On Sunday night, Nigel Farage was buried alive with a writhing tangle of snakes, before losing an election. Or to put it another way, he now has a reasonable idea of what leading the modern Conservative party would be like. He took it all rather more calmly than Rishi Sunak does, so his stint in the I’m a Celebrity reality TV jungle probably did him no harm among the kind of Tory backbenchers feverish enough to be lobbying even at this 11th hour to replace Sunak either with Farage or a “dream ticket” [sic] pairing him with Boris Johnson. Admittedly, neither man is in parliament and only one is even a Tory, which says something about the talent currently on offer. But as one anonymous backbencher breezily told the Mail on Sunday, “there’s actually no rule that says the prime minister has to be an MP”.
To which the rest of the country can only pray: please, please, please let them try. Just see this wretched thing through to its natural conclusion, which is for the Conservative party to go full tonto and bury once and for all any question of it still being some kind of serious political operation. Farage has been effectively dictating Tory policy for years, so why not just cut out the middle man? Fold him into the sweaty embrace of the establishment he so brilliantly defined himself against, and see how being held actively responsible for everything that goes wrong works out for him. Those who remain of the old centre right Conservatives could finally summon the energy to leave and start something new. Meanwhile, the Labour party could quietly get on with running the country, possibly for more than one term depending on how long the resulting civil war lasts. Anything that stops the Conservatives focusing on why they’re actually losing, while allowing Labour to talk sympathetically about how you can’t get a GP appointment any more, works for Keir Starmer right now.
