The Tory party at prayer

Regrets – we have a few

The bipolar nature of the British first-past-the-post two-party system – bipolar here meant in its psychiatric as well as its basic meaning – has never been more deeply despised than now. There is, however, no remedy.

The small number of British people who still take some sort of an interest in politics have spent the last three years watching that dim authoritarian Theresa May self-destruct in grinding, slow-motion detail.

Whereas a good leader can lead and inspire his or her party and even parliament as a whole, giving them both ultimately some cohesion and relevance, whatever nonsense resided in Mrs May's dim brain, she allowed no one else – apart from hubby Philip we are led to believe – to be party to it. The result was that the inherent fractures in government and parliament opened up, allowing all the fragments to centrifugally drift apart.

This website listed Theresa May's many defects a long time ago; the surprise is that her vacuity caused so much collateral damage. There is – and can be – no hope. She should never have been elected.

Damaged goods

The ruling Conservative party has now embarked upon a leadership election to find her replacement. Nearly all the same unpalatable candidates whom we saw last time will parade before the British people – with the exception of one, Mrs May herself, that is.

As in the Freddie Frinton classic sketch Dinner for One, the procedure will always be the same: the parliamentary party of the Conservatives will, after repeated rounds of damaging mutual combat and general ding-dong, end up with two damaged candidates. Dinner for One was amusing – the current Tory version is anything but.

It is only necessary to remember that most of these beauties hung in there with their idiot leader almost to the bitter end, meaning that they may have had the ministerial car and salary for a brief while longer, but they, too, now own to some extent the disaster she brought upon them all.

As do in a lesser way a substantial majority of Conservative MPs, who chose to keep her when they had the chance a few months ago to turf her out. Her dim and authoritarian career was enabled by these people and they should be punished as much as she will be, starting by issuing them with 'I voted to keep May' lapel badges.

The award for the most futile resignation goes to our one-time favourite Andrea Leadsom, who, after propping up the May regime for years, finally decided to leave on the day before her boss did. What a principled hero!

Beauty pageant

The grass-roots membership of the party will then be allowed to choose between the two who finally manage to stagger before them. We are told that the grass-roots Tories overwhelmingly want the buffoon Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson as leader – which actually says quite a lot about their general mental incapacity. Let us not forget, that those very same grass-roots members last time round also, according to the opinion polls, would have chosen Theresa May. They never got the chance, since her rival, Andrea Leadsom had already dropped out.

We are also told that Johnson's colleagues in parliament, who know him only too well as the erratic, disorganized, opportunist lecher he is, will do everything they can to prevent his being in the final two in that hideous beauty pageant.

Those Conservative fundamentalists who support a Peter Hitchens style nuclear option – that the party must be obliterated at a general election, after which it will rebuild itself on true 'conservative principles' – will have a long time to wait before this particular piece of Hitchens' wishful thinking comes to pass; about as long, in fact, as that other Hitchens' wish, 'bobbies on the beat'. At the moment it looks as though the obliteration will be the easy bit – restoration or rebirth will be the hard part.

So we have to reconcile ourselves to a few months of the Tory old and new guard saying things they don't mean and trying desperately to avoid saying things they do mean and dissembling that the last three years have really been nothing to do with them. Finally two repellent specimens will bob up to the surface from the malodorous mud at the bottom of the political pond and be presented for the consideration of the Tory laity.

There will be a general election at some point, which at the moment Labour seems likely to win, and the few surviving Tories will squat for a few years in the outer darkness and come to the same conclusion that they came to after each catastrophe that has beset them in recent times: they need to be more like Labour to appeal to an electorate growing ever less conservatively minded. The last time the Tory parted squatted in the outer darkness, while they were waiting they promoted to one of the three great offices of state one of their newbies: Theresa May.