Just over halfway through this wisdom-tooth extraction of an election campaign, and it looks like we are on the cusp of one of the bitterest ironies in British political history. From an 80-seat majority to 80 seats. It’s not easy to squander that much popular support that quickly, but the Tories have given it their best shot.
Cast your minds back four and a half years. Who can forget the surge of joy and relief when the exit poll flashed up on the BBC and we knew that the Corbynbeast was slain? It was the luckiest Friday 13th ever. “Boris’s win proves the soul of our nation is intact – I am so proud of what our country has done”, ran the headline above my column. “The thought of Jews with their bags packed, ready to flee,” I wrote, “The thought of a man who loves hate preachers getting the keys to Number 10. The thought of our children and grandchildren being indoctrinated in the Marxists’ mirthless creed. It was awful, awful…”
People from every region and all political persuasions had pulled together to save Britain, and it felt amazing. (Apart from Sir Keir Starmer, who said Jeremy Corbyn would make “a great prime minister”, although he now claims he knew that would never happen so endorsing a Marxist mate of Hamas to lead the United Kingdom was no biggie.) Lots of readers were kind enough to say they cut my piece out of The Telegraph and stuck it on the fridge as a keepsake, a reminder of all that happiness and hope.
No such jubilation will greet the installation of a Labour government on July 5. Rishi Sunak’s personal popularity rating may have sunk even further since the wretched D-Day debacle (“The Shortest Day” as one wag adapted the title on the film poster), but Sir Keir Starmer’s numbers are also deep into negative territory.
The mood of the Grimsby audience at the Sky News Leaders Special was sceptical, at times downright disdainful. Both leaders were openly mocked. Presenters and pundits claimed that “excitement is running high”. I sensed only weary resignation to our fate. More “Just get it over with” than “Bring it on!”
As Europe sees an astonishing Right-ward swing, voting against deluded eco-loons and culture-obliterating, open-border globalists, the UK is about to usher in the opposite on a grand scale. With the Tory implosion dominating the headlines, far too little scrutiny for my liking has been given to the barmy, Left-wing excesses headed our way.
Despite his best efforts to appear reassuringly managerial, the manifesto Starmer unveiled today hinted that the loony Left could be back with bells on. That silly gnu, Anneliese Dodds, who has horrible form in pushing radical gender ideology, has got her way. Just one doctor may be able to sign off a gender change, with possession of a penis apparently being no bar to womanhood. An appetiser no doubt for the aggressive activists’ goal of full self-ID – “If I say I’m a squirrel I’m a squirrel and saying I’m not a squirrel is a hate crime, OK?”
Almost worse in upcoming Bonkers Britain is the proposed ban on trans conversion therapy, which basically means no one, not even a parent, is allowed to suggest to a confused teenager that taking life-altering hormones or cutting off your breasts may not be a good idea. It’s an oxymoronic non-policy, which is impossible to uphold while respecting the findings of the landmark Cass Review, to which Wes Streeting and other senior party figures only recently gave their blessing.
Just when the tyranny of the trans orthodoxy was lifting, Labour doubles down. No British child, nor any female in a women’s-only space, is safe if that depraved, misogynist, biology-denying lunacy enters the statute books.
For more self-harming pottiness, look at Labour’s commitment to net zero. It appears to think it is going to decarbonise the national grid within SIX YEARS when 60 would be a stretch. On Wednesday, 34 per cent of the electricity used in the UK came from gas but, never mind, folks. You might say our next government was going full throttle in a handcart towards blackout hell, except the hair-shirt Flintstones really don’t want anyone to drive. Prepare yourselves for something called “active travel” previously known as Shanks’s Pony.
Shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh added to the general air of ideology untethered from reality saying her government will compel everyone who purchases a new car after 2030 to buy electric. As a matter of interest, where does Lou think the electricity for all those cars will come from, or the batteries, the lithium, the charging points, the high-voltage cables, the engineers, the infrastructure, or the money to pay for it all?
Yeah but no but yeah but no – whatevs, it’s green, innit? Bonkers Britain is all set to be the gobby, ignorant love child of Vicky Pollard and Soviet collectivisation.
With the new-look Parliament in Brussels likely to roll back rapidly on net zero, and with investors pulling out of renewables, Starmer’s Britain is soon going to come across as a crazy outlier intent on impoverishing a country that produces less than 1 per cent of global carbon emissions. How long before a population, which has no enthusiasm for its new government, is ready to pull the plug on this green dictatorship and launch a counter-offensive in the war on motorists
There is hope, I’m glad to say. A Labour government, which would have relished cosying up to the old EU, and even trying to rejoin, will now find itself with decidedly uncongenial neighbours who hate its socialist guts. A Marine Le Pen government in France may well trigger a referendum on immigration. Reform UK and a reconstituted Conservative Party could then push for that to be a key plank of the fightback here. Labour would have no place to hide from an electorate that is sick of the mass immigration it has voted against time and again.
At least, to cheer us up, there is the prospect of one delicious encounter. I understand a meeting between the leaders of the UK and France is already in the diary for late July. How Prime Minister Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy (who actually called Brexiteers “Nazis”) would have adored an entente cordiale with their ideological soulmates! Instead, with any luck, they will be obliged to meet Madame Le Pen and Le Toy Boy, the possible new French PM 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, who makes Nigel Farage look like Nick Clegg. I’d buy tickets for that, wouldn’t you?
Four and a half years on from that glorious 80-seat Tory majority, and with a new general election upon us, I think of the tragedy of wasted opportunity. I think of unforgivable betrayal and of the Labour landslide and ruinous policies that will sadly be its punishment. I think of all the cuttings of my jubilant column on so many fridges: forlorn, faded, hanging from one bit of Blu Tack now, a poignant reminder of the hope that we had, of what might have been.
But the people rose up once to save their country from the nutters, and, when the call comes, they will do it again. Bonkers Britain is not forever.
