'Well, yeah. What did you expect?' - A 2022 Political Year in Review
And answering the question, 'Where did it all go so horribly wrong for the Conservatives?'
I'm old enough to remember the exit polls from December in 2019.
They left me somewhat bewildered for a number of reasons, though the main one was accepting that the narrative dictates ‘sometimes the baddies win’.
That’s at least if you accept that the Conservatives ‘are’ baddies - many, as it turned out, did not.
Many put their hopes in the Conservatives to deliver Brexit at the time, and they sort of did - depending on who you ask. Northern Ireland would be the first place to start before making your way down to the hard shoulder ‘Portaloo Xanadu’ of the M20 in Kent to determine the answer to this - if you can even get that far.
But the over-arching idea of ‘Brexit’ was a kind of blind optimism that Britain could do ‘a thing’ - it didn’t matter if it was a ‘bad thing’ or even if ‘the thing’ made sense; ‘Britain did a thing!’
It was based on hopes and dreams, sunlit uplands and jam tomorrow. Most of the time the idea was that if you just believed and had faith in ‘the thing’, Boris Johnson would eventually light the darkness - somehow, some way - like a 22,000 lumen torch you purchased from Amazon that can be seen from the surface of Mars and lasts all of 10-seconds before exploding in a molten mass of plastic jelly but can at least be repurposed as a novelty cracker dog-poo practical joke this Christmas.
[NB: Every cloud and all that]
But the question that needs asking of those who put their faith in Boris Johnson - and as we learned it was almost solely Boris Johnson they put their faith in - is whether or not after having endured these last 3 years, ‘are your lives any better as a result?’
Anecdotally, some honest people will provide their ham-fisted, irksome, ‘Tl;Dr’ simplistic political commentary that took 20 seconds to fat finger its way on to Facebook, hold their hands up and say, ‘you know what - you’re right; it isn’t. I don’t necessarily blame Brexit - even if recent estimates courtesy of the Centre for European Research state that the UK’s growth shortfall is at around 5.5% (or £130 billion per year) - but I can see how the government has mismanaged events these last 3 years and I’ll never vote Conservative again now that I have all the facts - even though were never of much interest to me in the first place.’
And that’s a start, I suppose.
A bit of self-reflection on their role and complicity in all of this.
Some would present you with the ‘gaslight’ question and ask, ‘yes but what was the alternative?’
The question operates on the basis of providing a hypothetical answer - in other words, Britain did not get that alternative, and as a result the only thing one can measure is reality as it occurred rather than some imagined, fictional alternate history that did not. In short, the ‘…but Corbyn’ question is not only irrelevant but also hideously dated, as Rishi Sunak discovered whenever he used it during Prime Minister’s Questions as an attack line only for it to subsequently die on its arse.
Its purpose though - to ask ‘yes but what was the alternative’ - is an easy way to escape the reality of being the only people that have to provide an answer to the question of whether or not our lives are better after these last 3 years.
The answer is no.
For some, it’s likely too hard to bear answering the question that ultimately tells the individual that they may have made a terrible mistake. Some refuse to answer it altogether because it’s too unimaginable to consider that they ever made a mistake.
For some, that terrible mistake dawned on them when Boris Johnson removed his mask, but unlike the archetypal Scooby Doo villain where the mask is removed to reveal somebody completely unexpected, the greatest shock for those who ‘loved’ Johnson was that the only person beneath the mask was Johnson himself.
Some of us, I gather, were in on this plot twist years ago. Another section of society only realised it after ‘Partygate’. Some - though not the majority of people, thankfully - remained in denial, of course.
When it all fell apart for Johnson however, there were portions of the media that genuinely believed that the entire thing - or ‘Partygate’ - was some kind of establishment media, pro-Remain hit-job, as a way of processing their grief and gaslighting away from the fact that Boris Johnson was perfectly capable of screwing the whole thing up of his own volition.
The truth is, it was always going to end this way. Some of us knew this in advance and that’s likely why many people didn’t vote for it in the first place.
But then there were those who didn’t know this, or worse still, they did know this - and voted for Johnson anyway, and were subsequently the most disappointed when it all fell apart.
This is the prologue bit that provides context for where we are at the end of 2022.
So what the Hell happened!? Pt. 1
Sir Charles Walker, Conservative MP for Broxbourne, has always been and remains a fascinating creature in the Conservatives - for this page at least.
