I wouldn’t say I’m a Conservative confidence-vote prepper, but like many in the political survivalist community I do prefer to keep track of the threat level. Over the past few years, what you might call the Loonsday Clock has mostly hovered at somewhere between four minutes and one minute to midnight. The British people have accepted this is a fact of their lives, even if the prospect of the Tories going into opposition has been greeted with the same sort of exhausted relief that Kingsley Amis felt about the eventual loss of his libido: “For 50 years, it was like being chained to a lunatic.”
During the past eight years (feels like 50), the fateful midnight chimes have rung out on five separate occasions, turning a series of prime ministers back into pumpkins/lettuces/highly remunerated international speakers/future foreign secretaries/devoted husbands and procreators who go away a lot on business. As for what time it is now, I am afraid the news is … not great. In recent weeks the formal assessment has moved from “Even they aren’t mad enough to try” to “Yeah, no, actually they are going to be mad enough.”
The local elections on 2 May are widely expected to be such a calamitous event for Rishi Sunak’s party that even the newly knighted Christopher Nolan may be momentarily tempted to make a film about them, although the utter absence of anything resembling a great man of history would ultimately preclude his involvement. It would not, however, preclude Conservative party involvement in a spring regicide attempt. They will almost certainly get enough letters to have one of their endlessly constructive confidence votes – which Sunak will then win.
Whether that would be enough to stem the chaos is far from clear, which is reportedly why some in Downing Street are now advocating for a June general election to avoid having to live through yet another hot, treachery summer. Others remain fixed on going to the country as late as possible, on the principle that the public mustn’t be given what it wants because it doesn’t actually want that.
Hard to say which decision will eventually be alighted on, other than there aren’t any great ones; and in any case, Sunak can usually be relied on to go for the wrong thing. Unfortunately, the PM, as previously mentioned, is not at all good at politics. Most of his major decisions in office have been in the interests of trying to manage his party, which, as those recent years have shown, is a little bit like trying to manage Arkham Asylum on an open-doors-and-honesty-boxes basis.
To take a single highly illustrative example, consider the past year for Lee Anderson, a hugely unproductive politician who for some reason has been treated as though he were as strategically important as 19th-century Afghanistan. Let’s remind ourselves of the highlights of this great game. Anderson, a former Labour councillor barely six years ago, was made deputy chair of the Conservative party by Sunak in February last year. In March, he was given a lucrative presenting berth on GB News. (You know the one – it’s the anti-establishment station that broadcasts out of the capital and employs masses of its anchors from the governing party.)
Last August, Anderson explained that asylum seekers who didn’t like being put on a barge “should fuck off back to France”. In November, he claimed in some scenery-chewing interview that he had been offered money to join Reform. In January this year, he resigned his deputy chairship over the Rwanda bill. Within days, Anderson was bleating that he regretted having done so; the prime minister’s spokesman instantly hinted he might be back, gibbering that “I think we can say we have a lot of time for Lee”. No shit. But was it in fact possible that the PM had already had way, way too much time for Lee? By February, Anderson had lost the whip after refusing to apologise for suggesting that Islamists controlled London and Sadiq Khan (“his mates”, as he put it). Earlier this month, Anderson fell into the arms of Richard Tice, a man he has previously described as a “poundshop Nigel Farage”, having – to put it in terms he would understand – effed off to join Reform.
I know what you’re thinking: how is the person who regarded trying to manage this chaotic and malignant wally as a major priority now facing growing rumblings of a confidence vote? Total mystery.
Still, here we are. And there will, more likely than not, be months and months more of this. The situation is so deranged that some Conservatives are floating a return for “proven election winner” Boris Johnson, a proven pathological liar over whose grotesque leadership inadequacies more than 50 MPs resigned in less than 48 hours not even two years ago. A sizeable chunk of the party then tried to bring him back again a mere seven weeks after he had left No 10 and his successor had tanked the country.
But look, maybe Sunak is now actively self-sabotaging. After all, the prime minister has chosen to go into the Easter break also conferring a knighthood on a man who last year gave £5m to the Conservative party. Well done, Mohamed Mansour! Although I do think you were somewhat ripped off. You used to be able to get a peerage for way less than that. Cost of living, I guess.
Also knighted was Philip Davies, one of the governing-party presenters on that aforementioned anti-establishment channel GB News. So this month has seen Philip scoop both a title and three upheld breaches of Ofcom’s impartiality rules on a show he presented with his wife, Esther McVey (now Lady Davies). Meanwhile, various tech figures also picked up gongs, as did Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. It all read like the honours list of a man who doesn’t just think he’s going to lose the election, but is gunning to make history and shed his seat on the same day, permitting a clean break and the chance to eff back off to Silicon Valley at his very earliest convenience.
Quite what he’ll do there remains a chapter yet to be written. Nick Clegg does the comms at Meta, of course, so there’s every chance Sunak could find a berth cheerily PR-ing humanity’s losing war with the machines at one or other of the big firms. No doubt he’d bring plenty to the role. After all, as Sunak’s futile and dishonourable choice to govern the ungovernable Conservative party instead of the UK has definitively shown, he has always been more of a company man than a country man.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
