The Tories’ escape from reality

Twice already this week I have woken up to smartphone news flashes from the Daily Telegraph – one telling me that the unemployment figures were “A blow to Starmer” and the next one telling me that Inflation figures are “A blow to Starmer”. 

Leaving aside the fact that both figures were actually pretty good news and some desperate junior hack at the paper has obviously had to dig deep to find any bad news, the job figures cover a period when the Tories were in power, and the prices data covers the first four weeks of the new government.

If anyone knows what Labour could have done on day one to bring inflation down or to travel back in time and improve the jobs data, I am open to suggestions. 

But leaving aside the newspapers’ desperate attempt to blame Labour for everything just weeks after they won a massive victory, the opposition Tory Party has been even worse. 

I know that without a moment’s pause for reflection they have leapt straight into an election campaign to be leader of the party, but even so the messages they are sending are really quite amazingly detached from reality. 

Already we have had claims that the PM has shown no leadership in dealing with the riots, when all the Tory Party seems to have done is come up with excuses for the violence – all while their outgoing leader is on holiday in California.  

Oh, and the early release of prisoners is a sign that Labour is soft on crime, despite Rishi Sunak first announcing it in the House of Commons earlier this year. It is actually the result of a crisis caused by underspending on prisons for years, much of it under the Conservatives.

All in all, the reaction shows a complete lack of self-awareness, a level of arrogance that 14 years of power has only hardened and a complete absence of reality. The Tory Party has just gone down to the largest defeat in its history, and it is still obsessed not with working out what went wrong or even admitting the scale of the defeat but on doubling down on its failed policies. 

As far as I know, there is not a candidate in the Conservative leadership election who doesn’t claim that they can increase defence spending and cut taxes and fund both by cutting “waste”. Who doesn’t insist the Rwandan scheme was working, that trickle-down economics works, that Brexit was a triumph, that immigration is bad for the economy, and that the ECHR is the work of the devil. 

It is not my job or wish to help the Tories win elections, but they are going to continue to lose big time, if they keep marching in the wrong direction, live in a fantasy world and listen to the mad propaganda from their allies in the media.  

The Tories need to take some advice from Al Pacino in Scarface: “You’re not supposed to get high on your own supply.”