Another week of rock-bottom moments for the drama-addicted Conservative party, who continue to insist to concerned friends and enemies alike that they’re completely fine, are more fun when they do this, and can stop whenever they want.
This week’s ignored wake-up calls include the UK being told “there are limits” by Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president whose limits his critics have found it fatal to cross. Stay with this, but Paul reminds me a lot of those movie stars who say they’d do the acting part for free, but the multimillion-dollar salaries are the price for promotional tours and the loss of privacy. Kagame seems to be on the point of regarding the £240m the UK government has given him so far as nowhere near enough for being asked about their stupid bloody thing every five minutes. He could be literally days from describing it all as “a gilded cage”.
Other ignored attempts at an intervention on the Conservatives included a poll suggesting landslide defeat, which several analysts thought was on the optimistic side for the Tories, who some feel could be headed for places like “oblivion” and “the place the Lib Dems currently sit”. Informed by their election strategist that divided parties fail, two deputy chairmen promptly resigned and joined a rebel wrecking crew.
Presiding over episode 987 of the chaos is Rishi Sunak, who is even less watchable as Uncle Scar than he was as Simba. On Thursday he pre-emptively scapegoated the House of Lords for the predestined failure of the Rwanda policy. Or as he put it: the upper chamber needs to hurry up already and “do the right thing”, because this is “the will of the people”. The will of the people? It’s not even the will of the parliamentary Conservative party, as we’ve established after two years of increasingly unpleasant ructions over the issue, culminating in this week’s resignations and rebellion. Hilariously, Sunak insists anyone failing to get behind all this just wants to take us “back to square one”. Square one? Oh man – who wouldn’t take square one in a heartbeat? We’re somewhere near square minus 39 here, receding backwards through the squares until the place of utter darkness beyond all squares.
Speaking of which, the Home Office has reportedly hired an aircraft hangar and a plane fuselage in which security officials will be able to practise forcing migrant deportees on to flights. The place is usually used as a film set, and the Home Office has taken it on a one-year contract. Very wise not to commit further; I would have gone for a 10-month break clause myself. But surely the government should hire a second hangar where Conservative MPs can war game/Squid Game their way through various amendment scenarios, and work out in private that resigning over a bill you then end up voting for (Brendan Clarke-Smith) is tactically on a par with being so hungry you kill yourself for food.
While they’re at it, could the party’s location scouts also hire a hangar where MPs can be schooled in basic geography, following Thérèse Coffey’s excruciating attempt to own the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, for the latter’s reference to “the Kigali government”. “She can’t even get the name of the country right!” scoffed Coffey, professing herself “astonished”. Astonishingly, Thérèse has been secretary of state of three departments, and deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom. To put that into even sharper perspective, the people who are in charge of those departments now were regarded as less appealing than her by previous administrations. The dregsocracy is real.
Also failing to understand the basics this week is Nadine Dorries. “I’m calling it now,” she called-it-now. “The plan is to install David Cameron as next leader of the party following defeat in the general election.” Amazing. Even so, perhaps don’t get her to pick your lottery numbers. As for the guy Nadine thinks is the answer to all questions … Bonhams is holding a current auction of various props from The Crown, with the replica No 10 door they built for the series estimated at £30,000. And according to the Mail, Boris Johnson has only gone and put in a hefty bid for it. Surely this can’t be true? If it is, it honestly has to be one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever read. If only Johnson could have been given the big toy door some time in the 1990s, allowing him to play to his heart’s content and sparing the rest of us no end of grief.
After all, along with a load of other messes, the Rwanda policy is Johnson’s. It was in the earliest days of 2022 that it was first mooted – specifically as part of Operation Red Meat, the plan to save his premiership in the wake of Partygate. If you’re still on season one of the Johnson premiership, the plan doesn’t work – but the policy remains, because Sunak is too weak to be strong, and in any case doesn’t have any ideas of his own.
So the Conservative party has now spent years tearing itself apart failing to get through a policy that doesn’t even work anyway. Stop me if you feel you’ve experienced this before. Then again, the general feeling in the country – all those wonderful people out there in the dark – is that everyone has seen absolutely all of it before. The chaos, the drama, the lies, the tantrums, the self-indulgence. Pretty much seven years of the nation’s lives have been taken up with All This. Meanwhile, the economy has shrunk and there is no plan to grow it, NHS waiting lists are whatever the adjective beyond “biblical” is, infrastructure isn’t working, the courts aren’t working, supply chains aren’t working … Is the Conservative party working? It’s a question its dimmest MPs must surely be on the point of being able to answer.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
