No. 68 - Your Moment of Decision, James?

Dear James, 

Your moment of decision has arrived. Yesterday evening Boris Johnson’s government issued an ultimatum to Tory MPs. If they vote against the government, the whip will be removed. That means immediate suspension followed by de-selection i.e. any waverers will be booted out of the party at the next election.  I bet you never thought you would be faced with this dilemma when you first entered parliament in 2015. 

But face it you must. You have to decide whether you keep your present job or lose it. If you want to keep it you will have to support a government that is willing to hold the whole nation to ransom. The pistol is to our head – not the EU’s. This is the ultimate kamikaze tactic of the fanatics in the bunker. Be prepared to destroy yourself and the nation in the interests of a higher ‘vision’ i.e the quitting of the largest free-trade area in world history. 

When you take the King’s Shilling and bow to Boris’s ultimatum, you will be committing two major errors. Firstly you will be conniving with the reduction of your party into an extreme, hard right Brexit party aka the ERG. Secondly, you will be voting in your own personal interests rather than the interests of the nation as a whole. No matter how much you send out letters like your last which attempts to justify every recent Cummings anti-democratic move, you will have to reveal your real self this week. You will have to explain to your constituents how you can accept exposing us all to the calamity of a no-deal Brexit when the EU says no to Boris’s feeble pretence at strong arm tactics. 

In reality, Boris’s government is running scared and continues to refuse to risk exposing itself to public scrutiny. It is in bunker mode carrying out a kind of Tory Schlieffen Plan concocted by Dominic Cummings, the brain behind the Boris bravado. As A.J.P Taylor once famously said, the First World War was started because of railway timetables. I think your Tory Party civil war is running along the same tracks. That track probably leads directly to a general election in which your party will masquerade as the ‘People versus Parliament’. Your craven Ministers such as Nicky Morgan, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid, Amber Rudd and Matt Hancock – all of whom in very recent times said that prorogation would be totally inadmissible – are presiding in a government that has done precisely that. To quote just one of them, Matt Hancock on June 6th, “A policy on Brexit to prorogue parliament would mean the end of the Conservative party as a serious party of government.” To watch them and hear their weasel words at the weekend was embarrassing If not shameful.

So James, as I have predicted several times in my letters to you, we shall probably soon see the final split in the Tory Party. From being a One Nation Party it has been hijacked by the ERG and you will have to decide whether you back the latter or attempt to keep your party as a broad and ultimately electable party. 

You say in your recent letter that ‘we have just simplified the position that was always the reality before us’. Unfortunately the ‘real reality’ that you seem to be determined to ignore is that the EU will not be intimidated by the Boris Bravado. The ‘simplification’ is in fact as I described it below. It is the question of whether you become a paid up member of the ERG or remain a One Nation Tory of old? That is some choice! 

So please spare us the regurgitating of Tory propaganda. Try to think for yourself. Vote with your conscience and with the National Interest in mind. I guess however, that I am whistling in the wind. You aspire to being a career politician and you have a wife and family to take care of. So I guess you will take the easy route to personal advancement. The path of least resistance. 

That is disappointing. I used to believe that politicians, in moments of severe national crisis, had principles higher than their particular party interests. At the moment your only principle seems to be to stay loyal to a party that is no longer the party which you joined several years ago, a party that, in your short time as an MP,  has fundamentally changed in content, tone and philosophy .

I suppose it is too much to ask you to be a hero in such circumstances. But that is precisely what our nation needs at this moment of extreme danger. 

Tant pis!

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent