Patrick O’Flynn

Talk to almost any right-wing Tory MP these days and one of the first things they raise – with me anyway – is whether or not the Reform party is going to cost them their seats. ‘It makes no sense getting rid of people like me. The way we are going, we will only send 100 MPs back after the election and nearly all of them will be from the One Nation wing. They are the ones who tend to have the big majorities. So we get a Labour landslide and a left-wing Conservative party. How is that going to help anyone?’ one MP complained to me recently.

Labour’s new ‘stop the boats’ policy is a risible exercise in deception that will only ever fool the truly gullible. The centrepiece, announced by Keir Starmer today, is to set up a new ‘Border Security Command’, which will be an elite force empowered to use anti-terror laws to ‘smash the people-trafficking gangs’. Funding for the new force will come from savings made by scrapping immediately the Tory Rwanda removals policy, which Sir Keir branded a money-wasting gimmick that would never work. Starmer must know it is all flannel ‘That is my message to the smugglers. These shores will become hostile territory for you. We will find you, we will stop you, we will protect your victims,’ he added.

With the best will in the world, it is hard to see the defection of Natalie Elphicke MP to the Labour party as a noble deed. You could paper the walls with disobliging observations that Ms Elphicke has made about Sir Keir Starmer’s party, especially when it comes to her supposed driving mission to restore control and rigour to UK borders. The Tory benches these days are far too full of careerist hacks prepared to put their grandmothers up for sale if the price is right Comments such as this from 2022: ‘If Labour’s only policy is to rely on the French, then they are not serious about stopping small boats, tackling criminality, protecting people from smuggling gangs or saving lives in the Channel.

Tory supporters went to bed on Friday night believing that their man Andy Street would hold on handily in the West Midlands Metro Mayor contest, while also daring to dream that Susan Hall might just pull off a sensational win over Sadiq Khan in London. It has not played out like that. Not only did Labour handsomely win this year’s round of May elections, but it also won the expectations management battle. There really are no reasons to be cheerful for Conservative MPs In the West Midlands contest, a wafer-thin triumph for Labour’s Richard Parker over Street probably doesn’t tell us much about the general election results to come later in the year in that battleground region.

Given the universal forecasts of the Tories taking a proper pasting in yesterday’s elections, it is quite something for Rishi Sunak’s party to have done worse than expected. But a truly dismal result in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election, coupled with early council results indicating the party could end up losing half of the thousand or so seats it was defending, show that Sunak has managed to do just that. In Blackpool, the Conservatives picked up just 3,218 votes, compared to 16,247 at the 2019 general election. Labour took the seat with 10,825 votes, compared to the 12,557 it lost with in 2019. Is it a crumb of comfort that apathy could therefore be said to be the true winner of the by-election? Hardly.

There is an old Rowan Atkinson joke about the secret to good comedy timing in which Atkinson says the word 'timing' at just the wrong moment. Timing is important in politics too. As Harold Macmillan observed of Anthony Eden’s brief and unhappy premiership: 'He was trained to win the Derby in 1938. Unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955.' Timing is just as crucial when it comes to political stances, too, as it is for personnel matters. When William Hague made his controversial 'foreign land' speech in 2001 or when Michael Howard asked the electorate 'are you thinking what we’re thinking?' about immigration in 2005, much of the nation was still under the Blairite spell. As such, these were not winning gambits.

If you have been doing as badly as Rishi Sunak has as prime minister, then it doesn’t take much to register a notable improvement. Yet there is no point in his detractors denying that over the past week he has done just that. First, he got stuck into the issue of Britain’s burgeoning ‘sick note culture’. Left-wing brickbats predictably followed. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey accused him of ‘attempting to blame the British people for his own government’s failures’, while Labour’s Matthew Pennycook complained that he was pursuing a ‘cheap headline’. But headlines are headlines and if they are cheap then so much the better in these cash-strapped days. Most people will have agreed with Sunak.

Like a cowboy builder sucking his teeth about unanticipated complications on the job, Rishi Sunak has just pushed back another deadline. The Prime Minister was meant to get flights off to Rwanda this spring but has now given himself until July. And this isn’t even the main job. The actual grand design he is supposed to be working towards is to 'stop the boats'. For Labour a no-score draw on the issue will be a favourable result If sending irregular migrants off to Rwanda helps secure that then so much the better, but it would be remiss not to point out that illegal arrivals via cross-Channel dinghies have increased this year, more than wiping out the limited and wind-assisted progress made in 2023.

