Spare a thought for the Conservative party. It’s hard believing in meritocracy, yet finding yourself polling at 15%. It’s even harder having wanged on mercilessly for decades about natural selection, yet now constantly finding yourself appearing in the same sentence as the phrase “facing extinction”.
And it’s harder still to find polling guru John Curtice doing panels at your conference in which he outlines the route back to even the same time zone as being in contention. “You’ve got to get yourself back to base camp,” Curtice explained in one mild-mannered drive-by on Sunday. “At the moment you frankly can’t even see the Himalayas.” Given the well-documented traffic issues on Everest these days, we have to face the possibility that more people have reached the summit of the world’s highest mountain this year than have joined the Conservative party.
