The Westminster elections are only a week away and the Tory party is battling the odds with all the grace of Wile E Coyote running off a cliff, dangling in mid-air before realising he is about to plunge into a chasm, while the Road Runner grins and goes “Beep-beep!”. As the Tories pile cartoon calamity on disaster and the staff snag the candlesticks on the way out, a serene Keir Starmer and co are hardly bothered to utter a beep.
Tired of summoning up 10 impossible policies before breakfast, the geniuses at Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) are mounting their own Project Fear. This was always going to be tricky. After a decade of Tory slapstick how do you induce nightmares about the legendarily boring, resolutely moderate Starmer, someone who says things such as “There is a degree of steadfast seriousness that is much needed across the country”, someone who reckons his slogan could be “Make Britain Serious Again”?
What CCHQ does is point to the polls predicting a 200-seat overall majority for Starmer’s party (and maybe fewer than 100 seats for the Conservatives), call it something meaningless such as a “supermajority” and pronounce the demise of that much-cherished British parliamentary democracy. Michael McDowell did something similar here in 2002 when he shinned up a lamp-post with the PDs’ “One-Party Government? No Thanks!”........