Can the Conservative party of recent years ever really be said to have been in recovery from its addiction to pure, teeth-gnashing chaos? It’s possible that there was a brief period at some juncture after the third prime minister of last year had been installed that the natural party of government was not tearing itself or the economy or the country apart … but if you happened to be taking the bins out at that moment, you’d sadly have missed it. Whatever the truth about the good old day/hour/minute, the Conservatives have fallen well and truly off the wagon again over the past week, as the prime minister, Rishi Sunak’s, sensationally defective and distasteful Rwanda deportation bill makes landfall.
You are cordially invited to recall that when Sunak was appointed party leader in October last year, all manner of Tory grandees and commentators assured the nation that the sensibles were back in town. It was a “new dawn”, the “system” had proved robust, and all those wonderful people out there in the dark would be relieved at the era of calm about to be ushered in. Yesterday I suddenly recalled a column written by William Hague on the occasion of Sunak’s accession to the prime ministership, in which the former Tory leader confidently asserted: “After being an object of global pity in recent months, Britain will again be an example of government being conducted with professionalism, honesty and reliability.”
Will it, though? Flash forward to this week and a clown called Mark Francois is once again beckoning to us from a storm drain, while the phrase “ERG star chamber” has been deployed like it presages anything other than the apparently unstoppable rise of the idiots. In not unconnected news, this morning I read a current Hague column containing words and phrases such as “abyss”, “mad enough”, “cliff edge”, “huge public row” and “yet another drama”. Well quite. Who among us could have predicted, and so on?
Whichever way you slice it, Sunak arguably remains eye-catchingly bad at politics. Like me, you will have hugely enjoyed reports that Sunak had got the newbie foreign secretary, David Cameron, to call Eurosceptic potential Rwanda rebels over the weekend, rather than deigning to get involved himself. Making Cameron do the ring-around is a genuinely hilarious power move – if slightly undermined by the fact that many putative Rwanda rebels would prefer a call from the Metropolitan police’s serious sex crimes unit than from David Cameron.
At time of writing, I have no idea how Tuesday night’s vote will turn out – other than the absolute cast-iron, copper-bottomed conviction that whichever way it goes, it won’t be the end of the matter for the messiest messes out there. In the run-up to the big day, Sunak was at pains to stress that the Rwanda bill wouldn’t amount to a confidence vote in him. Ironically, even that doesn’t feel like a statement we can have confidence in. There are people – including a cabinet minister, according to a BBC report on Tuesday morning – who are now predicting (off the record) that, whatever happens with the bill, there’s absolutely no way that Sunak can butch it out to whenever in late 2024 he had set his heart on as the perfect general election date. I wonder if Rishi enjoyed his Monday at the Covid inquiry, answering lawyers’ questions about Treasury death squads and his own Dr Death nickname? It might well have been his last fun and carefree day in politics.
Again, at time of writing, it was still his world. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to live in it, and you could be forgiven for reacting to the ongoing horror show with total incredulity. Have we fallen through some tear in the strong-and-stable continuum, only to re-emerge in the depths of winter 2018-2019, with the mad bastards of the Conservative party ramping up to Mach 3 madness? Have we been marched at gunpoint into a wing of our memory palace we thought we had put permanently beyond use?
No. It’s somehow worse than that because of a) the hideous familiarity b) the fact that whole new Conservative party factions and splinter groups have spawned since we last knew this place. Take the New Conservatives. Tuesday began with Sunak throwing an “emergency breakfast” (arguably the only phrase worse than “emergency podcast”) for this group of MPs, who believe in nationalism, nativism and the use of artisan trepanning techniques to exorcise the woke mind virus (leading light Jonathan Gullis was among the first patients). Or take the Conservative Growth Group, or the European Research Group, or the Northern Research Group, or the Common Sense Group. All of them should be fitted with sarcastic airquotes as standard.
And then, take your place in the Brexit wars simulator, and remind yourself that this is what taking back control looks like. A powerful Tory faction whose false nostalgia for a time that never truly existed caused a political shock in 2016 is now just one of the powerful Tory factions apparently nostalgic for the three-year fallout period after that shock – for the era of indicative votes, for tented media field hospitals on the green outside parliament, for spectacularly talentless and freaky MPs being on telly more than Ant and Dec. Hate to call an untimely end to Rishi Sunak’s inspirational new dawn, but it’s starting to look just possible that Theresa May was right all along. Nothing – NOTHING – has changed.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
