On current trends, the next election poses the greatest threat to the Conservative Party’s continued existence in its history. Can we imagine politics with under 50 Tory MPs?
The MP for Harborough this week took a step towards fame when The Times picked up his attack on the Prime Minister’s failure to stop record migration.
The former Prime Minister, chastened at the start, began to explain to the lawyers how politics actually works.
Gove, Cummings and the Federation of Conservative Students are also denounced for destroying her hero.
We hurl abuse at here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians and their advisers, while the permanent state flourishes like a green bay tree.
Did those in power still believe it was right to terrify the nation into submissions with their fear-mongering campaigns warning us to stay away from our loved ones? And why did the rules constantly change and at very little notice?
His critics think he is “a busted flush”: how eager he will be to demonstrate that he is, on the contrary, serious.
As his options narrow, Sunak has little choice but to get back to first principles, which would be the right course anyway.
The number of possibilities teaches us three lessons about politics today. Firstly, never to underestimate the role played by mere chance. Secondly, that this is not an age of great leaders who make their own luck. And, thirdly, that we need to choose more carefully in future.
He may have less than a year, as Parliament returns and his Party’s conference looms, to persuade voters of his case – which he has scarcely even begun to make.
Over the last 50 years of British political history, there have been precisely two occasions when the established order was challenged and defeated: the Thatcher revolution, and Brexit. In both instances, the agent of change was the Conservatives.
If Sunak doesn’t commit the Conservatives to leaving, and then somehow wins the next election, the next Leader of the Opposition will take up the cause.
Ai provides an enormous opportunity for humanity. But Beijing sees it only as it’s latest tool for repression.
Many of Tory MPs will be sick and tired of the self-reverential obsequies attached to the Committee’s deliberation and verdict – and of the hysteria, hate, vitriol and venom directed at a man without whom many would never have had the opportunity to serve in Parliament.
The intellectual heft of figures like him will be vital in ensuring that it moves forward, rather than languishing in the same ideological dead-ends that sunk it in the first place.