Prime Minister the Tories want is very different to one country wants
THERE is always some grumbling when a small group of people get to choose the next Prime Minister.
In recent days 357 Tory MPs have decided who should make it to the final two candidates.
And now around 180,000 Conservative Party members are going to decide which of the two candidates put forward should be party leader and therefore Prime Minister.
People complain about this situation. But unless you want to radically change the party and voting systems then they’re what we’re stuck with. Flaws and all.
But the Conservative Party has some big problems of its own.
Obviously the first one is whether to elect Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss.
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Who is most competent, most ideologically sound and most likely to lead well?
All these questions and more should weigh on the membership.
But there is another consideration.
Because the party membership and the rest of the country are two very different things.
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It is possible for either candidate to make love to the Tory grassroots but go down like a dose of monkeypox with the public.
This is one of the dynamics that makes the race so interesting.
Because the Conservative grassroots want a lot of things the wider public do not.
For instance, they usually want to see lower taxes and lower public spending.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak was responsible for one of the biggest spending splurges in modern British history.
The furlough scheme got millions of people through the pandemic.
But it has added hugely to the national debt and to the stagnation this country is going through.
Liz Truss can appeal to the grassroots by attacking Rishi for this.
But while the grassroots might love this, the wider country probably may not.
They recognise that the Covid era was unusual and called for unusual measures.
If anyone looks like they are introducing “austerity” we will get what we got in the Cameron years, with lots of talk about “austerity” but almost none of it actually occurring.
But there is something even more uneasy about this race than the Conservative Party itself realises.
The parliamentary party just carried out the political assassination of their most high-profile figure.
Boris Johnson had been on our televisions for decades.
From the time he first dominated Have I Got News For You (way back when it was still funny) everybody knew him.
As Mayor of London he was a one-man publicity hoover.
He couldn’t do anything without people laughing fondly.
He was larger than life.
The public were on first name terms with him. Like Kylie.
As Prime Minister he seemed not to be up to the job.
He never grew into it, was lazy, dishonest and indecisive.
So the party got rid of him.
But the two people they have now offered up as replacements leave a lot of questions around them.
Sunak became fairly well known through the pandemic, seeming to give a reassuring sense of calm through very troubling times.
Truss is probably less well known among the public.
That is understandable in an era where the job of Foreign Secretary is really held by the PM. As Boris’s trips to Ukraine showed.
But neither of these people are really known to the public.
In the coming weeks they are going to try to become better known. But it is going to be a crash course for the party.
And at the end of it the country is going to have an even bigger crash course as we try to work out whether this person is really someone we want to keep leading the country.
Name a deputy
I worry about the party membership.
Actually, more than that, I distrust them. They have given us too many duff leaders in the past.
Anyone who thinks the party is ruthlessly efficient has never studied the actual party.
Don’t forget, in Parliament and in the party they offered us John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith and Theresa May for Prime Minister.
I think Sunak has more chance than Truss to appeal to the nation. And at least he wasn’t a Remainer in 2016.
But I worry we need more from him.
What we see may be mainly good. But we haven’t seen much. The party and the country need reassurance.
As I see it he needs to name a deputy — fast. Someone who can reassure the grassroots, like John Prescott did for Tony Blair.
That appointment was a masterstroke by Blair and the union held together for a decade with hardly a chink of light between them.
Rishi should look for someone to perform a similar role. Someone who the country knows, who the party trusts.
After all, it’s not just the party we’re talking about. It’s our whole country.
The party needs to get it right this time. Otherwise, at the next election, they will be toast, and will deserve to be.
Quidditch players bad for our ’elf
ADULT readers may not be aware that there are actual real-life people, including grown-ups, who play Quidditch.
This is the fictional game played by the invented characters in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
Since the books and films came out some real people (who, without doubt, definitely have a life) have taken up the “sport”.
Despite the fact that in the series it is played on flying brooms and with a darting golden “snitch” ball.
There are now US Quidditch and Major League Quidditch and the World Quidditch Championships.
But like everything else involving Rowling, there has been an upset. Because, of course, the genius who invented Harry Potter is today deemed controversial.
Talentless actors such as Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, who played Harry and Hermoine in the films and who would be unemployed if it were not for Rowling, have turned against the author.
And now the people who like to play Quidditch have decided they need to rename the game in order to “distance themselves” from JK.
All this because Rowling thinks there are men and women, and that men who put on a dress do not automatically become women.
So apparently the game will be renamed Quadball. If I were them I’d settle for Oddball.
We can probably expect to hear of Dobby the house-elf denouncing Rowling any day now.
But what a world we live in, where the fantasy of Rowling seems real to so many people.
While back in the real world, we are being told to believe fantastical things and warned of expulsion (just as they have done to Rowling) if we do not.
IT’S ALL GONG WRONG
I SEE that transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has been nominated for an award.
The University of Pennsylvania has put the swimmer forward for the 2022 National Collegiate Athletic Association Woman of the Year. I would expect Thomas to romp to victory.
In 2015, when Bruce Jenner announced that he was becoming Caitlyn Jenner, he did a clean sweep of the award season.
Jenner was nominated for Time magazine’s Person of the Year, honoured by Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year and won a gong for courage from America’s top sports awards show.
I would expect similar success for Thomas.
Expect her to be named “greatest sportswoman of the year”, “greatest sportswoman in the world” and eventually “Sportswoman of the millennium”.
Thomas should clear the mantelpiece for the number of awards that will be coming in.
All so that people can virtue signal about something that is completely and transparently unfair.
Jac is losing favour
I KEEP a small notebook on overrated world leaders, which fills up quite fast.
And one of the world leaders who has been most overrated in recent times has been New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern.
From the moment she entered office, people praised her for her emotional intelligence, empathy and compassion.
Now it seems New Zealanders are finally turning on their leader.
Indeed, she was asked this week what it was like being more popular abroad than at home.
She’s the sort of person who would win a landslide if she ran in Islington North or Brighton.
But the people of New Zealand have had to put up with her repeated lockdowns.
They have had to suffer through her zero-Covid policy.
And they have seen their country’s tourism industry and international reputation trashed.
A new poll this week showed over half of the country believe it is going in the wrong direction and that the centre-right parties would win comfortably if there was an election now.
As an expert on the genre, I might say one of the things that denotes a truly world-class overrated leader is someone who is great at pretending to care at press conferences, who weeps, chokes up and more.
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But who shows zero compassion for actual people.
On these criteria, if no other, Ardern is a world leader.