A Hard Sell

Anyone who has had any truck with UK Tories over the decades knows that large numbers of them are devious, duplicitous, slimy, oleaginous, frankly repellent and utterly treacherous. But it didn’t matter because, when all else failed, their selling point was competence. After less than three years of Theresa May they’re now in the difficult position of having to market a not obviously winning combination of incompetence-and-betrayal.

Thursday’s local elections in England were the first test of this new strategy. The Conservative Party lost over 1,300 seats. To Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party? No. His month-old party was not on the ballot. To Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party? No. Labour managed to lose seats itself, and in fact its share of the vote was no higher than the Tories – 28 per cent. In effect, Theresa May managed to lose to no one. If she were facing no one on Centre Court at Wimbledon, she would still get totaled in straight sets.

The custom among metropolitan party bigwigs after a clobbering in the local or Euro votes is to say that none of these other elections matter a jot or tittle. They’re just “protest votes”. All that counts is the national election for the national parliament at Westminster – because that’s when voters are deciding who actually governs the country. This time round there are two problems with that traditional analysis: First, the central issue for Tory electors is the party’s inability to govern, in the sense of being able to effect the most consequential issue before it. And secondly this month’s European elections are a literal protest vote, pure and simple. The UK wasn’t even supposed to be participating, because it had announced its departure from the EU would occur in March 2019. But March came and went, and the Eurocrats, who are enjoying the implosion of Britain’s reputation as a mature stable democracy, agreed to let the fainthearted secessionist stay in the club for another six months. So whichever Britons are elected to the European Parliament on May 23rd will theoretically be there not to participate in the business of the EU, but just to fill the seats until – on its fifth, seventh, twelfth, thirty-ninth vote at Westminster – Mrs May’s ersatz “withdrawal agreement” finally passes the House of Commons.

Nigel Farage has very cunningly seized the opportunity of an election that has no practical purpose and formed a single-issue party to ensure that Mrs May’s ghastly hollow nothing of a ministry can be punished to the fullest extent. On present polling evidence, he’s on course to do just that.

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See Also:

(1) Farage scorns ‘BEGGING’ Theresa May for calling ‘unelected’ Juncker ‘your excellency’

(2) May snubbed by Brussels as leaders turn back on UK – ‘More important!’

(3) May & Steele?

(4) Brussels rocked by ‘DESPAIR’ over future role of Farage and Boris Johnson

(5) Europe slides into the poor house