What happens next?

Nothing ever really changes in British politics. It’s always basically the same three groups having the same old arguments. Every now and then, someone declares a revolutionary upheaval in British party politics, and everyone gets up and dances round in a circle. But when the music stops, no one’s removed a chair, so everyone sits back down again. At the end of it, all that’s really happened is that one of the parties has changed its logo.

The biggest party realignment of recent decades was the SDP. In 1981, the right-wing of the Labour party snapped off and formed a new party. Before the general election in 1983, the SDP gained 29 MPs in defections from current MPs - as well as winning a couple of by-elections. All but one of the defections were from Labour - one left-wing Tory joined them too.

As the SDP ultimately merged with the Liberals to form the Lib Dems, there is now little sign that the SDP ever existed, except the invention and addition of the lovely word ‘Dem’. The SDP did not change the landscape, it has just left a few marks for the interested to uncover. The residual effects of the SDP are not seen in political tectonics, but in the occasional piece of palaeontology. The SDP have left behind fossils, not mountains.

But sometimes things really do change. When the Labour Party came along in the early twentieth century, that was a genuine novelty. It wasn’t just a new name for an old thing, a re-brand, or an adjustment. At a similar time - possibly as a pure coincidence - the Liberals faded to become a third party. That was the last time there was a meaningful changing of the guard of political parties.

It’s possible that things might actually be shifting around again. For the first time in a hundred years, British political parties might actually be on the move.

The main reason that things might change amongst major British political parties is that there’s a vacancy. The Lib Dems have filled in the form applying for the abolition of their party - or the coalition agreement, as it’s also known. It has taken five years to process their application, but it now seems to be going through on the nod.

At the same time, UKIP have decided to become a real grown-up party - though no one’s told them that means they should keep the same policies regardless of who’s talking or which day it is. Once they tie themselves down to something as tedious as a manifesto, and they can’t base their policies on what mood they’re in, they’ll lose some of their fly-by-night appeal. But they will still do well enough to become the third party - in England at least.

The laws of political gravity would suggest that the UK can’t survive long with two right-wing parties, one left, and nothing in the middle but a big gap. Especially in a country that hasn’t actually voted in a Conservative government for more than 22 years, and where right-wing parties have not attracted more than half the vote since the 1950s.

On economic matters, the Labour party are in their furthest-left position for a generation, and the Tories in the furthest right ever devised by non-American humanity. This leaves a very large centre ground. Economics aren’t everything, but they’re not far off. The huge gap in the centre of British economic politics must surely be tempting to any centrist strategist.

Anyone who thinks that the NHS shouldn’t be sold off to the highest bidder, but also thinks the government shouldn’t impose a price freeze on energy companies, now finds themselves in a middle ground unserved by any major parties. Admittedly, UKIP oppose NHS sell-offs, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and even then it depends on who answers the phone.

But that only answers the Why of a new British centre party - you also need a Who, How, and When, or else it never gets off the drawing board. The most likely moment is the post-election pre-coalition deal-making, and the most likely catalyst is UKIP.

It is very possible that neither Tories nor Labour will get enough seats to govern alone, and that the Lib Dem return will be so low that teaming up with them wouldn’t give a majority either. It could be that, to make the parliamentary maths work, someone might have to think the unthinkable and talk to Farage. The Labour leadership should be able to resist it, as they won’t want to drown in an avalanche of ripped-up membership cards.

But the Tories may not. They may look at the pure numbers of Tory and UKIP MPs returned, and conclude simplistically that adding those two numbers together gets the desired total. And then the changes start.

The left wing of the Tory party, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, will reanimate. They will leave the party, loudly, and with righteous indignation. The striking thing will not be the number of defectors, but the quality. Ken Clarke, obviously, but Heseltine and Patten too, and many others who are Tories exactly because they have despised Ukippery since before it was invented.

The exodus won’t be reflected in the House of Commons. Very few current Tory MPs will feel affronted by a UKIP match-up because the parliamentary party does not closely resemble the country, even the portion of the country who might consider voting Conservative. The Tory party could alienate half its voters without alienating more than half a dozen of its MPs.

Clarke, Heseltine, and Patten would surely be branded as ‘yesterday’s men’ by remaining Tories. But people prefer yesterday’s Tories to today’s. This ‘class of 92’ got 14 million votes. The Cameron-Osborne generation couldn’t get 11 million when the alternative was Gordon Brown, who half the country hated more than athlete’s foot.

But if the ex-Tories will amount to any kind of political force, they will need allies. The most obvious candidates would be Blairites who find Miliband’s policy brew too strong. There would also be room for any Lib Dems disaffected with Nick Clegg’s leadership. Which, after the election, will be both of them.

With the anti-UKIP element in the Tory party gone, Tories and UKIP would be free to merge, and normal three-party politics will resume. The new ConUKIP party will be further to the right, and Labour minus its Blairites further to the left. In the middle, a different kind of centre party. Previously, the middle party has represented some kind of liberalism, claiming that the cause of liberalism over authoritarianism is more important than the battle between left and right.

