There’s something to be said for a prolonged death. It means you can get your grieving in when the patient is still alive. All the more important when that patient is you. The Tories have known the game is up for some time now. They can read the polls as well as the rest of us. They are facing electoral wipeout. It’s not totally out the question that they might even be the third largest party after the next election.
None of this comes easy for Tories, born to believe that they are the party of government. So there has been plenty of tears as they process their grief. First the denial. This can’t be happening, they told themselves. These things don’t happen to people like them. It is against the natural order. So they dictated their own reality. One of their choosing. The methodology of the polls was wrong. Of course it was.
Then came the anger. Messy and raw. Torrents of unprocessed rage. How dare voters even contemplate kicking them out of government? Where was the gratitude for all the government had done in making people’s lives so much worse? The country didn’t deserve them. Closer to the truth than they cared to imagine.
Next up was the bargaining. OK, we may have made one or two mistakes, the Tories whined. But they were very, very little mistakes. The sort that any government could easily make. So they were sorry. Sort of. Not that they could actually bring themselves to mouth the word. But look, just trust us. Vote for us again and this time we will get it right. We will deliver untold riches. Promise.
The fourth stage was depression. Here the Tories just sat motionless unable to raise any sort of fight. They sat largely silent in the Commons as they stared into the abyss. Those that could be bothered to even make it to Westminster. Many just lay in bed with their phones switched off, only moving to let their constituency associations know that they wouldn’t be standing again. Last one to leave could turn out the lights.
Finally the grieving process has been completed. They have reached a state of unsteady acceptance. They have come through the worst into a parallel universe where they are neither totally dead nor alive. A half-life in which they are neither happy nor sad. Just going through the motions of an existence they are struggling to recall. To give one last performance before the final curtain.
Were you to be completely clueless about the reality of current UK politics, you might have thought that all was well with the Conservatives as they gathered for the first prime minister’s questions since the Easter recess. The backbenches were almost full and MPs managed to rise to a throaty roar of approval when Rishi Sunak took his place in the chamber. And Rish! looked almost happy to be back.
Only scratch the surface and what you have is just a chimera. Nothing is quite as it seems. All smoke and mirrors. The backbenchers merely the walking dead. Sunak’s ripostes, not smart so much as desperate. What we were getting was not a battle of equals, but the spectacle of a prime minister who has always been out of his depth and is now getting his arse handed to him on a plate yet again. Because almost everything Rish! says is untrue. A bedtime fantasy to help him sleep at nights.
Keir Starmer went in on the Liz Truss sci-fi memoir. The gift that will keep on giving for Labour in the months to come. The Diary of an Idiot. Liz taking centre stage in her own commedia dell’arte. Something to put front and centre of every election leaflet. The Trusster had said that her Kamikwasi budget was the happiest day of her life. Did the prime minister know if any mortgage holder shared this ecstasy? Sunak had come prepared. Starmer should spend more time reading Angela Rayner’s tax advice. He thought he was being smart. Playing to the crowd. The reality was he just sounded bitchy and peevish. His default setting.
“Mmm,” said the Labour leader. “We have a billionaire prime minister and a billionaire peer [Lord Ashcroft] who had saved millions in tax through non-dom loopholes smearing a working-class woman over £2,000 of tax.” Is that really the rabbit hole you want to run down, Rish!? Literally, no one except the Daily Mail really cares. You want to look like a graceless, entitled bully then go right ahead.
Even Sunak had the antennae to realise that this wasn’t the best of looks. His trainer collection is worth far more than the tax Rayner is alleged to have avoided. So he found himself babbling in desperation, hoping if he carried on talking for long enough he might alight on some sentences that bordered on coherence.
He had never rated Liz Truss. Truss was a loser, he was a winner. Er … hello. Earth to Rishi. Earth to Rishi. Is there anyone there? You actually lost to the Trusster. The Tory members preferred her to you. So this one is on you and your party. You don’t get to pretend you had nothing to do with the chaos. Just grow up and take some responsibility for once.
Starmer went in for the kill. At the last budget Sunak had made £46bn of unfunded tax cuts by promising to get rid of national insurance contributions. How on Earth was he going to pay for that? Cut the NHS? Cut the state pension?
Now the bolloxometer tipped into the red. It was Labour who had put up taxes, insisted Sunak. Apparently Labour were the ones who had been in government for the past 14 years. In any case, the NHS had more than enough money. In fact it was over-funded. The waiting lists were just a fiction. Pensioners were also far too well-off. Truly, Rish! was a man of infinite compassion. He ended by saying “Vote Conservative for a brighter future”. Yup, that will work. Because the present is so obviously shit.
The rest of the session was largely taken up with local election stuff. It was Labour’s fault that local authorities were going to have to increase council tax because their money from central government had been cut. And Liz Truss’s crowning achievement had been the Australian and New Zealand trade deals that Sunak had previously rubbished. One for the ages that.
It had been an ill-tempered and sulky PMQs. One that did the Commons no favours. Then there are few depths that Sunak has not shown himself willing to explore. The golden boy repeatedly falling from grace. Then, as we know, the grieving process is rarely simple.
