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A Lunge to the Right Would Guarantee the Tory Party’s Demise
With its pomposity, upper class affectations, insufferable arrogance of many of its MPs and habit of wistfully evoking a long-dead era of colonial dominance, the Conservative Party can give the illusion of being like a grand and robust old castle.
In reality, it is more like a crumbling relic. A fleeting look from one angle might evoke a sense of solidity but, once you get beyond the odd intact outer wall, you find a derelict pile.
The Conservative Party has won just one election since 1992 — the one in 2015, which was hardly a landslide — the Tories got 36.9% to Labour’s 30.4%. The other times it scraped into or clung onto power was due to deals with the Liberal Democrats and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), in 2010 and 2017 respectively.
The Lib Dems’ time in bed with the Tories, from 2010 to 2015, left the former incredibly unappealing to voters. It has only just started recovering from that coupling. While the Tories are the party of Brexit (decades of civil war in the Tory Party led to the Tory-initiated Referendum), it seems highly unlikely that a freshly sanitised Lib Dems will get back in bed with the toxic Tories.
A grubby deal with the DUP enabled the Tories to limp from the car crash of their 2017 snap election — and the loss of their majority — and…