But this new centre party would fight firmly on the left-right axis, by placing itself exactly in the middle. Instead of a traditional Lib Dem principle of swinging left or right depending on the liberal qualities of each proposal, a new Centrist Party would know exactly where it stood between left and right, and would define itself in those terms. It would embody moderation.

And that is potentially a powerful offer to the British people. A centrist party, a moderate party seems to be one very closely suited to the British character. What could be more appealing to British voters than a party whose main message is: ‘Let’s not over-react. I’ll put the kettle on’?

Truth decay

Politicians don’t tell the truth.

This is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. Though surely we should all be recalibrating our gauges of newsworthiness in the week when ‘David Mellor is obnoxious’ was considered front-page news.

Politicians don’t tell us the truth partly because they only ever speak to the public through a media engagement. If we hear David Cameron it is because a media organisation and the No.10 press team reached an agreement that this would happen. The subject was agreed and the messages rehearsed. It’s not real, it’s not a slice of life, even if the politician is in his kitchen making pancakes for his children. In fact, especially if the politician in a kitchen making children pancakes. It’s probably a studio, and those kids are probably off Outnumbered.

An interview is not a conversation, so the normal rules of polite society do not apply. It is much more like a verbal game, like Articulate. The interviewee draws a card with key messages on it (‘Sensible policies for a safer Britain’, perhaps) and scores a point every time they manage to say it; the interviewer draws a card with a list of gaffes on it (‘I distrust the poor’ or ‘I hate vans’) and scores a point every time they force the interviewee to say one of them.

The general public listen in and hear two people behaving in a baffling, and pretty beastly way. So they switch over.

There is always some truth in what a politician says. They tend to avoid any verifiable inaccuracies, as they can be embarrassing later. It is the truth and nothing but the truth - but never the whole truth. If politicians were forced to swear a court-style oath ahead of interviews, they would have to claim that ‘two out of three ain’t bad’.

Politicians don’t answer the question, because they are playing the game. But equally interviewers don’t often ask real questions. They prefer to set traps, because they’re playing the game too. Take the question: ‘What did you do last week?’ What is a true answer to that question? First you have to decode what is meant by it. If you are asked the question socially, it means: “Did you do anything last week interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this conversation?’

In the unlikely event that a politician was asked that question in public, it would have a different meaning. During a friendly interview it would mean, ‘Give us a flavour of what it’s like being you.’ If it was asked with venom, it would mean, ‘Name a single thing you did last week to justify your continued existence.’

But the politician hears the question as, ‘Which of your well rehearsed key messages is in any way relevant to something that happened last week?’

Interviews where the politician just repeats their message are pretty irritating. But even worse are the ones where they say nothing, then high-five themselves at the end of an interview for not having been caught out. Why did they ever agree to the interview? They seem to think that to avoid saying something stupid on the news you should stonewall an interview. But actually the best way is to decline the interview and stay at home practising the bassoon, or watching New Tricks.

Of course, if you entirely avoid the question, you end up looking like Michael Howard in May 1997. Howard didn’t realise that if Jeremy Paxman asks you the same question 12 times, people are going to feel that it’s you being evasive, not Jezza being irritating. Howard, in his answers, was trying to suggest that Paxman’s question was in some way not valid. It didn’t work.

This comes across most clearly in the magnificent moment just after Paxman announces that he is going to be “frightfully rude” and ask the question again (a tenth time). Howard, with a staggering lack of self-awareness, says, “You can put the question and I will give you an answer.” Howard really thinks it now looks like Paxman is not asking the right question. Instead, it suddenly seems like the most important question in the world.

The problem with communicating entirely through this media game is there’s not a lot of truth knocking around. And when people hear the truth, they recognise it, and respond positively. And this is a gift-horse to Farage.

UKIP tell their fair share of political lies. They will bend, ignore, or misrepresent the facts. They will be partial, misleading, and evasive. When they are talking about policies, it’s the same game everyone else is playing - get your message across, and try not to say anything too racist.

But if you ask Farage about elections, votes, and UKIP’s chances of success in individual seats, or nationally, he just seems to tell the truth. There’s no great moral virtue to it. He’s not doing it because he’s a wonderful person, nor necessarily as an evil Machiavellian double bluff. But, whatever is behind it, when you ask Farage to play election pundit, he seems to say exactly what he thinks.

Imagine asking the party leaders about a hopeless constituency. Ask Cameron what the Tory in Kirkcaldy is hoping for, and he’ll say something bland. Ask Ed Miliband about Labour’s chances in Witney, and he’ll say ‘hardworking families’, possibly in a sentence.

But ask Farage how UKIP are going to do in Peckham, he’ll say, ‘We don’t stand a chance.’ Ask him how many seats they will win next year, he says, ‘Could be 30 or 40, if it goes well’. He seems to be giving the same answer as he would behind closed doors. He’s telling the truth. It’s weird.

And it puts him at a very unfair advantage. He gets to tell the truth in public sometimes, where the other leaders are not allowed to. Eventually, politicians get the questions they deserve. No one would ever ask Nigel Farage how he feels when he sees a white van, because he’d probably tell them it was a bloody silly question, and ask them if they were foreign.

