Red, dead, redemption?

This week: everything that worries me about the upcoming Labour landslide. Also: an animal that doesn’t throw its young; and a map of where Europe’s rail network won’t go.

“I think we are witnessing one of the biggest ever failures of our news media,” bemoaned long-standing Tory big mouth Tim Montgomerie on Monday. “Labour is about to win the biggest parliamentary majority of modern times and at least half of scrutiny is STILL focused on the defeated Conservatives.”

My first thought upon reading this was: have you ever heard of Brexit? My second thought about reading this was: have you ever heard of Boris Johnson? My third thought upon reading thi- Well, you get the point. There has been no shortage of people, policies and things which have gone upsettingly under-scrutinised by our news media these last fourteen years. That is one reason – there is no shortage of others – we all find ourselves in this mess. 

Montie has also, I think, misunderstood the dynamics at play here. Yes, it does seem likely that Labour is about to sweep to a massive majority with limited discussion of what they’re actually going to do with it. But the Tories have only themselves to blame for this. There’s not a world in which an unprecedented press interest in policy and the mechanics of governing would make it otherwise, because this isn’t just a change election, but a punishment one – and while the British press has its flaws, many of the people inside it have as much desire to see hubris meet nemesis as anyone. (This is, of course, why I’m using this newsletter to keep a running list of Tory gaffes, of which more below.) Labour dominance of the next few years is merely an inevitable but unintended side effect of Tory misgovernment.

There is, though, the grain of a point here: we aren’t really talking about what comes next. And as much fun as I was having, before the last joule of energy left my body about three weeks into the campaign, there are reasons to think it won’t be pretty.

That’s firstly because the situation the new government will inherit is going to be pretty ugly. I’m not going to do a full list, because space is limited and I would prefer both you and I to retain some semblance of a will to live – but “Sue’s shit list”, a dossier of the six biggest and most immediate challenges an incoming government could face, compiled by Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray, gives a sense of just how broken things are: 

Image: screenshot shamelessly stolen from the Financial Times.

A new government probably won’t immediately get the blame when one of these landmines blows up three weeks in: voters are not actually idiots. But it won’t be fun to live through, and press hostility may mean the new government gets a lot less leeway than the old.

When things do start going wrong, it’s also not clear how much credit Labour will have in the bank with its own side. I’m not going to get into the specifics of the recent round of deselections, and you can’t make me: suffice it to say that some feel a lot more justifiable than others. But the enthusiasm with which they’ve been conducted speaks of a faction around Starmer, who seem to think that crushing the left is not merely an unfortunate necessity on the path to government, but a fun and exciting end in itself.¹

I am not entirely sold on this strategy, to say the least: it feels to me that the long-standing contrast between the Tory impulse to coddle its right, and the Labour desire to purge its left, is another reason the Overton window keeps shifting to the right. More than that, telling voters who should broadly be on your side to piss off – deliberately making the tent smaller, not bigger – feels like a stupid idea in a democracy. As Chaminda Jayanetti wrote for Bloomberg a few weeks ago, Labour’s support is “broad but shallow”: that won’t matter much on election day, but two years into a new government, with the polls in the doldrums and formerly safe Labour councils tumbling to the Greens, telling your own side to piss off may come to look a big shortsighted.

The third reason to worry about the new government is the one hinted at by Montgomerie: we don’t really know what Labour is planning to do. Sure, there’s a manifesto now. But in policy area after policy area – planning reform, relations with Europe, public finances, child poverty – people whose expertise I trust say it doesn’t go far enough to address the mess the party will inherit.

That may not be a problem: those same experts, or at least the ones who are broadly favourable to this incarnation of the Labour party, tend to assume that Starmer will inevitably be rather bolder in office, on the grounds that, well, he’ll have to be. He’s just keeping quiet now because he doesn’t want to scare the horses. He’s just saying it to get elected. But when the people who think you’re probably lying are your supporters, that doesn’t strike me as particularly healthy for democracy, either. 

Election day will be satisfying. The Tories deserve not just to lose but to be wiped out: as my sometime podcast colleague Rob Hutton wrote in The Critic, in one of the best pieces I’ve read this week, “The Conservatives have behaved terribly in government, and politicians, like children, need to know that their actions have consequences”. But we should not mistake that for a happy ending. Things cannot only get better.

Anyway, that’s enough of my serious face. The latest instalment of the Tory gaffe list is below; but first, quickly, some rather more personal stuff.

Something beautiful

Last weekend marked a year since I unexpectedly, ruinously, lost my beloved Agnes. For reasons I’m sure I don’t need to spell out, I’ve not yet had the strength to write about her², as opposed to the pain of losing her. But her wonderful friend – my wonderful friend – Sarah Duggers has done a glorious job. You should read that instead. 

Something commercial

Always nice to see praise for 47 Borders – even nicer to get some from map man Jay Foreman himself:

(No I did not pay him, you think I’m made of money?)

I was also on Monday’s Monocle Daily, talking to Andrew Mueller about the book. My bit starts at around 31.10.

If you want to find out what the big deal is – and have somehow not bought it yet, even though I do this every week, sometimes twice – then you know what to do. Goes down well with dads, too! It’s available from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops.

Something involving hubris meeting nemesis

This week’s gaffe list.

• Craig Williams, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary, became the latest previously unknown Tory MP to hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, when it emerged he was being investigated by the Gambling Commission for placing a bet on a July election before any such thing had been announced. In a classic Rishi Sunak move, he described this as “disappointing” but took no further action.

• This may or may not be why Sunak himself was too busy to attend this week’s Black & White Ball, which party funders had paid a small fortune to attend on the grounds they’d get to see the Prime Minister. (The obvious line of defence here is that Rishi is opposed to all forms of corruption, and is merely showing his donors exactly the same respect that he shows to D-Day veterans.)