On the anniversary of the EU referendum, the party leadership needs an audit of what went wrong this month, and a plan for the Tory future in this Parliament.
Plus: Why haven’t Kensington and Chelsea’s leaders resigned too? Labour double standards on the Prime Minister. And: how Jake Berry became a cockney.
May won five per cent more of the vote than Cameron did two years ago. The margin between having a majority and not having one was performance in marginal seats.
The Prime Minister played the adult to Corbyn’s grumpy teenager.
At a time when we have significant difficulties in explaining what we are about, having a ladder as a symbol (with hands around it), would give us that immediate recognition.
The Party has collectively failed to modernise its campaigning, with the result that we saw on June 8. This needs radical reform if it is not to collapse completely.
Often, the disagreements between the two old camps are less substantial than the disagreements erupting within each camp’s own tents.
During the 1980s, the electoral function of the SDP/Alliance was to help the Conservatives win. This does not necessarily hold true 30 or so years on.
And just about the worse thing we could do would be to send out the campus Tory boys and girls to bark the party’s message like an army of daleks.
Lord Ashcroft’s research suggests where the party performed poorly or badly on June 8: among women, younger voters and Remain supporters.
May’s view had no impact on the polls. It was only later after the Conservative manifesto was published that our poll numbers begun to deteriorate.
For all the chatter about the Customs Union, leaving the EU in full is still on course. But May’s bungled election has raised the chances of a disorderly outcome.
There is only one priority: keep the Stalinists, trots, Islamist fellow-travellers, gender and feminist lunatics and, yes, the young deluded idealists out of power.
With seven of their nine seats in England now held with majorities of less than eight per cent of the vote, the next election offers a chance to take them out for good.