If UKIP get some sustained success, then this truth-telling won’t last. Soon, they’ll be calculating and over-thinking every answer like proper politicians, and they’ll have lost their advantage along with their novelty. When Farage tells a UKIP conference, ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government,’ then we’ll know the UKIP threat has finally passed.

But until then, their truth-telling example must be followed. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, if a politician has even the most occasional opportunity to tell the truth to the public, they should take it. The public will notice, and give them the benefit.

Anything will do. The classified football results. The rivers of Yorkshire. The films of Denholm Elliott. Anything, just as long as it’s true.

The death of the swingometer

At the last election, no one party had a majority. At the next one, we may go one further: no two parties will have a majority.

It is very likely that no two plausible partners would have enough seats. The only pairings that could combine to make the 326 seats needed are the impossible Tory ones: with Labour, and with the SNP. A majority coalition government would require at least three parties.

The Tories may remain the biggest party, but they will not be able to form a government. Even if the Lib Dems wanted another coalition with them, they won’t have the numbers. The two coalition parties need to lose 34 seats between them to lose their majority. The Lib Dems could easily do that on their own. And if they don’t, Tory losses to UKIP will make up the difference.

There is no one else the Tories could do a deal with. The elephant wearing a barbour jacket and insisting on smoking in the room is, of course, UKIP. But because every UKIP gain is likely to be a Tory loss, they won’t give themselves more MPs by allying with UKIP: you don’t make a cake larger by cutting more slices.

And the Tories would be very reluctant to give UKIP the validation of power. Teaming up with the Tories may have been electoral hemlock for the Lib Dems, but it may be viagra for UKIP. And the major parties will be united in making sure they don’t get any.

Anyway, a Tory coalition with UKIP would need the Lib Dems too to make the maths work. Surely the Lib Dems would bail out of a coalition if UKIP joined it. The Lib Dems may do anything for power but, even for Nick Clegg, the offer of sharing a cabinet table with Farage would be his Meatloaf moment: ’I won’t do that’.

UKIP will only achieve a moderate breakthrough, and get less than ten seats. This will be terribly unfair, as they will have got about a tenth of the votes. However, they will be unable to complain about it, as the only solution would be proportional representation, which smells foreign.

The ‘swing’ that has traditionally defined British elections may scarcely happen at all. In all elections up to this one, there has been a swing from Conservatives to Labour or vice versa. But there is no sign of it this time. Very few people who voted for one of the major parties last time will now change their mind and vote for the other one.

Some Tory seats will go UKIP. And some Labour seats will go SNP, and slightly more Lib Dem seats will go to Labour. And this is all that will happen. It will be like a round of musical chairs where the two favourites are allowed to stay in their seats playing Yahtzee.

Before the last couple of general elections, the period of the campaign has made no net difference to the parties’ standings. The opinion polls fluctuate wildly - in 2010 this was mainly because you never knew if the electorate would wake up thinking Nick Clegg was Churchill or Dr Crippen. But the opinion polls would end up exactly where they started, and the election result would agree. This shows that every single campaign dollar has been wasted, and the parties would have been wiser spending the money on filling a swimming pool with tinned peaches.

This time the feeling of futility is similar, but amplified. This time, it is not three weeks of campaigning that has failed to inspire any voters to change their minds, but five years of government. The Conservatives have not won anyone over as they put their plans into practice. More depressingly, Labour have not landed enough convincing punches on the government, let alone set out an inspiring alternative. Neither party has attracted a significant number of supporters from any source, other than the sinking Lib Dem ship.

In replacing Gordon Brown with Ed Miliband, Labour have simply replaced one kind of electoral liability with another. And David Cameron having power has had very little effect on people’s opinion of him. Before he became prime minister, large parts of his natural supporter base had serious reservations about him. And five years on, they still have.

A very large number of voters are planning on voting for a different party in 2015 from their 2010 choice. But this is a feature of UKIP coming from nowhere, and the Lib Dems travelling in the opposite direction. In terms of the two major parties, very little has changed. Those who vote for the two major parties in 2015 will do so with little enthusiasm, and without changing their minds from 2010.

If the result is a coalition of ‘everyone against the Tories and UKIP’, this may not be the worst thing for Labour. The current coalition has seen Tory plans (very occasionally) diluted by Lib Dem priorities. In a coalition you expect compromise. But if Labour forms a government with nationalists and Greens, then the junior partners will be pressuring Labour into more truly Labour policies. Labour may end up as the most right-wing party in their coalition.

Even the Lib Dems are likely to choose a more left-wing leader after the 2015 election, to draw a line under the Tory coalition years. This would also make them comfier partners in a left-wing coalition. Labour could be falling in with a very improving crowd.

So the BBC may have to retire the swingometer, and stick it in a storage cupboard with Posh Paws and Jan Leeming. But there is a more meaningful change in British politics. No major party has ever written a manifesto expecting a coalition. Labour and Tory manifestos have always been a plan for government, and the Lib Dem one has always been piece of fantasy fiction.

