Oh, how the clever boys in Tory HQ must have laughed. What a jolly jape. Mocking up a series of tweets to mimic US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s messages on bombing the Houthis in Yemen.
Rachel Reeves: ‘The tax rises I promised not to do when we won have completely destroyed the UK economy. This stuff is so much more difficult than it looks on TV.’
Torsten Bell: ‘OK, OK, uhhhh f***. What about more tax rises?’
Angela Rayner: ‘Anyone seen my vape?’
Her vape. That’s what working-class women do, you see. Puff away all day on Red Astaire, chuck in the curlers, then down a few cans of Magners. Or at least, that’s the perception that obviously pervades the Conservative Party press office.
Last week, as predicted, the Government’s economic policy officially collapsed. Having pledged to kickstart the economy, the Chancellor was forced to admit her Budget had instead slashed growth in half.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch should teach her party not to despise the working people of Britain, writes Dan Hodges
New figures published by the Office for Budget Responsibility revealed that in the final months of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, GDP actually grew more quickly than anticipated, but was then strangled as soon as Labour took over the reins. As a result Reeves had to unveil cuts to benefits and other public spending that will – according to her own figures – force an additional 250,000 people into poverty, 50,000 of them children. ‘Balancing the books on the backs of the poor,’ raged the normally supportive Daily Mirror.
But for Labour MPs facing the wrath of embittered constituents this weekend there is one crumb of comfort. Which is that the Tories still hate working people even more than they do. And clearly couldn’t care less who knows it.
The sneering, snobbish tweet about Angela Rayner wasn’t an aberration. But a graphic illustration of the mindset of a party that, even after facing a record drubbing at the hands of the British people last July, stubbornly refuses to learn the lessons.
For a brief moment under Boris Johnson it seemed the Tories really were changing. After decades of neglect by a Labour political machine that arrogantly assumed its working-class supporters had nowhere else to go, the Red Wall rose up in revolt. Iconic seats such as Sedgefield, Bolsover and Leigh embraced the Conservatives for the first time in a generation.
In Redcar, newly elected Tory MP Jacob Young appeared to epitomise this new political realignment as he announced he would finish his final shift at his local chemical plant before departing for Westminster. ‘I can’t drop the lads in it,’ he explained.
It was all a mirage. Boris was ousted, and his commitment to ‘level up’ Britain went with him. The 40 new hospitals the nation was promised never materialised. The £640 billion of new infrastructure projects failed to leave the drawing board. HS2 – a symbol of Northern regeneration – was axed.
Rachel Reeves leaves No 11 ahead of delivering her Spring Statement
And the voters responded accordingly. Of the 50 seats the Tories snatched from Labour in 2019, all but two – Keighley and Stockton – flipped back last year. In Redcar, poster-boy Jacob Young’s majority of 3,500 was transformed into a 3,000 majority for his opponent, former Labour MP Anna Turley. Boris’s Red Wall was razed to the ground.
But Kemi Badenoch and her party still don’t get it. Keir Starmer and Labour are about to experience a whirlwind of anger at the hands of working-class voters who again feel the hot-sting of betrayal from the political class. Yet the Tories are totally incapable of capitalising.
The British people are sick of being told they again have to dig deeper and make greater sacrifices, while their public services are cut further, more and more of their fellow citizens are forced on to the bread line, and the country stagnates.
And what is the Conservative response? To castigate Keir Starmer and his ministers for not cutting enough, and not driving even more people into the poorhouse.
On Wednesday Labour MPs sat glumly as the Chancellor read out the OBR’s increasingly gloomy prognosis. But they needn’t have worried. Because Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride was about to come riding to the rescue. Faced with welfare cuts that would see those with genuine disabilities left unable to wash and clothe themselves, he offered these words of comfort. ‘We would have gone further – much further – and we set out a clear plan in our manifesto to do exactly that.’
Stride is right. His party did set out their plans, in black and white. And they were rejected by the electorate in the biggest political shellacking of the Conservative Party’s history.
As I travelled round the country in the run-up to the last Election, I observed how disconnected Rishi Sunak was from the voters. When he appeared on a council estate to point at some offending potholes it was, I wrote, as if he’d arrived from Mars. Kemi Badenoch and her colleagues may as well have turned up on the latest shuttle from Venus. With the exception of Robert Jenrick, who is proving increasingly effective at holding ministers’ feet to the fire, it’s hard to see how they could be more out of step with the priorities of working Britain.
By my reckoning the Conservative Party’s new leader has made two cast-iron economic pledges. The first is to deliver a tax cut to the parents of private school children. The second is to provide a tax cut to Jeremy Clarkson and other wealthy farmers.
Both policies may have their merits. Badenoch may be right when she charges the Government’s decision to place VAT on private school fees and inheritance tax on family farms is driven by spite and ideology, rather than sound economics.
But politically that doesn’t matter. If she or her shadow ministers got out of Westminster and embarked on a walk round the housing estates of Bishop Auckland, Grimsby or Scunthorpe, they would quickly recognise the plight of private schools is not topping people’s list of concerns.
And that a group of well-heeled Tories promising to ‘go much further’ with public spending cuts is not a vote winner. They’d also find one or two people who vape.
Many of the caricatures surrounding the callousness and venality of the modern Conservative Party are lazy. But some of them are rooted in truth.
The old contempt for working people is back. So too the ignorance about the lives of those who live among the ruins of Boris Johnson’s fabled Red Wall.
Kemi Badenoch said she would change her party. Teaching it not to despise the working people of Britain would be a start.