It may sound self-indulgent but one of my own personal favourite articles that I’ve written [unpublished on this page] was about Sir Charles Walker and his surreal ‘Milk’ speech in the Commons in March 2021 where he was protesting against lockdown restrictions.
At the time, I didn’t agree with Walker, and this page supported lockdown measures - but the point of the article [that I wrote] was that his speech epitomised the nightmarish, Baudrillard-esque, post-modern and hyper-real state of multi-hyphenated British society at the time.
His words made no sense. But then nothing in society made sense. So, invariably Sir Charles Walker’s words made complete sense - even if they didn’t.
You see?
Nobody noticed how mad [surreal, weird, eccentric, etc] his speech was because it fit in seamlessly with the surrounding madness in society.
But one of the key moments in politics in 2022 - in my opinion, that was not indicative of Sir Charles Walker’s prior reported madness; rather he was being very rational - was the interview that he gave to BBC News at the height of the existential crisis facing the Conservatives earlier this Autumn that would eventually lead to Liz Truss’ departure.
You could see the seething resentment; feel it, even, or hear it in his voice.
Somebody like Walker would never cross the floor. Walker would be unlikely to vote or support Labour because he is an inveterate, dyed-in-the-wool Conservative - but his anger stems from the fact that the Conservatives had it all less than 3 years ago, and over the last year [at least] have done little with it.
In fact, Walker knows that they’ve completely blown it - and worse still, is that he’s uncritical of this; he knows, he realises why it has all happened - and he’s being honest when many Conservatives have not been, even if they realise it, too.
As early as January they were saying, “it doesn’t matter if Johnson leads us, we’re going to lose the next election anyway.”
In my final piece last week, I alluded to something else Walker said at the beginning of December in a separate interview. Two things about his interview with Times Radio stood out to me. Walker said:
“I think the scale of the loss reflects where we stand in the opinion polls at the moment.”
He also said:
“I hope what Rishi Sunak does is make sure Labour doesn’t wipe the floor with us, so that we perhaps win 220 seats.”
This is as opposed to more recent [and contentious] polling that suggests that if an election were called tomorrow the Conservatives would have less than 70 MPs in Parliament. In essence then, Sunak has not achieved what Walker hoped he would achieve - if the polls are to be believed.
It’s worth pointing out that Walker is among a number of MPs who do not intend to stand at the next election, and what he says [and has said consistently since as early as February 2022 when he said he was unlikely to stand at the next election] is what senior Conservatives have been secretly muttering since the moment they saw the opinion polls at the beginning of the year.
It was a consensus across many different polls, too, that painted a very clear picture of how things were looking for the Conservatives at that point.
The reality was inescapable: this was not an anomaly, or even a passing fad. The bubble had very clearly burst, and it was likely followed by the Conservatives’ equal parts grief and incredulity when they asked, ‘how did it happen?’
How did they get from that seismic victory and that proverbial landslide in December 2019 to the point where they were staring down the barrel of having less than 70 MPs in Parliament at the end of 2022?
Is this questionable recent polling data? Perhaps. Perhaps not - worryingly not if you’re a Conservative.
Although questionable polling wouldn’t explain the broader consensus that shows the Conservatives behind in the polls by anywhere between 20 and 30 points - for almost the entire year - where they remain going into 2023.
So.
To explain this, there’s a ‘short, simplistic, Tl;Dr, 20 seconds to fat finger its way on to Facebook style’ answer to the question that people might give without having read a single word of this article.
It’s because the nation’s patience has been exhausted by the Conservative Party’s inexcusable way of handling almost every political omnishambles that they are mostly responsible for having created for themselves.
There’s also a longer Substack answer - with substance that serves as the meat of this ‘End of Year’ review!
So…what the Hell happened!? Pt. 2
It stretches back to Autumn in 2021 where one internal crisis presented itself after the other, and how the Conservatives handled each subsequent event worse than the other, in quick-fire chronological order:
It began with Johnson’s absurd conference speech before he jetted off to Marbella amid fuel shortages, and then when he landed back in Britain, he gave a disastrous speech to the CBI where he spoke about his jaunt to Peppa Pig World before finding himself at the forefront of the Owen Paterson scandal only to end up at the despatch box lying to the Commons about breaching lockdown restrictions.
Remarkably, this investigation is still outstanding and the Privileges Committee inquiry has yet to conclude; due in no small part to the level of obfuscation that has been applied by the government and the fact that the government itself has left a blank cheque for those gathering evidence to defend the former Prime Minister.