But this time, all manifestos will be written more like a menu, with negotiable options. People will know that, whatever happens, they’re not going to get everything the manifesto promises. Of course, that’s always the case - but previously it’s been the fault of incompetence and duplicity. This time it’ll be for the healthier reason that democracy is complicated.

Ed's invisible campaign

The Labour Party knew what it was getting when it chose Ed Miliband. When they went for him over David, they picked someone with policies they liked over someone more likely to win. It’s a choice familiar to game show viewers - they gambled. They could have made winning easier, but with a reduced prize - but they didn’t. They asked Hughie Green for the jackpot question. They took the larger offer, but let the Chaser come one step closer. In ‘Bullseye’ terms, Ed Miliband is the speedboat.

It was the act of a party that had its fingers burnt by Tony Blair, a man who couldn’t have lost them an election if he wanted to, but who scarcely ever warmed their hearts. Ed was the opposite of that. He said exactly what they wanted to hear, but he made them fear he might turn Labour into a pamphlet-writing pressure group, rather than a manifesto-writing, country-running party.

And Labour did choose Ed Miliband, by the way. You may have heard, from everyone who has ever said anything about it anywhere, that Ed Miliband was elected by the unions. He wasn’t. Ed’s leadership victory was largely down to trade unionists, which is a very different thing indeed. Unions are large, fairly rich organisations run by more or less democratically chosen leaders. Trade unionists (or trades unionists, if you want to pretend you’re Tony Benn - and who doesn’t?) are people - human beings with bicycles and nail clippers and opinions. From the way that trade unionists were blamed for Ed Miliband’s win, you would think they’re not allowed to vote. That’s not trade unionists you’re thinking of there, that’s the sovereign and/or the insane.

If Ed Miliband had been elected by the unions, that would be sinister. But he wasn’t, so it isn’t. Anyone caught saying Ed Miliband was elected by the unions should be locked in a cupboard with Dennis Skinner until they’ve had a really good think about what they’ve done.

There’s a grand old American political saying: you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. It’s very wise, very true and, for Ed Miliband, entirely unhelpful. Ed should avoid poetry, or any kind of campaigning that could be vaguely compared to it. Getting Ed to lift his eyes to the corner of the room and murmur ‘I have a dream’ will just make the country cringe. Even simple rhetorical techniques fail in Ed’s hands: when he told us stories of people he’s met, we didn’t picture charismatic walkabouts, we just imagined how relieved those people must have been when he left.

Instead, Ed should take an entirely prosaic approach to forming the next government. He should start doing, immediately, whatever his policies require for successful implementation. He can’t just start governing the country, or behave like he is, before he gets the job. But if Ed Miliband enters Downing Street on 8th May next year and starts work, there will unquestionably be things he’ll wish he’d done six months earlier. And those are the things he should be doing now.

It may seem a bit previous, because there’s an election to win yet. Is it presumptuous to plan for government now, when so much remains to be done to ensure the victory? The fact is, if you start doing the right things now, as much as you can, then that is the campaign. You won’t need to convince people that you’re up to the job if they can all see that you’ve started work already.

And when people see him doing these things, they will see ideas, direction, and purpose. In other words, he will have communicated his passion and his vision without ever having to tell us how darn much he cares. He will never persuade the country by talking - Ed needs to do. And then the country will realise that he’s the leader we need in our lives. Imagine the next six months as a romantic comedy, and Ed is the male lead, and the electorate the female. The point when she falls in love with him is not when he blurts out his feelings in a heart-wrenching speech. It’s when the boiler explodes and he turns up at 3am with a large spanner and a pile of blankets.

When Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997 he said, “Today, enough of talking. It is time now to do.” This line smartly deflected the allegation that New Labour was all about saying things, rather than doing things. When he persuaded us that he was all about the doing, he did it by saying. We really should have smelt a rat.

But Ed Miliband could actually do it. His could be a non-campaign campaign. It could be the ‘I’m too busy to campaign’ campaign. Instead of delivering a speech about Labour’s plans to freeze energy prices, let’s have him convening a meeting with energy companies and poverty campaigners - or some other, much smarter tactical move - and not even having a press conference afterwards.

Ed needs to be carrying out the policy equivalent of measuring up for curtains. The problem of opposition is often that you have to create the illusion of action. Being a minister is an incredibly busy job - being a shadow minister really isn’t. A minister is helping run a department of government with thousands of employees doing countless things. As a shadow minister, if you spend a couple of weeks in your pyjamas watching Netflix, there’s a serious possibility no one will notice. And being leader of the opposition is the same problem magnified.

The non-campaign campaign also helps an opposition move the narrative from negative to positive. First you must persuade the country that the government’s approach is wrong, then show them that yours is better. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is a good phrase, but it’s a critique of the current lot, rather than an outline of your own plan. When the slogans change to describe Labour’s plans, the criticism of Tory plans will then be implicit, and so be much more powerful.

If you stop members of the public on the street now and ask them, ‘What is Ed Miliband doing?’ you wouldn’t get many replies that would warm the hearts of Labour campaign managers. ‘Getting stabbed in the back’ would probably win, ahead of ‘gurning’ and ‘bacon’. The non-campaign campaign should be focused on that question, and how to get better answers. By election day, they should be hearing a whole range of positive answers.

