No.229 - Shropshire North: The Boris Puffball Vanishes into Thin Air!
Dear James,
The scene was set. The blue balloon with ‘Boris’s Bubble’ scrawled on its side awaited the final thrust. The ‘coup de grace’ came at the point of a hastily contrived, orange needle which, wielded by Helen Morgan, the extraordinary winner of Thursday’s by-election in North Shropshire, exploded the balloon into instant nothingness. Helen stepped back, smiled broadly. A wall of Lib-Dem banners waved behind her. Something special had just happened. It was the perfect metaphor. The inflated Boris puffball had vanished into thin air. The ‘Boris Bubble’ was no more.
James, the people have spoken. Or rather your people have spoken. The people in North Shropshire, the deepest of deep blue Tory shires, voted (or abstained) on Thursday for change. Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem candidate, won 17,957 votes, ahead of the Conservatives on 12,032, a majority of 5,925. Turnout was 46.3%. In the last election, the disgraced Owen Paterson won the seat with a majority of 23,000. The swing to the lib-Dems this time was 34% which is the worst by-election result since John Major’s 1993 drubbing in Christchurch. The public has cottoned on to Boris. The man has been finally revealed as an emperor without clothes. And the result puts even your own incumbency in another deep blue constituency in jeopardy. Time for a rethink, James? Time to discover what kind of Tory you really are?
The nation is angry. It’s angry with your party’s behaviour and angry with your party’s leadership. This weekend, the words ‘earthquake’, ‘watershed’, ‘tipping-point’ and ‘last chance saloon’ are making the rounds. For the moment let’s take these with proverbial pinch of salt for it was a by-election and these are notorious for slapping down poorly performing governments. However, this is the first time that the Tories have failed to win North Shropshire since the Great Reform Act of 1832. This result was not normal. This was a tectonic plate shifting beneath the Westminster political bedrock.
Yesterday, in response to this extraordinary earth tremor, Boris stood before Sam Coates of Sky and, unchanged and unchangeable, blathered into his extra large facemask. ‘People have been having a constant litany of stuff- stuff about politics and politicians; stuff that isn’t about them, and isn’t about things that we can do to make life better,” So it’s the people who are wrong is it Boris? The voters are concentrating on the wrong issues? As usual Boris, doesn’t get it. He is cut off from truth. Government is as much about procedures and process as it is about content or policy. Process contains expectations of honesty, integrity, openness and competency all of which have been absent in Boris’s and your government. That message has at last ‘cut through’. The people have said that Boris must go. The people want a vestige of normal politics back.
Something else happened in Shropshire that should worry you, James. Your party has never had a full majority in our country (even Brexit was won by only 37% of the electorate). The problem has been that the opposition has always been divided into Labour, Lib-Dems and Greens. The anger and frustration in North Shropshire was so acute that you could hear the cry, ‘Do what it takes to get the Tories out.’ If that transfers to the national level, the Lib-Dems and Labour could align and fight the next election as part of a great tactical voting alliance? That could mean the first meaningful change in British politics for decades. By then the devastation caused by successive Tory governments will be plain to see. By then a new political class may start to unravel the deepest constitutional problems that have plagued our nation for the last fifty years; the problems of deep inequalities, massive north south discrepancies, under investment in education and medicine and the continuous erosion of our laws and social mobility.
Yesterday James, your party’s ‘big beasts’ were saying that Boris could be gone in a year. Your colleagues are out on manoeuvers. Liz Truss, the beloved of your shire members, is pirouetting before the camera while Rishi Sunak, the heir presumptive and Jeremy Hunt, the dark horse, are playing deeper games.
And you, James? The political bronco is about to buck once more. Political skulls may be cracked, bones may be broken. You do however, have one advantage. That of an infinitely flexible, unimpaired by principle, political spine. Even so, you’d better hang on tight!
BH – Your Concerned Constituent.