The reliance on the taxpayer to fund Johnson’s defence seems strange even though you’d think Johnson would be perfectly capable of paying for it himself having earned almost £1 million since leaving office - as I wrote he probably would do after he inevitably resigned, and as I’ve consistently been saying since as early as 2020.
Each event led to, and provided context to, the rancour over ‘Partygate’ - with the tipping point for most likely being this video:
And this response, from Johnson to the video where he said on the Hansard:
“…may I begin by saying that I understand and share the anger up and down the country at seeing No. 10 staff seeming to make light of lockdown measures? I can understand how infuriating it must be... I was also furious to see that clip.”
History would dictate that he would later be fined for ‘making light’ of lockdown measures.
‘Partygate’ - as we learned - would provide the media with ample criticism to proceed with into 2022 but it also allowed observers and critics of the government to chip away at the Conservative Party’s political mithril, too.
Every subsequent crisis moving forward seemed more consequential than the last and the government’s misdemeanours were no longer protected by the armour of Johnson’s formerly unassailable and teflon-coated ‘image politics’.
For example:
Johnson’s comments at the despatch box early in 2022 on Sir Keir Starmer’s relationship with the Jimmy Savile investigation back-fired hideously.
Even when the government tried to do its utmost to help Ukraine, the war cast light on the Conservatives’ unscrupulous funding from Russian donors and the Prime Minister’s personal relationship with Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev. In the latter months of his premiership, Johnson’s expedient use of Volodymr Zelenskyy to boost his domestic credentials was so openly and transparently cynical that it became a morbid in-joke, and the entire thing feels performative.
There was also this:
William Wragg’s accusations of bullying that I wrote about back in January was one of the most important moments in politics in 2022 because it precipitated one of the most important factors that would eventually lead to Johnson’s downfall.
It stifled the whips’ authority; policy papers were being abandoned and the government’s agenda went into a kind of stasis that has not seen any real movement since.
Many policies laid out in the Queen’s Speech 2022 were abandoned altogether, or rushed through at the very last minute. Some remain in the Parliamentary void where they will likely stay for the foreseeable future - even the recent ‘lawful’ ruling on the government’s disatrous Rwanda policy is not likely to elicit any results for those who want it. It’s not only undeliverable, but also obscenely expensive.
Also:
Fake culture wars, the “bollocks” story of Channel 4’s privatisation, failed ‘reboot weeks’ and Operations ‘Save Big Dog’ and ‘Red Meat’ fell on deaf ears. There was Rishi Sunak’s implosion, owed in part to the acrimony that existed between the former Chancellor and former Prime Minister and the “absolutely insane” initial first response to the cost-of-living crisis.
There were manufactured trade wars with the EU, the climb down on the Rwanda policy [that still serves as the Conservative Party’s own Captain Ahab vs. Moby Dick to this very day].
There were the May local election results and by-election Conservative disasters - advisers, like Education Tzar Kevan Collins and Lord Christopher Geidt leaving and not being replaced, ministers walking away from their posts, holiday after holiday after holiday, the list goes on, but ultimately it was the Chris Pincher saga that sank Johnson.
This was the moment when Johnson ‘could’ have come clean, but instead he needlessly exacerbated the situation; he trivialised the severity of the scandal out of blind complacency - ignorant to the simple fact that his lustre had rubbed off months earlier as a result of the hurt and the pain caused by the ‘Partygate’ allegations and his [and his supporters’] subsequent handling of events, even after the allegations turned out to be inescapable facts.
He was no longer protected by his voters and he was politically naked. The joke simply wasn’t funny any more. It was over.
Conservative members, MPs and the general public were sick of him, too - but the moment it dawned on them that it was likely over for Johnson was at the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations where the crowd booed the former Prime Minister.
Whether you’re a monarchist or not, the memory of ‘that’ picture of ‘that’ ageing Monarch sitting in ‘that’ Church, alone, mourning the death of ‘that’ husband - framed in the Telegraph, no-less - was likely seared into the memory of ‘those’ onlookers who remembered exactly how Johnson handled matters with his own rogueish arrogance and hubris - it was disgusting, it was outrageous, it was an affront, and they wanted to humiliate him in the only way that they felt they could.
And it was destined to end no other way.
In reality, it was always going to end this way.