In economics, there is a phenomenon known as ‘automatic stabilisers’, which kick in at the onset of a recession. Without politicians having to do anything, state spending on out-of-work benefits increases while the amount of money taken off private citizens in taxes decreases, thereby preventing the economy from going into freefall. Hence wild fluctuations in GDP are constrained. We will shortly discover whether there is an automatic stabiliser in the UK electoral system. Most polls are indicating that Labour will go from the 202 seats they won in 2019, to more than 400 at the looming election. One poll this week even indicates that 500+ is on the cards for Keir Starmer’s party.

The great trans hoax is coming to an end. The idea of thousands of people being ‘trapped’ in the wrong body is an interpretation of gender dysphoria that is increasingly being seen as damaging nonsense. The invasive treatment regimes, particularly for teenagers, carried out by the NHS, are unravelling too. And so is the claim that women don’t need protected spaces, separate from biological males. Giving campaign groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall influence in setting public policy in this area is looking more and more like the terrible mistake that many of us have long argued it was.

The herd of Conservative MPs is on the move again, this time obediently setting off towards the abattoir in which the careers of most will meet a grisly end. When historians come to write their accounts of the Conservative administrations of 2015-24, they will have a bewildering variety of ‘worst weeks’ to choose from, but the past seven days will have a strong claim to mark the moment when the fight went out of the parliamentary Conservative party and it became resigned to its fate. Rishi Sunak achieved one thing of note this week Two MRP polls with huge samples offering the possibility of constituency-level projections have offered a new range of likely outcomes. The first suggested just 98 Conservative MPs will be elected into the next parliament.

Is there anyone in Britain who believes that Rishi Sunak will take us out of the European Convention on Human Rights? If there is then that person may also still think they got an absolute bargain when they paid a man in a pub £10,000 in cash to take ownership of Tower Bridge. For the Prime Minister to airily imply that he is ready to take the UK out of the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its supervisory court in Strasbourg amounts to a new low point in his parlous handling of the small boats crisis.

Were I to tell you that the most significant political figure of his age celebrates a landmark birthday this week, you’d probably work out that I could not be referring to Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer. There would be an argument for suspecting I might be talking about Boris Johnson, given that he was born in 1964 and presided over the departure of the UK from the EU. But no, his 60th birthday does not fall until June – beaten to it by more than two months by Nigel Farage, who chalks up the big six-o on Wednesday. Though we could say that Brexit is a child with two fathers, there really can be no contest as to which was in loco parentis from the earliest days.

By their rugby analogies shall ye know them: when Boris Johnson was asked about his chance of becoming prime minister, he spoke of the 'the ball coming loose at the back of the scrum'. That characterisation sought to disguise his burning passion to reach the top. Getting to be PM would be the result of a mere happy turn of events and not something he would ever plot for, he implied. No doubt this will have prompted hollow laughter among those previously exposed to the white heat of his ambition. Sunak has confirmed himself as being absolutely terrible at politics But it turns out that Rishi Sunak’s capacity for self-delusion is still greater. For he has just told William Hague that inheriting the keys to Number 10 when he did amounted to 'the worst hospital pass'.

Abdul Ezedi is dead and gone. The Clapham acid attacker was laid to rest in a Muslim burial at a cemetery in east London after a funeral at a mosque in the west of the capital. This is what his family and friends wanted for him. Given that we know he was a loyal customer of his local halal butchers in Newcastle right up until the end, we must presume it is what he would have wanted for himself too. Head-in-the-clouds vicars are a longstanding stereotype. But judges are supposed to be different Even the liberal dolts of our establishment – church leaders, immigration judges and the like – appear to have come round to the view that he was never really a Christian.

Is Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer right to have limited the access to and sway held over him by Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence? Lady Lawrence, a Labour peer who was made the party’s race relations adviser by Starmer after he became leader early in 2020, is in no doubt that this is what has happened in recent weeks. According to the Times, she told a meeting with shadow ministers and senior party officials, 'I wish Keir listened to me' and blamed 'gatekeepers' around the Labour leader for obstructing her work.