Getting rid of Boris Johnson was shocking treachery - and this is now the result
Even though we all knew it was coming the bodycount was still shocking. For any natural Tory watching Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party being torn limb from limb by an angry electorate which felt abandoned, ignored and thoroughly let down, was hard.
Just look at the toll:
3.09am Defence Secretary Grant Shapps goes.
3.49am Gillian Keegan goes
4.08am Therese Coffey goes
4.09am Penny Mordaunt goes
4.10am Johnny Mercer goes
4.39am Michelle Donelan goes
4.41am Rishi Sunak concedes election
It was a kicking of such unprecedented ferocity you almost felt sorry for the Tories by the end.
Almost.
But not quite, because the reason we are waking up to the Socialist Republic of Great Britain today is entirely down to that special mix of entitled arrogance and utter uselessness which sadly became the imprimatur of Rishi Sunak’s party.
Arrogance. You’ll see that word a lot.
What became very clear very soon after the results started coming in was that Reform wasn’t splitting the Tory vote as had been predicted.
The Tories were splitting the Reform vote.
Yes, that’s how bad, how humbling, and how shameful it was for the two-century old party of Disraeli, of Peel, of Churchill and Thatcher.
Indeed if the Tory party had just stood down a handful of MPs in key constituencies we might not be waking up to five (perhaps 10?) years of a Prime Minister nobody really wants.
But the arrogance, the sheer bloody self-entitlement, of so many second-rate Conservative MPs was so complete that, even in the face of overwhelming evidence they were now loathed by so many of Britain’s rank and file, they still believed it was Reform’s duty to stand down rather than theirs. And this became their death knell.
They will have time to reflect on the wisdom of that belief as they pick up their P45s today and enjoy a decade of Labour governance while the Conservative Party figures out whether it can continue as a functioning party in British politics.
Be under no illusion Keir Starmer didn’t win this election, the deep systemic arrogance, coupled with the spinelessness and the stupidity at the heart of Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party gave it away.
And lord, did they give it away.
Back in 2019, in the early hours of December 13 as it became clear Boris was achieving a thumping Commons majority, a positively idiotic political hack wrote for Express.co.uk “make no mistake this result is a two-term, maybe three term, result for the Tories. Labour are in the wilderness.”
That idiotic hack was me. Yet it seemed, as Boris on a Get Brexit Done ticket swept all before him (dismantling the Corbyinte Labour Party in the process) a genuinely reasonable assumption.
What was impossible to foresee was that the Conservative Party was on a suicide mission.
A suicide mission which ended this morning, with the Tory Party if not quite dead then at least on life-support.
Let’s be honest, even the truest blue would have to admit that the overthrow of Boris Johnson was mind-bendingly stupid. An shocking act of treacherous political dullards whose arrogance (that word again) was inversely related to their political intelligence.
Did the traitorous anti-Johnson B-listers really think people had voted for them in 2019? A bunch of second-rate, faceless, hopeless Tory MPs with a warmed-over Labour agenda for a manifesto?
Of course they hadn’t - they voted for Boris Johnson. Period.
They didn’t vote for Liz Truss either (although they might have done, despite the misogynist bullying she has faced since her ill-fated budget). And they certainly didn’t vote for Rishi Sunak - a man so rich he should have his own currency.
Throughout the night MPs and TV pundits alike woke-up to the apparently shocking realisation that normal people don’t vote for a manifesto, they vote for a personality, a leader, maybe even a visionary - especially one with what is known as “the common touch”.
Just ask Boris and Nigel.
What they don’t vote for is collapsing standards of living, a tanking economy, an utterly failing (yet phenomenally expensive) health service, frightening levels of illegal immigration, poor schools, a laughable, declining military, and a Brexit no-one has lifted a finger to make work.
And what they don’t vote for is an election campaign so laughably poor it was almost insulting.
Why Sunak called an election at the worst possible time for the party is the stuff of university dissertations for years to come - perhaps the same dissertations which will be discussing the death of the modern Conservative Party, because it is hard to see where they go from here.
Today is not the optimistic dawn which welcomed Tony Blair’s bright shiny new Government in 1997.
No, it is a collective howl of outrage, a festering anger at a Government which always seemed more obsessed with crazed wokeness and its own self-preservation than serving the needs of the people of this country and fixing a broken Britain.
We can now only hope that Mr Starmer offers more.
He could hardly offer less.
