Columns

Oppositions don’t win elections — governments lose them. This has long been the Westminster wisdom. But the truth is that oppositions can lose elections, too: they must pass a basic competency test to be considered for office. Today, however, no party resembles a credible opposition to the Tories, let alone a government in waiting. What makes this absence so striking is that the government is in such a perilous position. It must somehow implement Brexit. Leaving the EU will crowd out Theresa May’s domestic priorities and reveal all the divisions in the Tory party over what kind of relationship with the EU the UK should seek. As one Tory with good links to No.

On Wednesday 19 October at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London, a reception was held to celebrate Oscar Wilde’s birthday. Invited by the excellent Gyles Brandreth, I arrived in good time. But as I approached the doors of the reception room, something stopped me. These are the facts. But what is the explanation? A few months ago Boris Johnson wrote two newspaper columns, one in favour of a proposition, one against. As an exercise in clearing one’s mind, the approach has much to commend it. So, to clear my own mind, let me try the same plan. There follow two alternative submissions of the diary item that could follow the first two paragraphs above. Version One [CONTINUES] [NEW PAR] I struggle to explain.

I never really agreed with the central-thesis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I have no great animus against the number — it does its job, filling that yawning gap between 41 and 43. But I had never thought it actually-special until the beginning of this week. That’s when I read that the Conservative Party was 17 points ahead in the latest opinion polls, on 42 per cent. A remarkable figure. I suppose you can argue that it says more about the current state of the Labour party than it does about Theresa May’s stewardship of the country.

Perhaps it’s age, perhaps disillusion, or perhaps party conferences really aren’t what they used to be, but I have struggled this autumn against something that has seemed to be carrying me away. As with a swimmer drawn from the shore by a strong current he cannot see, I’m trying not to leave but the people on the beach seem to be getting smaller, and the holiday noise, the shouts and laughter, grows faint. I knew my duty on arriving on the south coast for the Liberal Democrats’ annual gathering. It was to sit through conference debates in the vile windowless warehouse that is the Brighton Centre, scarring the waterfront with a great slab of concrete that’s blind to the sea, and take the temperature of a party in sharply reduced circumstances.

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against accepting even a few hundred migrants, as per the European Union’s insistence. That poll result must have been gravid with nostalgia for Magyars over the age of about 35. They will remember that sort of election result being de rigueur, rather than astonishing. Indeed, in 1985 the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party succeeded in capturing 98.8 per cent of the popular vote — and even this was a bit of a disappointment, because in 1980 it had pulled in 99.3 per cent. On both occasions the ruling party was aided, of course, by the lack of an alternative on the ballot paper.

What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably riveting Philip Hammond speech, and head instead for the fringe event run by the Bruges Group starring me, Professor David Myddelton and Charles Moore. I can’t speak for my performance (modesty forbids me) but my fellow panellists were brilliant: funny, incisive and as optimistic as you’d expect of a pair of ardent Brexiteers addressing the victorious home crowd for probably the first time since that happy day in June. ‘Which of us here could ever have imagined that we’re actually part of the majority: the 52 per cent?’ I asked. And lots of people clapped at the wonderful warm feeling this gave them. But then I introduced a worm into their apple.