Enter Boris

Exit Right. Enter Night. Take my hand, we're off to never Tory land.

Heeeee’sssss Baaaaaack. Well sort of.

Labour had a bad night at the recent elections. The Tories had it much much worse. That’s not great consolation for Labour supporters and it’s leaders and nor is it meant to be. There is work to be done.

But that’s the point - there is work that can be done. Work the leadership can do to mend broken fences. Work the party can do to show the progress in government. Work Labour can do to demonstrate they are making a genuine difference to people’s lives.

What is it the Tories can do to get themselves out of the state they are in? It’s not wholly clear.

The problems of the Tories do not start and end with Kemi Badenoch.

Tories who despair of her leadership aren’t wrong to do so. She’s turned out to be utterly unsuited to the task of rebuilding the party - an essential first step after a colossal electoral defeat. She fails to hit open goal after open goal at PMQs and doesn’t seem, by all accounts, to have the temperament or humility to learn what she doesn’t know.

She has not the management, people or political skills to even acknowledge fully the length of the journey the Tories need to go on or the judgment to even take a first step in the right direction.

But the Tories problem is not simply Badenoch. It is all that precedes her. Badenoch is a terrible leader. But the options to replace her are not better.

The Tories have a true dearth of talent. In part this was inevitable when so many lost their seats at the last election. But the rout of talent had been taking place long before then. Since Brexit, the Tory faithful and those eager to pander to them cast out the unbeliever and the waverer. Doubt was out.

But doubt can be an important and valuable quality in politics. Because questioning why you do things and whether your plan is the best way to achieve your goals is essential. If you endlessly rid yourself of those who question you, you end up with Liz Truss. A lesson that Kemi Badenoch has clearly not imbibed.

Even worse, perhaps than the Tories options for replacing Badenoch are the optics of doing so which lean in again to a party in utter chaotic disarray. A party that cannot be led is a party that cannot lead.

None of which troubles Boris and his sycophants, who do not believe the rules apply to them. For them, he is the one person (besides the AI reanimated corpse of Margaret Thatcher) that Tory mythology hails as a winner. Boris still, unaccountably, has a set of loud braying supporters convinced that the second coming would be akin to, well. The Second Coming.

The argument runs that Boris reaches the same parts of the Red Wall that Reform does and would, therefore, trim the Farage sails, taking polling points out of their lead and crosses away from their candidates.

This is true to a certain extent. Polling does show that Boris could do the most damage to Farage.

But the problem with Boris is the damage he also does to everyone else. There is a sector of the Tory membership - not an insignificant one - that remains repelled by him as Polling from Conservative Home - once a place of about as much loyalty to Boris as the Tories can muster to anyone - shows. His return would trouble Farage but delight Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who would be the greatest beneficiaries from a continued, bloody split on the right.

The Tories belief in one great leader is part of their problem, not their salvation. This belief - fairly intrinsic to their politics of individualism and exceptionalism - is always seeking a change at the top - never at the heart of power. But the Tory Party is rotten and voters know it.

This does not make voters any less likely to vote for a party on the right. But the Party that was once considered the most electorally successful party in history has let that success go to their head for far too long. If you believe you are the natural party of government, you stop believing it matters what you do and how you behave when you get there.

It is this work the Tories are avoiding doing. And until they do, talk of replacement is just displacement activity.

I leave you with a piece of far greater writing than I will ever manage that encapsulates the Tory Party so completely it could have been written yesterday:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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