Then the papers will have something more interesting to write about than a leadership crisis. Leadership crises are the easiest stories to magic out of thin air. If you decide there is one, then there is one. If you mention it a few days running on your front page, then it’s getting serious. Then the actual politicians start to think that it’s real, and start ringing their friends. And before you know where you are, it’s actually happening. And all because some left-wing publications decided, probably rightly, that a Labour leadership story would sell a few extra copies.

To any anti-Ed plotters, there must be two questions. Firstly - those flaws in Ed’s electability - you’re only noticing them now? What kind of honeymoon-goggles were you wearing for the first four years of his leadership that made you think getting into Downing Street would be a straightforward task?

And secondly, how long did you think this parliament was? Why would you wait four and half years before unseating the leader? Bearing in mind it took Labour four and a half months to get from election day 2010 to Ed’s appointment, that would give his successor a cool six weeks in the job before polling day - and that’s if you persuaded him to fall on his sword this weekend. Or, more likely, the candidates would make that calculation themselves, and decide that a cobbled coronation is a better option - which it is, but scarcely.

Ed’s not going anywhere. And if he carries on as he is, he is going to lose, or win very badly. A strategy to get Ed Miliband decisively into Downing Street must be very, very bold, but also utterly realistic. If you think that soundbites and photo opportunities aren’t important, for God’s sake stop making speeches about soundbites and photo opportunities. Instead, decide what’s important. Then don’t even tell us about it - just do it. And if the country and the media have to work slightly harder to understand what you’re up to, that’s fine - it’ll be good for us.

A totally different campaign would prepare the country for a totally different kind of government. And people will queue round the block to vote for that.

How not to attack the right

The debate between right and left can sometimes seem quite unequal, when we get onto the subject of each other. The right accuse us on the left of being unrealistic, idealistic dreamers. Then we accuse the right of being evil. It just sounds like we’re not playing nicely.

For some reason, when left-wing people look at right-wing people, they see them as belonging to a continuum that stretches as far right as you can possibly go. Left-wing people feel that the whole of the right side of political thought is a slippery slope, and if you fall to the right of the gravitational centre, then the only thing preventing you from being Hitler is lack of time or ambition.

It’s ridiculous, obviously. Conservative moderates can be as sound on their ground as anyone. But on the left, we feel that unless you’re as far left as we are, then you lack a foothold, and you will eventually slide inevitably Hitlerwards. As if Ken Clarke really wants to send all the gypsies to concentration camps, he just doesn’t know it yet.

For some reason, the feeling is not mutual. Conservatives seem to understand that their Labour opponents don’t secretly dream of a communist utopia. Tories are happy to mock the left for their stated opinions, without imagining secret ones. Cameron has been known to use ‘socialist’ and even ‘left-wing’ as insults during prime minister’s questions, seemingly unaware that to many people these are simply statements of fact (or even sources of pride). It’s like insulting the opposition bench by calling them ‘suit-wearers’ or ‘bipeds’.

Maybe the right don’t exaggerate their opponents’ views because they got all that out of their system years ago. If a Tory accuses a lefty of being a secret communist, it all sounds very 1970s. It harks back to a very specific allegation - that the Soviet government is running you as a secret agent. The communist double agent was, they assumed, being rewarded handsomely by the Soviet Union. So the communist was a traitor - a greedy, greedy traitor. If you call someone a communist now, it doesn’t sound like an attack on their political credo; it sounds like you haven’t noticed that the Soviet Union’s gone away.

We had it easy in this country, of course, compared to the United States. There they were obsessed with communists for a very long time. In the absence of Ebola, they needed something to channel their baseless terror into, and communism fitted the bill perfectly. Anyone to the left of an arbitrary political norm was a dangerous ally of an enemy state, regardless of whether their address books actually contained any Sergeys or Alexeis. And you didn’t have to be a politician or public servant to be targeted - in fact, they preferred it if you made films.

These days, the extremes of left and right are used as insults, rather than actual allegations. But they’re used differently on each side: a bad-tempered left-winger may call an opponent a fascist, but a right-winger won’t accuse anyone of communism. And not just because Tories don’t want to seem out of date. On the contrary - some of them love being out of date, it’s their favourite thing.

It’s because we think we know what an extremely right-wing government looks like: it look like Hitler. But for some reason, we don’t think an extremely left-wing government looks like Stalin. If you get more and more right-wing, the logic seems to go, you will eventually be Hitler. But if you get more and more left-wing, you would have to take a wrong turn to become Stalin. Stalin, we feel, is a perversion of left-wing thought. Whereas Hitler is a perfect distillation of the right. Stalin got left-wing wrong; Hitler got right-wing horribly, horribly right. They both murdered millions, but only one of them did it by being true to his ideology.

It’s not fair, it’s not reasonable, it’s not right - but it sits behind some of the more virulent anti-right rhetoric. When the left implies that a Conservative policy is tantamount to Nazism, for some reason we can come across as a little judgmental - even impolite. It should be guarded against, because the left will never win any arguments by claiming that Tories are basically very, very diluted Hitlers - that the Conservative Party represents a kind of homeopathic Nazism. There are many, many dangers to the right-wing agenda of the Tory party, but that’s not one of them.

