The Tories salt the earth

There is no moderate Tory strategy for winning the next election. Only for making life harder for everyone so Labour gets the blame.

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Much has been written - not least by me - about the doom loop of the Tory right as they split into ever ‘purer’ groups that from the outside all seem to think the same thing but, I am sure, have an internal logic that means the People’s Front of Judea could not *possibly* ally themselves with the Judean People’s Front.

Far less well-examined, however, is quite how divorced from normality the other parts of the Tory Party are.

Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt are painted by themselves and by their outriders in the Tory-supporting press as the sensible, centrist bulwark against a Tory Party gone mad. And while Liz Truss was Sunak’s principal internal opposition (one he lost to, let us not forget) that was easier to swallow. Compared to Truss, Sunak is a centrist in the same way that compared to Saturn, Mars is really close to Earth.

But once Truss had been toppled and banished to the *checks notes* Popular Conservatives, Sunak should have started to be judged by his own behaviour and that of his government not simply compared to what we could have been living through for longer.

And here, Sunak starts to look very very bad indeed.