IN the two weeks since Jeremy Hunt’s gutless Budget, the Tories have morphed from a mildly rattled Bonkers Party into a headless chicken version of the Monster Raving Loonies.
They have been driven mad by new polls signalling an election bloodbath — whenever Rishi Sunk decides to call it.
Revulsion over 14 years of flimsy Tory failure point to a landslide for unloved, unwanted Keir Starmer, condemning Britain to perhaps decades of woke Labour rule.
Only this can explain the panic-stricken plot to ditch Rishi, anoint sword-wielding gender warrior Penny Mordaunt as leader and force a snap election.
“Plot to crown Mordaunt as PM” scream the headlines.
But even her greatest fans admit the Royal Navy reservist is an “empty vessel” with zero political heft.
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Don’t worry about her wringing-wet ideas, they blather, we can sort those out later.
The Commons leader is not the only desperation candidate for a party set to lose three-quarters of the 365 Tory MPs elected in 2019, including half the Cabinet and most of its brightest stars.
Boris Johnson, who delivered that landslide, is on manoeuvres for a safe seat and a glorious Trump-like return to power.
Unlikely retreads such as David Cameron are also eyeing a comeback.
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“MPs who are usually calm have become angry and those who are usually angry are now boiling mad,” says a Government loyalist.
The good ship “Iron Lady” is sinking, torpedoed by its own grotesque incompetence.
Rishi is blamed not just for failing to save his party, but for helping to prepare its watery grave.
Hungry voters have waited patiently but in vain for red meat Conservative policies — tax cuts, defence, immigration and Brexit delivery.
Time has now run out.
This crisis is not all of Rishi’s making. He inherited a rubbish hand from Boris and Liz Truss and, yes, he has played it badly.
But the Tory rot set in long before he became an MP.
Collapse of trust
It began 14 years ago with David Cameron, aided and abetted by devious Chancellor George Osborne.
Basking in coalition with the absurd Lib Dems, they ditched Thatcherism, slavishly imitated New Labour on multiculturalism and human rights and hailed Tony Blair as “the Master”.
It was Cameron who vowed to reduce immigration to the “tens of thousands” then broke his promise.
And it is Cameron today, as Foreign Secretary, who is repeating his own government’s errors by diluting British support for Israel just as the country faces its biggest ever threat of extinction.
But his ultimate political crime, having lost the 2016 In-Out referendum, was to poison the Brexit well and turn the pro-Brussels “Blob” into a permanent block on British sovereignty.
[David Cameron's] six-year reign led to a collapse of trust in politics and politicians, matched only by BoJo’s brief tragi-comedy in Number Ten
Trevor Kavanagh
His six-year reign led to a collapse of trust in politics and politicians, matched only by BoJo’s brief tragi-comedy in Number Ten.
Yet the Westminster gossip mill now claims Lord Cameron is ready to hand back his brand new peerage and volunteer as “Call Me Dave” Mk II.
No wonder Rishi is reportedly so “depressed and exhausted” that he had to be talked out of calling a snap May 2 election to “get it over and done with”.
He is doomed to plod on, beyond hope of reasserting his fragile authority over a terminally divided party, forever braced for the assassin’s dagger.
Dismal legacy
In the meantime, the optimists who fell for BoJo’s squandered promise to “take back control” will switch pointlessly to Reform or stay home on election day.
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, more divided even than the Tories, will ride the wave into Downing Street and swiftly prove that they, like Welsh Labour, are unfit to govern.
Starmer will surrender to Brussels, dismantle Brexit, welcome more migrants and detonate an inevitable tax and welfare bombshell, making Labour as unwelcome as the floundering Tories.
It will be a dismal legacy to 14 years of Tory rule.
But the blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of Sunak.
It belongs squarely with the architects of failure . . . David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
FOR almost six months the BBC and human rights charities have taken Hamas estimates of 30,000 Gaza deaths as gospel. Especially the claim that 70 per cent were innocent civilians.
Now careful study of Hamas statistics by Pennsylvania University data crunchers suggest a far bigger proportion were Hamas terrorists killed in action.
It would not be the first time the Islamist group has been caught lying – first over butchering 1,200 innocent Israelis on October 7 and later by blaming Israel after a Hamas rocket wrecked a Gaza hospital.
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There have been shocking tragedies involving innocent women and children.
But it’s about time the Western media stopped treating Hamas propaganda as the unvarnished truth.