When the left becomes intemperate in its criticism of the right, the right gains a moral superiority it ill deserves. Left-wingers are much more often accused of hypocrisy than the right. Left-wingers send their children to selective schools, they use private health insurance, they under-pay their cleaners, they wear t-shirts. Left-wing views go along with hypocrisy very easily - like fish and chips with guacamole.

The assumption is that left-wing people lack the moral spine to apply their beliefs in practice. There must therefore be something wrong with either the beliefs or the people who hold them. Right-wing people, however, happily embody all the principles they espouse publicly - with the occasional exception of sexual fidelity.

Is this because left-wing people are weak, or their ideals are other-worldly? Are the left a more morally wobbly bunch? No - it is because left-wing principles guard against the human frailty of selfishness. So when a left-winger succumbs to selfishness, they clash with their stated political principles, and hypocrisy is the result. Right-wingers don’t think you should be forced to regulate your behaviour in any way, so they couldn’t be hypocritical if they wanted to be.

If you lionise individual liberty, then selfishness is built into the system, or even celebrated. When a right-winger says that you should be allowed to do whatever you like, it is hard to see what kind of behaviour might constitute hypocrisy. If a Conservative minister led a crackdown on begging, and then was seen giving change to a homeless person, would that be seen as hypocrisy? Surely not. A right-winger’s personal compassion would not undermine their hard-line political stance.

Right-wingers still have the human instincts of compassion and generosity - often to a very considerable degree. But they believe that generosity has no place in a political system - it belongs to the worlds of charity and philanthropy. A system built on universal selfishness makes the whole of society sit up straight and click into place. Selfishness may be no part of their personal character, but it is an essential driver of their political credo.

Yes, we should condemn hypocrites. But we should condemn more strongly those whose policies make so few demands upon the comfortable that no one could ever fall short. Why should we praise anyone for ‘walking the talk’ if their talk mainly comprises shouting obscenities at strangers, and their walking style involves kicking pensioners in the shins?

Living by your principles is only really admirable if you have admirable principles.

Conspiracy? What conspiracy?

If you think there is a conspiracy to prevent your voice being heard, it is important to remember one thing: there might not be.

If you really think there is one, you should do all you can to smash it. But first check and double check that the conspiracy definitely exists. There are few surer ways of looking silly than trying to smash something which isn’t there.

Some conspiracies do exist, of course, including some very unlikely ones. For many centuries, half of the human race were complicit in ensuring that the other half had very little power, and encouraged them not to worry their pretty little heads about it. Feminism spotted this and objected to it, and the rest of the world has slowly conceded that they’ve got a pretty bullet-proof point. Now only a small minority disagree, normally for reasons of religion or golf.

For a few thousand years there was another conspiracy that legitimised the idea of owning humans. Bad enough in itself, that conspiracy also ensured that people were often divided up into ‘owners’ and ‘owned’ based largely on skin colour. Another conspiracy made sure that men who want to have sex with men feel really awkward, and women who want to have sex with women feel impossible. And there’s probably another massive conspiracy going on right now which we’re entirely unaware of, which will make future generations look back at us and tut - probably something to do with robots.

One conspiracy that is definitely not happening is the liberal conspiracy. There is not a secret group of powerful people forcing the masses to adopt tolerant, compassionate opinions against their will. No such group exists, and even if it did it wouldn’t have the means, motive, or opportunity to carry out their vile plan. Yet some people demand that this is what is happening.

Some people get suspicious when they hear liberal opinions. Why are they saying these things? Why don’t they say what they really think? It doesn’t occur to them that liberal people exist. Liberal people are saying what they really think, they just think different things from you. To claim that no one could possibly think anything different from you shows a dreadful lack of imagination.

This is what was behind the ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ Tory campaign at the 2005 election. They wanted us to reply, ‘Yes, and we’re relieved you’ve finally said it out loud’. But the electorate’s actual response was, ‘No, and please stop asking such creepy questions.’

Healthy debate requires disagreement. But it also requires respect. When someone says, ‘I believe in X,’ it takes a special kind of arrogance to reply, ‘No, you don’t.’ 

If a local council, a quango, or a comedian on a panel show (or a blogging comedian who’s never been on a panel show, but is available at surprisingly affordable rates) - if any of these demonstrates sympathy towards the vulnerable, they are not doing it to annoy you. They are doing it because they believe in it. The fact that it annoys you is just a happy by-product.

The real problem with the imagined liberal conspiracy - compared to the real male or white conspiracies - is the question of who benefits. Sexism and racism prevailed because they benefited the powerful, so the powerful made sure they continued. But what advantage do liberal opinion-formers gain from their stance? There is no evidence that their motive is in any way ulterior. Any prominent liberal mouthpiece rubbing their hands in glee and cackling evilly is kidding themselves.