I’m reassured - are you reassured?
Following Johnson’s departure, an absurd leadership contest took place, where no one candidate stood out above the rest and not one of them appeared to actually believe a word they were saying - not even Tom Tugendhat; not even the mighty Rehman Chishti!
Though after beginning with 11 potential candidates, amid alleged sex tapes, drug use, prostitution, continued blue-on-blue action and infighting, and Sajid Javid’s scandalous beard, it eventually whittled down to a single and unsurprisingly obvious winner.
This page knew - as other commentators knew - that Liz Truss’ time as Prime Minister would likely be erratic, potentially ‘a bit chaotic’ but it is fair to assume that nobody expected that within days of her being elected, the Queen would die and Truss would very nearly send the UK economy back to the bronze age.
This page has a tendency to add levity to serious issues, but the reality was no laughing matter when the Bank of England intervened in this fiscal shock treatment being performed by Truss and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng - acting on the behalf of their banana-republic, Tufton St paymasters in the IEA and elsewhere - that to this day has left the UK with a shortfall of around £30 Billion according to the Resolution Foundation.
In fact, the situation was terrifying - most had no idea how close to the precipice of total economic collapse Britain truly was. Many probably still have no idea.
“There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!” - K. - ‘Men in Black’ (1997)
“Within hours,” said Andrew Bailey from the Bank of England.
Public support for the Conservatives subsequently ebbed to its lowest point in years and it culminated in a Conservative Party conference that was variously being described as a “shitshow with a capital S” or a “Truss-terfuck” by other Conservatives.
Some MPs, like Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak, boycotted the conference altogether. They simply did not go. In Sunak’s case, he didn’t attend because he wanted Liz Truss to “own the chaos.”
Those who attended were ‘downing champagne’ and wandering aimlessly around the ICC in Birmingham; some party members and activists were found in corridors of venue half laughing, half crying and drunkenly screaming “we’re fucked!” - face down into the venue’s carpet.
Michael Gove appeared on television openly disparaging then-Prime Minister Liz Truss’ strategy, while others - like Grant Shapps - bought a £1,600 smartphone for the express purpose of collecting names in a spreadsheet as part of some weird, openly discussed sabotage mission to bring her government down.
Some governments spend years bubbling dormant beneath the magma awaiting that super-eruption of scandal and downfall; for Liz Truss, it took less than 50 days for her chaos to take full shape in the form of a political MOAB that involved:
Sacking her Chancellor via Times journalist Steven Swinford’s tweet.
The forced resignation of Suella Braverman after she breached ministerial code - though it’s more reasonable to assume that she was sacked having disagreed with every single policy Liz Truss was presenting to her cabinet, including the realistion that ‘Britain needs more migrants’.
Open warfare with former ministers Sajid Javid [who Truss’ team is alleged to have said was “shit”] and Michael Gove [who Truss’ team was alleged to have called “a sadist”].
The sacking of important Downing St. strategist Isaac Levido and adviser Jason Stein [who the ‘shit’ and ‘sadist’ comments were attributed to].
A bizarre press conference lasting 9-minutes where a terrified Liz Truss looked as though she was either being held hostage, drugged - or both.
And finally, a contentious opposition vote on fracking that sent the government into freefall and Liz Truss literally chasing former chief whip Wendy Morton around the corridors of Westminster while Jacob Rees-Mogg faced allegations of assault after forcing members to vote with the government.
The mood was so febrile that the final Monday before Truss eventually resigned, she was called to Parliament to answer an urgent question to explain the chaos enveloping government, only to send Penny Mordaunt in her place to reassure the Commons - in as earnest, solemn and as serious a tone as possible - that the Prime Minister was, in fact, “not hiding beneath a desk.”
[NB: In hindsight, it’s worth remembering that Penny Mordaunt only lost out on becoming Prime Minister herself by 8 votes]
“Towards the end of the exchange, the Prime Minister would eventually emerge from whichever dark cavern under the Palace of Westminster she was hiding in and then proceed to sit down in the Commons as though everybody was expected to pretend that she wasn’t there.
Meanwhile, Penny Mordaunt answered questions being directed at the person who members were constantly reminded could not attend [for whatever mystical and ambiguous reason] - even though Truss was sitting directly behind her.”
Opposition members stood in the chamber, in disbelief, pointed at Truss and said to the Speaker, “...but she’s there; she’s literally right there.”
