CSM EDITORIAL

Let’s face it, Keir Starmer and his haircut would just about pass muster as transport secretary in Thatcher’s 1987 government. But he’s the only half-competent (whilst dreadfully slippery) player in a side that should have been permanently relegated in 2019.

You’ll find more competent characters in the cheap offices in a Slough business park. When Wes ‘Dead-End’ Streeting is Labour’s go-to rescuer, you know us Brits are in for a horrible five years.

It looks like Labour will win most seats, and the Conservatives are way past their sell-by date so we’ll end up with a Labour government or a Lib-Lab coalition, or, far worse, an SNP-Lib-Lab coalition with Starmer as PM. Whatever we get, it won’t last and will be eminently destructible.

Reform is a complete waste of space. If only the Tories had chosen Tice as their London mayoral candidate back in the day (he’d have made an excellent mayor) he’d not have bolstered a protest party that seeks only to destroy the Tory vote. Vote Reform = Vote Labour. Reform won’t exist with any relevance in 2025. At least UKIP had a single purpose (and the Farage factor), so could survive up until the 2016 referendum after which it went irretrievably loopy. Reform isn’t even a useful policy resource.

The Lib Dems are on very shaky ground. Usually, they’d be expected to collect Tory seats in the Southwest and, if anyone is myopic enough to vote for Reform, they might still do. But this year’s General Election promises to be a bruising one for battered Ed ‘Post Office’ Davie, whose team looks about as thin as Starmer’s what with its dreadful Remoaner residue – the 2019 braying of Layla Moran and the German Wera Hobhouse still fresh in the collective memory when they sat alongside Soubry and other democracy-denying despicables. The heroes that are the Post Office sub postmasters will never let the guilty off the hook.

After 14 years in power, the Tories really need a 1997-style bashing but they won’t get it. So many Brits will secretly hold onto nanny as Labour’s much more of a risk in 2024 than it was in 1997.

All the talk of an annihilation will be allayed by the shy voters, who this time are especially silent about their intention to vote Tory whenever the pollsters call. When the Labour cocks crow a few times they’ll come round.

The Conservative Party is dead on its feet and needs root-and-branch rebuilding with some MPs being forced into resignation. Those faux Tories, like Caroline Nokes, need culling from party ranks overnight but it would be a mistake for the party to either go too far rightwards or go as far left as Cameron did – there is, oddly perhaps, a middle ground opening up between Thatcherite conservative and social conservative, just as a third way opened up for Blair…

After five years of more Blair (we’re now into year twenty seven of Blairite Britain) a radical path, involving high technology and Brexit independence, permits opportunities for a radically revamped tech sector and bolstered City, hinting at a national revival now the UK has so successfully ditched its burdensome, old industries.

The Tories also need to remember what it was like to be loved by the Countryside – on rural matters they have lost their way and, whilst in power, succumbed too often to the 5:1 majority urban viewpoint.

They will need to dust off and rebuild fast – a Mordaunt who has cursed globalist Schwab as successfully as she has cursed the SNP of late is the Squires’ best bet for a ready and waiting leader but she’ll need her Keith Joseph and brains trust in place sharpish to mould a winning formula against the bourgeois Marxists. CCHQ needs trimming and tidying too with those who have become part of the furniture getting lobbed on a huge bonfire of vanities.

So, vote Labour and end up with five years of morally relativist gibberish and babblespeak – scratch on the surface and the nutters are still there with their Palestinian flags and hatred of ordinary Brits, while the Fabians’ policy unit is still replete with those who, so embarrassingly, supported and voted for Corbyn.  

Or vote Conservative to save the Tories for another day (they will reform into something the country wants, as that is what they always do, and they may even remember this time round to do what they say they are going to do rather than morphing into blue watermelons).

• Vote Reform and you’re voting for Labour or the Lib Dems.
• Vote Lib Dem and you’re voting for Labour.
• Vote SNP and you’re dystopia-addicted bonkers in true, SNP-fascist tradition.
• Vote for anyone else and you’re just trolling – disrespecting your right to vote which was so hard-fought won for you.

See you in 2029.

Last one out switch the heat pump off.