her as the “right person to be leading our party”, on the grounds, one presumes, that no one else would be doing quite such a good job at keeping the seat warm for him. (The same poll found him ahead with the members, 46 to 39, which is awful, given his main contribution to the discourse this week included the genuinely disgusting phrase “didn’t see another white face”.)

Kemi can take some limited comfort, perhaps, from the fact that her leadership is hardly the only existential threat to the Conservative Party. Where the left care about purity, the right care about power – they’ll forgive almost anything if they’re following a winner – so the echoing emptiness of the conference halls in Manchester tells its own story. Footage shows near empty auditoriums, fringe panels at risk of outnumbering audiences, normally bustling bars standing empty; the exhibition hall, meanwhile, has areas blocked off in a doomed attempt to disguise the lack of exhibitors. The best that can be said for the Tories this week is that I wasn’t quite right with my prediction that they’d see a stream of high profile defections to Reform – but I was right in my prediction of timing, because on Tuesday 20 councillors made the jump. The Tories are now a party to which no one shows up.

A change of leadership might help, through reversion to the mean alone: it can hardly make things any worse. But it’s still not clear what the Tory party is now for when Reform is doing nativism for slightly racist pensioners, without 14 years of terrible economic mismanagement as a handicap. There logically should be a gap for a sane centre-right party, for affluent voters who don’t like voting Labour or paying tax but aren’t wild about incipient fascism either. Yet nothing coming out of this week’s conference suggests the Tory party has any interest in occupying that space. They claim to be fiscal realists, because they talk about yet more cuts. They don’t acknowledge how there are simply no cuts left to make, or that the true source of fiscal pressure is not government waste, but an ageing population and the yawning gap between what the electorate expects and what it is willing to pay.⁴

The promise to create a £1.6bn “removals force” to deport 150,000 illegal migrants a year sum up the party’s many problems in one horrible package. It’s obviously appalling to watch masked thugs from US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) kidnapping people from their families on the ground they look a bit foreign and to think, “Ooh, we could do that”. It’s risky, too, because the odds of that agency not doing something so bad that you won’t want to be associated with it seem so slim as to be effectively nil. It’s also incoherent, because it means blowing £1.6bn on expanding the size of the state in search of a flattering headline, all the while claiming to be the party of fiscal rectitude.

And with the best will in the world, the people most likely to be impressed by such a policy are unlikely to vote for Kemi Badenoch for PM anyway. It’s a mark of her political genius that she’s come up with a policy that isn’t just horrible, but which would make vastly more sense coming from the biggest threat to her leadership.

“Can Kemi get to Number 10?” is a question with so obvious an answer that no one is even bothering to ask it any more: the only time I’ve heard her name this week from someone outside the Westminster bubble came when a friend asked why no one had put her out of her misery. The way things stand, though, it seems entirely plausible that none of her colleagues will ever reach Downing Street, either.

Having seen the alternative for a right-wing force in British politics, I am less convinced than I once was that this is an entirely positive development.

Event, Dear Boy, Event

Hey, check this out:

At time of writing we have literally no idea what we are going to talk about. But if you’re in the Falmouth area in 12 days time, why not come along?

Also, if you’ve been wondering what the big deal is with that 47 Borders book that everyone keeps going on about – worried that all your cooler friends keep muttering that you haven’t read it yet – then it is currently available for just 99p on Kindle or Kobo. Bargain.

Non Public Information Film of the Week

An email, from Paul Smith, concerning one of my recent themes, and some [checks notes] anti-car propaganda courtesy of the Walt Disney Corporation:

“Not strictly a public information film, but as that’s what you’re mostly writing about these days (and I’m very much enjoying it), I thought you might like this Disney short from 1950, Goofy’s Motor Mania. Goofy is Mr Walker, a gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly – but when he gets in his car, he turns into angry Mr Wheeler. I hope you enjoy it.”

I did. The voices, like the sort of Disney characters you see painted on the side of ice cream vans, feel ever so slightly off: the voice of Goofy, indeed, sounds so unlike him that I went back and checked the cast list, only to discover he is here being voiced by Bob Jackman who was primarily an accountant. Despite that, though, this is brilliant: it’s basically Jekyll & Hyde, repurposed as anti-motorhead propaganda.