Truss would later stand up and quietly shuffle out of the Commons without having said a word; casting doubt on the reality of whether or not what MPs had just witnessed in the Commons actually occurred, and leaving her position completely untenable.
The sense of nootropic weirdness about the entire situation was heightened by the fact that the Daily Star produced a live feed to see what would wither first; Liz Truss’s glittering career as Prime Minister or a lettuce.
Eventually, Truss would later resign - and the lettuce would, remarkably, win.
It paved the way for a failed attempt by Boris Johnson to make a half-hearted comeback and open the door for our current Prime Minister, the Honourable member for Santa Monica Rishi Sunak.
Managed Decline…
Sunak’s short time in power up until now has been marred by the interminable accusations of ‘being boring’
The idea, of course, is that if you bore people enough through lack of histrionics and an absence of personality and drama, you will reinvigorate your standing among the general public and somehow naturally increase the poll ratings that have been languishing in the firey Pit of Hades for the entirity of 2022.
The problem is that since the beginning of his tenure as Prime Minister, the level of drama has been unrelenting [depending on how engaged you are with politics and whether or not you’ve actually bothered to pay tune in to the Whitehall horrow-show].
As a result of the minimal drama that has occurred however, he has looked both weak in his inability to deal with said drama, and at points naive in the expectation that his brand of politics would be replicated and be as slick as his online Chancellor persona previously lampooned on this page and elsewhere.
Sunak is, as I wrote, over-rated:
“…an entirely superficial character. Weighted on his contributions alone as Chancellor, you might even say he’s almost completely useless and elevated way beyond his capabilities - literally [as Chancellor], there was almost nothing he actually got right.”
Sunak is really a testament to good brand marketing where Hot Pink text memes like this [complete with signature]:
Quickly fall apart and become this when it all gets a bit too much for Sunak.
Sunak is naive to political movement, too - there’s an over-arching ineffectiveness to how he treats scandals.
If it wasn’t the re-appointment of Suella Braverman - designed with one intention in mind; to appease the ‘Far Right’ of the Party rather than down to competence - it was the continued allegations of bullying that permeate throughout Whitehall over the conduct of former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and current Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab.
And that’s before Sunak has had the chance to deal with more serious allegations surrounding sexual assault, rape and misconduct performed by his own MPs.
Sunak more or less sits on his hands either hoping that the problem solves itself, or that if he creates less drama and says little in response, the storm will eventually pass.
But it often doesn’t pass, and people often do notice.
Meanwhile, the problems evolve quietly in the background. Worse still is that this ‘quiet, managerial style’ is not working for the Conservatives - with some late into last week revealing the worst kept secret in Whitehall to The Times:
“We’ve got no ideas and people feel abandoned. We’ve been in power for 12 years. How can I possibly say to people on the doorstep don’t vote Labour because they’ll put your taxes up, they’ll say ‘what, like you’ve just done’? Vote Conservative we believe in housebuilding, ‘no you don’t, you’ve just abandoned the housebuilding targets’. Vote for the Conservatives for a strong economy, ‘what, the economy that’s in recession with 10 per cent inflation and low productivity’? It’s been possibly one of the least successful governments in modern Europe.”
This is indicative of the mood that has imbued the Conservative Party since the beginning of the year.
These are also problems that will continue long into the New Year after Christmas recess, too, but the biggest problem facing Sunak is less superficial than ‘which scandal X minister has presided over’ this week, or which PPE contract he’s having to justify presiding over as Chancellor the next, or which by-election he’s having to contest at some future date - as he may with more than a few in 2023.
As it was for Johnson towards the end, and Truss too, the biggest issue facing Sunak is paralysis and the government’s agenda coming to a halt amid a cost-of-living crisis that is only likely to get worse according to OBR forecasts.
Paralysis, in this context, is the government’s inability to enact its policies or its agenda, which Sunak - under his current administration - is finding difficult. Various votes, acts, bills, motions and amendments put forth by his own MPs have scunnered the government’s ability to proceed in any meaningful way, and as a result, nothing legislative - for their voters - is likely to ‘get done’ without significant concessions that Sunak is uncomfortable in giving to MPs that fundamentally hate his guts.
Indeed, Sunak’s authority is weakened - worse still, the public knows that his authority has weakened and since his elevation to power, Sunak has not reversed the fortunes of the Conservative Party at the polls and evidently at the ballots, either - as exemplified by the recent battering in the City of Chester by-election.