If the liberal consensus really has gone too far, if political correctness really has gone mad, then society’s project to protect the needy is over.  Since early last century we have, as a society, decided that the poor should receive healthcare, education, and a basic financial safety net; that the sick should receive treatment regardless of their wealth; and the old should be given a third option that is neither ‘work’ nor ‘starve’.

Opponents of the imagined liberal consensus must feel that this project is finished - that the hungry now have a constant reliable source of food, and the poor have been abolished. In fact, they must think this was managed a while ago, and every effort made since then has been wasteful and counter-productive. Society is now too compassionate, and the biggest problem the needy face is that they get too much help.

That is a caricature of the right-wing position, but it’s the best guess we have about what they think. We never hear their position properly outlined - not because the liberal consensus is so all-powerful that it silences all right-wing voices. The real problem is that right-wingers, when given a platform, use it to complain that they’re never given a platform. They refuse to talk about the real issues, they just speak constantly about how they’re not allowed to speak. It makes you wonder what they have to hide.

Euro vision

The UK is divided over many issues - about paying the bills, about keeping the lights on and, most ridiculous of all, about the continent we’re on.

“Are you in favour of Europe” is a ridiculous question to ask. It’s like asking a Swiss politician if they are in favour of mountains. We live in Europe. It is the continent our country is on. It’s not a matter of political opinion, it’s geographical fact. The narrow strip of water between us and France is not tectonically significant - we are Europeans.

Now, of course, in statements about ‘Europe’, people are mostly using the word as a shorthand for the EU. But the laziness of the nickname betrays a sloppiness in the thinking. Many of the evils ascribed to one European body derive from a different one entirely. These unthinking kind of eurosceptics do not distinguish between European unions, commissions, courts, or councils. They will rail interchangeably about Brussels or Strasbourg. When they say Europe, that is exactly what they mean. They mean local foreigners. Foreigners are a worry to these people, and nearby foreigners are just as foreign as distant foreigners, but with the added worry of proximity.

Over the last decade or two, the eurosceptic tendency - most often affiliated with the right wing of the Conservative Party - has been a constant presence. They have made a considerable contribution to public life, not least ensuring the frequent unelectable disunity of the Conservative Party - a valuable service to the nation in itself. More surprisingly, there have even been occasions that they have been right.

The euro is the best example. When the euro was a live political issue in the UK, those who advocated British entry were the modernisers, the bold dreamers of the future, the new generation. Needless to say, this bright gleaming bunch were led by Tony Blair, who liked things that were new. At one point, he seemed to like things for no reason other than their newness. We may not know much about Tony Blair’s culinary tastes, but if he were coming round to dinner in the late 90s, you would probably give him new potatoes - it would feel like the safe bet.

The euro was a new idea but, it turns out, not a particularly excellent one. The eurozone seems not to have benefited many of its countries in their efforts to manage the financial crisis. When things go bad, it seems that governments benefit from having control of as many financial levers as possible. There is never a good time to lose control of your economy, but this has surely been amongst the worst. 

This was always part of the problem of the euro. The problems of Germany and Greece were never likely to be identical, but the euro demands they swallow the same medicine. The chances are that if the prescription matches the needs of one country, it will do no good for the other. And between Germany at one end and Greece at the other, there are sixteen more countries with individual needs. A single economic and monetary policy for all of them will, at any one time, be a compromise that probably serves none of them especially perfectly.

The eurosceptic wing of British politics warned us about the euro. How? Did they talk of the dangers of co-ordinating economic and monetary policy over too widely varied an area? Not exactly. Mostly, they wore suits made of pound signs, and dressed their bulldogs in union jack waistcoats. If that was meant to be a metaphor for the harmonisation of interest rates, it was a pretty damned subtle one.

The one time that the right wing of the Tory party happened to be right about something, they made  absolutely sure that they seemed as ridiculous as possible. There’s no use being right if you also make yourselves laughable. If Churchill had spent the 1930s warning about German rearmament while wearing a red nose and oversized shoes, he would have to share some of the blame for being ignored.

The euro was, either in concept or execution, a flawed plan. But not for any of the reasons that its opponents were noisiest about. The fatal weaknesses of European and monetary union were nothing to do with the Queen’s head. National identity was never even remotely at stake. You may have travelled to countries that use the euro: you will have noticed that they are still countries. Crossing the channel, you don’t feel you have entered the part of the eurozone that used to be called France. If you think changing currency will reduce your national character, you surely have a pretty low opinion of your nation.

Europe exists, and no amount of pulling faces towards Calais will change that. The EU is an incompetent, partly corrupt organisation that needs massive reform. It is still a good thing that it exists. Before it was created, its countries did not often, if ever, go seventy years without declaring war on each other. Yet the current era, the era of the European project, is on the verge of that record.

And it is still a good thing that the UK is a member. Why would you not want to be a part of the club of where you live? You may not often, or ever, attend your residents’ association meetings, but you’d be pretty annoyed if they didn’t invite you, then in your absence voted to knock your house down. Leaving the EU would be asking to have less of a say.

