And now the end is near. Barring a polling error of galactic proportions, we are hours away from the final nemesis of the Tory government. It is 14 years since Cameron and Clegg invited the press into the Downing Street garden to reveal that the coalition would ‘give our country the strong, stable and decisive leadership we need’.
As Rishi Sunak prepares to vacate the Downing Street premises on Friday, he will probably be looking about and having one of those moments so simply but so accurately captured by ABBA in ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. ‘We just have to face it, this time we’re through.’
All of that groping, sacking and stabbing. What was it all for?
There’ll surely be another consideration weighing on him. Fourteen years. The bedroom tax and the pasty tax. The three baskets. The backstop, meaningful votes, ‘austerity’, levelling up, the common rulebook, the Northern Powerhouse, tiers. All of that groping, sacking and stabbing. What was it all for?
When Gordon Brown shuffled off into the sunset in 2010, after a similarly short but equally disastrous sojourn in the top job, he could at least reflect on how he’d been a key part of a government that – in slightly less time – had utterly transformed Britain for the better. (It was actually for the worse, but he wouldn’t have thought that.) The 1997-2010 Labour administration dropped forever-bombs that are still reliably going off even today – mass immigration, quantitative easing, inept economic regulation, ill-fated international adventures strategised on the back of a fag packet, and of course Labour’s parting gift, the Equality Act. They outsourced huge amounts of power to unelected, unaccountable quangos and committees and charities manned by their ideological pals.
What, by contrast, have the Tories achieved, exactly? They didn’t reverse any of Labour’s legislation, didn’t return any of its devolved powers to democratic oversight. They merely carried on with the Blair/Brown project, and inevitably were hemmed in by it on every pathetically small attempt to push back. There was a procession of tough talking Home Secretaries that actually did absolutely nothing. The Tories increased the population by five million in a ploy to fiddle the country’s dismal growth and productivity figures, and it fooled nobody. They sat back and let ‘woke’ tear through every last one of the institutions without deigning to notice or doing anything to stop it. Because if they stopped it they would be accused of waging a terribly déclassé ‘culture war’ – which they were accused of anyway. They slashed police numbers for the sake of ‘austerity’, and were then surprised the police became a tired, terrified body of stewards who sat back and let ethnic hate marches parade through our cities every weekend. They signed up to insane net zero targets that run serious risk of blacking out and/or bankrupting the country, in the belief that the climate of the world can be altered by a tiny island. Anti-Semitism in the country has become just background noise. Brexit was their one concrete achievement – something they were dragged kicking and screaming to do, and which they have predictably made a hash of.
It’s tempting to imagine a different world after the 2019 election, without Covid. But there would still have been the chaotic lack of discipline; the sex scandals, the tawdriness, the wetness. The record immigration and the boats. The sheer naivety of Liz Truss in thinking the Bank of England wouldn’t try to shaft her.
Perhaps the Tories are right. Perhaps as we are all dragged off to the gulag we will be shouting ‘come back Penny Mordaunt, all is forgiven’. But I doubt it. Even my flinty heart melts a little at the thought of Kemi Badenoch’s dismay at people turning from the Tories, when she has been the only effective minister actually doing the job. But I also feel like shouting ‘Leave it mate, you’re too good for them’.
We are now defaulting to something pretty much the same, except worse. Hang on to your hats. Hang on to yourself. Hang on to each other. Hang on to everything.