This will likely continue as crises continue; in April, for example, when much of the cost-of-living support is set to end [pending u-turns and feverish back-pedalling, obviously], political decision-making and continued scandal and paralysis will segue into the May elections that will likely be a repeat of what we witnessed in Chester albeit on a national level.
Another King’s Speech will be delivered and it will be met by another collective public shrug in response.
As a result of polls having remained fairly consistent since January at the beginning of this year, as public-supported strike action mounts and people begin seeing the real term effects of government policy, the calls for a general election will likely grow louder - and without being partisan, it is Labour’s to lose.
If - at the end of the day - you bring not just one, not two, but three different Prime Ministers to the fore in the same year, each with a different idea on how NOT to run the country than the last while deviating from the manifesto pledges that they committed to delivering when the country elected them in 2019, then you need to ask the country whether or not it approves before you attempt to proceed.
An irony [see also: ‘Hypocrisy’] exists in the fact that the Conservatives - particularly of the so-called ‘libertarian’ variety - complain of ‘nanny states’ and yet they’re happy to ‘take back control’ and out of voters’ hands if they can prevent the public at every stage from telling them that it would much rather proceed without them in charge.
For Sunak and the Conservative Party’s fortunes, there is no greater indicator of his failure than to see the number of donations to his party drop by 40% under his watch - probably [potentially] as a result of the dodgy, backroom swindling courtesy of the Moscow-linked Quintessentially head honco Ben Elliot being hounded out of the party by the ominous ‘Men in Grey Suits’ where he previously served as the Conservatives’ fixer, with access to an unscrupulous money network.
Adding to Sunak’s woes is the fact that there is a growing number of MPs who are simply refusing to stand at the next election - including, as noted right at the beginning of this piece, the fascinating Sir Charles Walker.
Yes, it’s falling apart.
Yes, it’s only a matter of time before it likely happens under Sunak.
No, there will not be another Conservative politician to pick up the pieces, as much as a certain marginal number of MPs think bringing back Boris Johnson will solve the party’s woes. [Here’s a clue: it won’t]
One just hopes that the mess left behind is not too difficult to clean up.
What happens now, then?
Regardless of your politics, 2022 will be remembered as the political year where many people finally ended up hating the Conservatives, for all of the many reasons they probably should have hated them in 2019.
Some may also have the outlying belief, however, that Britain got exactly what it deserved at the end of 2022, and what we receive now (and moving forward) as a kind of punishment for making the mistake of voting for them in the first place.
By spending so long forgiving Boris Johnson’s transgressions - that many of us predicted and warned about - some may feel that Britain doesn’t deserve better.
Indeed, Britain began forgiving Johnson almost as soon as he was elected when he eloped to a private island in the Caribbean while Cornwall, Kent, Suffolk and Norfolk were submerged under flood water. [In hindsight, it was probably an oracle of things to come]
The forgiveness - the deathly forgiveness; that did indeed result in bodies piling high in their thousands - however, likely came as a result of viewing events (and transgressions) through a pair of Brexit-tinted sunglasses that were applied to protect in denial voters from the searing, blinding darkness of the mythical sunlit uplands.
This is another matter entirely, though. This ‘End of Year’ article is not about Brexit nor should it be interpreted as such. This article is about ‘losing grip’ - loss in general, really.
Brexit is worth serving as a footnote to this; it offers some context. Not least because minds are changing on it - by the way of a phenomenon known as ‘Bregret’ that we may see gathering fervour in the New Year and may set the narrative for both parties to make their positions clear.
2022 offers context for why this may be happening.
Minds began to change in earnest around the same time as Liz Truss’ mini-budget revealed the brute force and initial purpose of Brexit, and it emerged that it was essentially nothing more than a heist on the British economy - that literally sent Britain down the sewer.
Incidentally, one of this page’s domestic personal heroes of 2022 is Feargal Sharkey, who has done more than most to highlight the sleeper issue of the toxicity of Britain’s water alongside other page heroes such as Surfers Against Sewage and journalists like Anna Isaac - just one of many exceptional female journalists whose voices have cut through the usually male-dominated media in the past year to deliver some almighty ‘green issue’ stories, like that of the virtually unseen ecological disaster near the Tees estuary that was easily was one of the best stories all year (that many of you probably had no idea about).
