How to lose a battle without really trying

Today guest post is from Tom Phillips, Jonn’s co-author on his most recent book Conspiracy. This week: Business as usual in the Tory tailspin, and a short history of battles that never really were.

Having been entrusted with the stewardship of Jonn’s newsletter for a week, I’m not going to mess with a winning formula. As such, I thought I might begin in a time-honoured manner: by pointing out that the Tory party is going to lose the next election and Rishi Sunak is not very good at politics.

This is, in fairness, not quite the bold contrarian take it was a few months back , when large chunks of the press were trying to convince people of the Great Tory Comeback Narrative. Everywhere you look now, the signs are... un-great. Polls in the last week have moved out of the mere “landslide” territory they’ve occupied recently, and back towards the “extinction level event” zone. Sunak’s on track to potentially miss every one of his five pledges, which is quite an achievement given how vague and unambitious they were. A self-imposed recession seems likely, fresh tranches of mortgage-holders are getting pummelled every quarter, NHS consultants just voted for strike action, Thames Water might be about to collapse, and meanwhile the 999 service broke down across large parts of the country, which honestly feels like too clumsy a metaphor.

Sunak’s message through all of this, of course, is that it’s important to “hold our nerve”.

The problem with this is not that it’s a thuddingly tone-deaf bit of political communication. I mean, granted, that’s certainly a problem, even if it’s basically par for the course at this point. But the real issue is the lack of an answer to the obvious rejoinder: to what end? The great hope at the end of this period of pained national fortitude seems to be the promise that things will… get worse more slowly?

There are several barriers to them finding an answer to this question. The parliamentary party is barely a workable coalition at all at this point: unsurprising, as it was moulded in the image of a leader whose main asset was his ability to cheerfully say contradictory things to different audiences, and whose key pledge at the last election was that we could all stop talking about his government’s signature achievement. Many MPs are simply quitting, while others have been sent away from Westminster, “urged by the party machine to mail out hyperlocal, single-issue leaflets”, presumably in the hope of fooling people into thinking they’re Lib Dems. Return to your constituencies and prepare to point at pot-holes.

The upshot of this – alongside the government’s agenda now largely consisting of announcing they’re no longer going to do stuff they said they were going to do – is a message vacuum that the increasingly unhelpful right-wing ecosystem is happy to fill with weird alienating paranoid nonsense. As they cast around for people to blame for our woes that aren’t “the party who’ve been in power for over a decade”, ever larger sections of the country get added to The Blob: entire professions, whole cities and regions, age groups, modes of transport… It feels like we can’t be far away from someone adding “snowflake homeowners” to the ranks of the anti-Tory coalition. The impression we’re left with is most of the British public being scolded for letting the Conservative Party down. Which I’m not entirely sure is a winning strategy…

The really depressing thing is that we’ve probably got another sixteen months or so of this before there’s an actual election. The faint hope that the Tories might decide to go early seems, well, increasingly faint: of course they’re going hang on as long as possible in the hope that Keir Starmer punches a child on national TV or something. But it’s hard not to wish that they’d just bite the bullet, and put themselves out of our misery.

Battles that never really were

Don Fernando Girón y Ponce de León directs the defense of Cadiz against the attack of the English fleet under Sir Edward Cecil by Francisco de Zurbarán. Image: Wikipedia/Public Domain Galería online, Museo del Prado.

I’m sure many of us spent the weekend glued to unfolding reports from Russia, as the Wagner Group explored the previously overlooked grey area between ‘putsch’ and ‘daytrip’ – an attempted ultranationalist power-grab in a nuclear state, conducted with the energy of an angry dad turning the car round two miles short of Alton Towers. (“If I hear another peep out of either one of you, the insurrection is OVER.”)

My experience of looking at my phone for most of Saturday was lent an extra frisson by the fact that this year’s Armed Forces Day events were centred on Falmouth, which happens to be where I live. Reading about a coup-in-progress while the streets of your town suddenly fill up with uniformed personnel and military hardware, accompanied by jets and helicopters performing ear-splitting flyovers every few minutes, is – it turns out – a faintly alarming experience.

I’ll leave the geopolitical analysis of the events in Russia to those better qualified to comment (failed crypto CEOs with blue ticks on Twitter). The coup that wasn’t does, however, provide an excuse to look at one of my favourite things: a short history of ill-advised military engagements that failed to feature many of the traditional elements of battle, such as “two sides actually fighting each other”.

The Battle of Cadiz, 1625

The newly elevated King Charles I – demonstrating the tact and judgement that would serve him so well throughout his reign – decided he wanted to go to war with Spain because they hadn’t let him marry one of their princesses. So 100 ships and 15,000 English and Dutch troops sailed into the Bay of Cádiz, intent on capturing the city and nicking the vast quantities of gold they’d shipped back from the Americas.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t thought to bring enough food and drink with them. So when the invasion force landed, the expedition’s commander decided to prioritise letting his starving troops find something to fill their bellies over more conventional military goals like capturing strategically important positions. Naturally, the troops did as Englishmen abroad tend to do: they went straight for Cádiz’s wine stocks. In short order, most of the expeditionary force had got spectacularly hammered. Realising his army was too pissed to actually do anything useful, the commander ordered a rather shame-faced retreat back to the boats. Around 1,000 troops were so drunk they couldn’t even manage that, and just stayed lounging around Cádiz until Spanish forces turned up and executed them all.