Tories

Political Cabinet on Tuesday was a fascinating occasion, as I say in The Sun, and not just because Andrea Leadsom took the opportunity to tell Theresa May she had a wonderful smile.  The Cabinet were given a detailed presentation on the state of public opinion—and bits of it made for grim reading for them. David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary, summed up the mood of the meeting when he told Theresa May, to chuckles, that his first impression from all the data was that she shouldn’t call an election anytime soon. The problem for the Tories is that the voters are wary of their values and fed up with austerity.

As from the Manchester conference hall I watched Theresa May’s big moment falling apart, as I buried my head in my hands while her agonies multiplied, I suppose I thought this could spell the end for her premiership. But even as I thought that, then reminded myself that the same failure of the larynx has afflicted me in front of a big audience and could strike anyone and is in itself meaningless, I knew such an outcome would be unjust. There may be reasons why the Tories should find a new leader, but the triple-whammy of a frog in the throat, some joker’s idiotic stunt, and the failure of two magnetic letters to stick to a board, can hardly count among them.

One of the reasons that coalition governments are so unusual in Britain is that both main parties are coalitions themselves. The Tories have long been a party of both social conservatives and libertarians, Eurosceptics and Europhiles, buccaneering free traders and economic nationalists. Labour has always brought together Methodists and Marxists, middle-class liberals and working-class trade unionists, hawks and doves. These internal alliances mean the parties mostly avoid the need for an external one. But the Labour and Conservative coalitions are nearing breaking point. Labour’s problem is that its far left now dominates, making the party unbalanced. The two years since Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership have seen his wing gain ever more control.

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with 'memes' - I believe they're called - similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’. https://twitter.com/Activate_uk_net/status/902284187687780353 Yeah, I wouldn't be too hopeful on that one to be honest.

There are three areas on which the EU insists that the Brexit negotiations must make progress on, before proper trade talks can start: the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the Irish border. Today, the Irish PM said that no progress had been made on this issue, that the Brexiteers had had 14 months to devise a plan and hadn’t come up with anything adequate. Implicit in the Taoiseach’s speech is a threat to block the start of trade talks this autumn. If Dublin doesn’t think any progress had been made on the border question, the European Commission is highly unlikely to recommend to the Council that the EU moves on to the next stage of the negotiations.

Who will be the next Tory leader? I keep asking the senior contenders over breakfast after the show or at those now notorious summer parties. And they all say the same thing: she will stay for a couple of years and then it will be somebody we haven’t thought of yet. It’s already too late, they say, for MPs in their 50s and 60s. Predicting politics these days is like juggling greased goldfish… but I pass this on for what it’s worth.

Nicky Morgan's election as chair of the Treasury Select Committee will doubtless be written into a narrative of Remainers taking key parliamentary positions overseeing Brexit. There's also a story to be told about the power of the Tory moderates: as well as Morgan, Rob Halfon took the education chair, and Tom Tugendhat got foreign affairs.   But what interests me here is another aspect of Morgan's arrival at the TSC. Perhaps the most important parliamentary committee is now run by someone who takes a gloriously sensible view of immigration.

Gay lefties have hated gay Tories ever since learning of their existence. The concept baffles them, like pro-life women or alcohol-free wine. Those with long memories are aware of the Conservative Party's ugly record on gay equality. This is the party of Section 28, of differential consent laws, of fretting about children 'being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay'. But gay Tories, having largely rehabilitated their party and with many of the major gay rights battles settled favourably, hoped the rainbow flag might finally have space for a stripe of blue.

It was better from Theresa May today. She was combative, prickly and forceful at PMQs. The ship is moving on a steadier course. And two toxic enemies have returned to the fold. In the days following the election, both Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan were ‘helpfully’ suggesting a possible timetable for Mrs May’s departure. Today they both asked supportive questions. And Mrs May read out the answers, tight-lipped. Only those within a yard of her could hear her molars grinding. The Labour leader got a rather glum cheer from his party. He suggested that the PM should fund a pay-rise for nurses because ‘she seems to have found a billion pounds to save her own job.’ As usual, he had a missive of woe to delight us with.

This first week back in Parliament has proved quite how fragile the government’s power is. It may be able to govern in a technical sense - announcing bills, occupying Downing Street, and so on - but it cannot guarantee that it will get what it wants in the Commons. Having to accept the Stella Creasy amendment on free abortions for women from Northern Ireland shows that, but this is just the start of a legislative free-for-all in which MPs from all parties are able to propose changes to any bill ministers put forward, and know that they stand an unusual chance of success. It just takes a handful of Tory MPs to sympathise with these changes, and then the government must either accept the amendment or face humiliation and defeat in a successful rebellion.

Can you remember what was in this week’s Queen’s Speech? Boris Johnson couldn’t on the day it was unveiled, making a total mess of trying to sell it on Radio 4’s PM programme. But as the week draws to an end, the main question about the Speech is whether it will pass unamended, not whether the legislation it includes will make much of a difference.  But is a ‘threadbare speech’ really such a bad thing? Governments of all hues suffer from a compulsive disorder that leads them to legislate merely for the sake of it.

Theresa May was rightly criticised for her response to the Grenfell Tower blaze. The Prime Minister’s decision not to initially meet survivors or relatives of those killed looked dreadful, and in the days after the fire there was a real risk that what happened was being pinned squarely on the Tories. While it was right to criticise May for her initial failings though, it also seems fair to say that the Prime Minister’s statement this morning was faultless - at least in terms of helping those on the ground in Kensington. Yet her remarks now raise troubling questions about how many other blocks like Grenfell Tower there are across Britain. For those affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, it is clear the Government is determined to make up for lost time.