One of this page’s biggest losers - as has always been the case - is of course Nigel Farage, proof that if you make enough noise on social media, you will eventually make enough money selling personalised greetings cards and home-made gin to fund your campaign to become an MP only to end up losing to a man dressed as a dolphin.
Farage, of course, is one man and stands alone as a testament to ridicule, but he also represents every asinine MP from 2019 that was both clever and opportunistic enough not to stand as a then-Brexit Party candidate, but too stupid - like Ashfield MP Lee Anderson - to realise that he shouldn’t have bet his mortgage on Boris Johnson’s success.
Nigel Farage, incidentally, loved the near-total economic collapse. It was the best thing since 1986. Apparently.
Many pro-Brexit influencers and commentators said the same thing, even when most Britons worked out that it was a disaster.
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail spoke of it in superlatives on the front page.
It should be noted however, that it wasn’t necessarily a Brexit problem that the British public saw. Brexit, in fact, has been one long, grotesque and hideous distraction from many of the real problems in society.
What people saw with the fallout from that budget was a potential economic catastrophe averted, that was brought about by people who by their own admission - and Kwasi Kwarteng’s words - “got carried away” and subsequently left Britain with a £30 billon bill to add to its already-tanked economic woes.
By some recent accounts, they ‘got carried away’ somewhere between exclusive Mayfair clubs, £370,000 flights to Indonesia and a smog of cocaine at Chevening House, which might explain it all.
Britannia ‘unhinged’ as opposed to ‘unchained.’
It served as a culmination of what we see today in the form of strike action, an evolving cost-of-living crisis that has yet to fully materialise, wage stagnation, rise in inflation, living standards at their lowest in decades, a future looming housing and rent crisis, a virtually inaccessible NHS - to name but a few things that have mounted and come home to roost for the Conservatives after 12 years of bad management, and as a result of the long, lingering shadow of inequality and austerity - or, ‘Covid’s Little Helper.’
What people hate most about the Conservatives now though, after 2022, is that they leave Britain going into 2023 with an almost complete and total loss of hope. For younger people and future generations losing much of what some from the post-war generation took for granted and creating this inter-generational divide is one of the great sadnesses of 2022, that even Conservative think-tank directors like Robert Colville agree is the case.
The Conservatives know this, too.
It comes in the form of losing younger MPs like William Wragg, Chloe Smith, an MP like Christian Wakeford crossing the floor or [esp.] Dehenna Davison to fight the next election, or the progressive Conservative Bright Blue think-tank that has abandoned the party with the exit of its director Ryan Shorthouse spoken about in another piece, or the remarkable statistic that only 6% of its members are under the age of 25.
The future has all but abandoned the Conservatives because it feels very much like the Conservatives have more or less left Britain without one.
So naturally the general public feels that the only future for the Conservative Party is a Britain without it in power for at least as long as it takes for the generations it has ignored to come of age and look back at it as a dusty remnant of Britain’s politically questionable past, studied by political scientists like paleontologists brush the sand from fossils.
Yes, the next election may be an extinction level event for the Conservatives and incidentally, we may see that come to pass in 2023 with an early election. There may be factions, splinter groups, the pitiable re-appearance of the questionably funded Reform Party led by Farage - but it will only lead to the Conservative Party’s demise.
From this, if you’re opposed to the Conservatives, you can derive a small sense of hope from the possibility that they will be wiped out.
But.
It’s worth remembering that the biggest quandary for Brexit supporters and ‘Leave’ voters in general - was in answering the question about what happened after we left the EU.
Similarly, what does Britain want after we’ve deposed of the Conservatives?
The short answer is hope, and inspiring a nation in need of some hope with at least some semblance of a vision. The alternative is apathy and disillusionment.
Promising to get these things ‘done’ - whether it’s security for the future, greener generation that needs it the most, with an education system fit for purpose, caring for the most vulnerable in society, a functioning transport network, bridging the plethora of gaps in disparity between economic groups, and providing a national health service well-funded, protected and sacred, to name a few things - is the easy bit.
It’s the ‘how?’ and the all-important ‘working out bit’ that they struggle to provide. In the future, many would prefer to say - with confidence - that their lives are better as a result of having voted for X, and not left in the position where they’re often too ashamed to admit that they made a mistake.
We can’t know the future, of course. We can only take a leap of faith and hope for the best. But - we can almost certainly deduce from these last few years that it won’t be the Conservatives that give us it. Most would agree that they don’t deserve to.