Sam Ashworth-Hayes

If you ask a typical member of the Conservative party what they want Britain to look like, you’ll get the usual list: low taxes, high growth, strong borders, low crime, sensible regulation, green countryside. If you ask a Conservative MP how Britain might achieve these things, you’ll get a long list of excuses: it simply can’t be done, it’s a bit more complicated than that, the budget isn’t there. And yet we know for a fact that these things are possible because we can see them elsewhere. Our neighbours are wealthier than us, our politicians promise to copy Australia’s immigration system, and Singapore and Japan show that crime is not an immutable fact of life.

In the hierarchy of excuses for tipping Britain into a month of blackouts, ‘the Met Office didn’t say winter would be cold’ must surely rank among the most abject possible. And yet this seems to be the story the government is running with; faced with the possibility of having to implement rolling power cuts, Conservatives are briefing that forecasters working from home has led to shoddy predictions, with the wise cabinet ministers accordingly caught out by the arrival of ice and snow. In December. In Britain. To blame any of this on Met Office staff working from home this is beyond ludicrous Britain burned through a fifth of its gas storage in the past week.

To understand the Conservative party’s approach to government, it’s useful to think of there being two Britains. This is something British people love to do; we divide the country into North and South, rich and poor, London and not. The division that matters for the Conservatives, however, is a little different. It’s not a matter of economics or geography, but age. It’s the divide between Old Britain and Young Britain. Old Britain, with the aid of the Conservative party, is very slowly throttling Young Britain The Conservative electoral strategy is simple and straightforward: it will do whatever it needs to win the votes of Old Britain, and it will do so at the cost of Young Britain.

What’s the most important story in Britain over the last 25 years? The financial crisis? Brexit? These events both changed our country dramatically. But neither has had such a big impact on the make-up of Britain than immigration. In 1991, Britain’s foreign-born residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population. In 2021, one in six people (16.8 per cent) living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, according to Census data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. The pace of change is both staggering and accelerating. Some four in ten of that foreign-born population arrived over the last decade. To put this into context, from 1981 to 1990, total net migration of non-UK citizens totalled 445,000.

Suella Braverman is in the firing line. But when she took to her feet in the Commons yesterday, she showed exactly why there is so much pressure on Rishi Sunak to get rid of her: Braverman actually wants to reduce illegal immigration. The Home Secretary's critics have condemned her for using the word 'invasion'. 'No responsible person should ever use language that risks inciting hostility and hate,' says Amnesty International. The problem is that Braverman’s statement is essentially correct. When she asks MPs to 'stop pretending they are all refugees in distress, the whole country knows that is not true', she is not engaging in 'far-right and inflammatory rhetoric', as one SNP MP claimed. She is highlighting the failures of twenty years and counting of British government policy.

It’s finally happened. After months of legal wrangling, Twitter has fallen. All hail King Elon; the 'bird is freed'. The executives running the show have been defenestrated, including CEO Parag Agrawal and head of safety Vijaya Gadda. Around the virtual watering hole, skittish packs of activists watch nervously as the ground shakes; Donald Trump, the biggest of the Twitter big beasts is set to make his return. And isn’t the wailing glorious? Well yes, but. Basing your politics around things your opponents dislike is a trap that it’s easy to fall into. Conservatism is not a negative image of progressivism, but an alternative philosophical perspective with its own positive vision of what the world should look like.

As the Conservative party holds its third leadership contest in four years, Britain is not experiencing déjà vu; we’re just stuck on square one. The three frontrunners consist of the previous contest’s runners-up, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Boris Johnson, the man they previously deposed. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, the Conservative party lost its marbles a long way back. These candidates have already been tested and found wanting. Penny Mordaunt is still a Labour politician in blue clothing, a living representative of your HR department’s moral values and political purpose while still willing to flip between trendy views and crude jokes on trans issues in order to cadge a few extra votes.

The Chicxulub meteor did for the dinosaurs; Netflix saw off Blockbuster. When the time comes to write the history of the Conservative party, the period from 2016 to today might be termed the ‘Whatsappocalypse’. If the Online Safety Bill genuinely wants to make Britain a better place to live, it should start by banning MPs from using social media. Politics is not meant to be conducted over each of the day’s 24 hours, with every minor event demanding an instant response. Everyone reading this piece can think of a moment where their snap response to something – their gut instinct, or initial emotional flare-up – differed from what they actually did in the end, once they’d had time to calm down and think it over.

With Jeremy Hunt installed as the representative Sensible and Penny Mordaunt answering questions in the House, Liz Truss has been reduced to politely cheering on the people actually in charge. Those in Westminster seem to think that her chances of leading the Conservatives into the next election are comparable to the chances of discovering Lord Lucan and Elvis in a service station off the M25. Truss will be replaced, many expect, once the party can work out who to appoint. In the meantime, with fox hunting off the menu, the Conservative party is left with little choice but to while away the winter with its second favourite bloodsport: leadership plots and recriminations.

As the Labour party’s lead reaches 27 per cent or more, it would be easy to place the entirety of the blame on Liz Truss. That doesn’t mean it would be fair; the effort to alienate all but the most hardline tribal Conservative supporters has been a joint effort across 12 years and multiple prime ministers. Markets hated the mini-Budget; cutting taxes while making massive spending pledges to subsidise energy demand during a critical shortage was not a winning formula. Apparently, blackouts are not looked on kindly; who could have guessed? Voters, meanwhile, hated it because it offered more to those who are better off.

A pair of Just Stop Oil activists walked into the National Gallery this morning and threw tomato soup over Van Gogh's Sunflowers. 'What is worth more? Art or life?', one of the demonstrators yelled as she glued herself to the wall. This isn't the first time a work of art has been targeted by environmentalists. In July, eco-protesters glued themselves to the frame of Constable’s painting The Hay Wain and covered it with an altered version of their own, doing minor damage in the process. A few days before, eco-protesters rushed onto the track at Silverstone. Eco-protesters also glued themselves to a Turner painting in Manchester. In June, eco-protesters…  you get the idea.

As a general rule, it’s worth remembering that Hollywood is in the business of mythologising, rather than retelling history. The Woman King, which was released in cinemas this week, represents the latest effort at constructing a past more in tune with 21st century progressive political narratives. In the film, King Gezo of Dahomey and his loyal Amazons – an elite band of women warriors – struggle to free his kingdom and his people from the evils of the slave trade, the dominance of the Oyo empire, and the creeping tendrils of European colonisation. It’s a stirring tale of African resistance and female empowerment. It’s also deeply flawed. King Gezo, Dahomey, and the Amazons really existed, and did fight a war with the Oyo.

The EU spent last November reinforcing its borders as Vladimir Putin directed a wave of refugees through Belarus towards the bloc. This winter, politicians in Brussels are once again preparing for another wave of asylum seekers caused by Putin – Russian men fleeing conscription. Baltic countries are taking a hard line. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas told CNN that ‘every citizen is responsible for their country’s deeds… so we are not giving any asylum.. For Russian men’, while interior minister Lauri Laanemets said asylum ‘would be fundamentally contradictory to the aim of all our sanctions so far, which is the collective responsibility of Russian citizens’.