UKIP have now inherited the eurosceptic mantle. They feel that something is wrong with the country, they don’t like it, and foreigners must be to blame. Imagine if UKIP had been around in the 1960s. Britain spent that decade begging to be let into the EEC, but France’s General de Gaulle kept saying ‘No’ (or whatever the French for that is). ‘Sixties Farage' would have decried these obstructive continentals, and demanded entry into their cosy private club. How dare these pesky foreigners tell us what to do. If we weren’t in the EU, UKIP would be demanding we be let in.

David Cameron also thinks that the EU is imperfect, and the best option for Britain is to improve it, and stay in. What eminent good sense. But for some reason, Cameron will only allow himself one attempt at improving it. He is giving European reform one last go, but doesn’t mention this is also his first go. If it doesn’t become what the government wants, we will move towards leaving. Cameron’s motto on European reform is, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, quit immediately.’

The UK has done precious little to improve the EU. Before this government, there has been little political will to push for change. During this government, we have seen a prime minister who would rather go home halfway through a summit than influence discussions positively. Neither approach has given EU reform a serious go. Cameron’s attitude is, “Well I’ve tried absolutely nothing - what else is there is to do? I’m at the end of my tether.”

EU reform is a laudable aim. It is an organisation which has repeatedly failed to get its books signed off by its own anti-corruption arm, and frequently behaves with questionable priorities. But reforming it is a lifetime’s work. Any politician genuinely committed to making the EU better would see that the job must be done inch by inch, month by month. It would also be done by engagement, not posturing and flouncing off.

Cameron is prepared to do anything to make the EU work for Britain. As long as it happens straightaway and with minimal effort. He has the mentality of an 11-year-old, frustrated that he still can’t play the Flight of the Bumble Bee, even though he’s owned a flute for, like, hours. 

Either that or his fides are not entirely bona - he wants failure, but he doesn’t want the failure to reflect on him. Except, that is, from the people who would consider the failure a success, and then he’s eager to take the credit. The EU is a genuinely complex area, with strong feelings on both sides. Cameron wants to be the darling of the eurosceptics, without alienating moderate opinion. In other words, he wants to be popular with two sworn enemies. It’s not going to work.

Talk politician to me

The relationship between politicians and people, at its best, is an oddly imbalanced one. Politicians should be fascinated with people - but they must remember that people are totally uninterested in them. When it works, it’s not like a healthy marriage, it’s more like cat ownership.

If a political message assumes the public is interested in politicians, it will fail. The general public’s feelings about politicians range from indifference to antipathy. Half of people wouldn’t care if the politicians all jumped in the lake - the other half actively want them to.

Not caring about politicians is quite different from voter apathy. Some people either don’t care about the issues or, more likely, feel that politics has no effect on the issues they do care about. Or they think there is little difference between the available voting options. They feel that voting is a choice between being punched in the face or kicked in the goolies. And that’s why they won’t schlep out to a local primary school on a Thursday next May.

Voter apathy is understandable but sad, and should be fought against. But the public’s indifference towards politicians is not just inevitable, it is healthy and natural. It is the politicians’ job to make themselves relevant to people’s lives, not the other way round. No voter ever heard a politician speak, went away and thought about it for a while, made some calculations on the back of an envelope, and then came back and said, ‘Right, now I’m inspired.’

Politicians often make this mistake, but it’s a particularly common error at the moment. And what has caused the party leaders to ignore this golden rule of how to talk to the public? UKIP. A new party with a genuinely gifted communicator at its helm, who always speaks from the point of view of normal people. Admittedly, his definition of ‘normal’ is disgustingly narrow, and his plans for those who fall outside his normality are at best neglectful, if not actually hostile. But he speaks to the people he considers to be his public from an angle they understand. They never have to translate Farage out of Politician and into English.

So this is exactly the worst moment for the main party leaders to forget how to speak. The Tories’ favoured line about UKIP at the moment is, ‘If you go to bed with Nigel Farage, you’ll wake up with Ed Miliband.’ Cameron first said it at the party conference, which is the right place to say it - to a live audience of your own party, and a wider national audience composed entirely of political obsessives. This is the kind of crowd that would laugh at a punchline about the public sector borrowing requirement: nerdiness is allowed.

But outside the conference hall, it doesn’t wash. It is undemocratic and patronising. When you vote for a party it might be out of principled conviction, or as a complex tactical hedge, or to win a bet - it is no business of politicians to tell you what your vote means. If you start persuading people that their vote isn’t what they think it is, you are tampering with the democratic process. You’re also likely to get people’s backs up. Voters will quite rightly say, ‘Hey, politicians, you get to run the country the other 1825 days of the electoral cycle. But on election day we’re in charge, so butt out.’

The Tories are assuming that normal people see politics the same way they do. Their message of ‘vote Farage, get Miliband’ is assuming that UKIP voters have one precise set of opinions about three political parties: they normally like Tories, but UKIP are exciting and new, and Labour are filthy vermin. That’s a lot of assumptions, and if any one of them is wrong, the message breaks down. The claim to understand the minds of so many people in such detail is highly patronising. Many UKIP voters have deserted the major parties exactly because they felt patronised. You’re not going to solve that problem by patronising them a little bit more.

Labour have pounced on this tactical error from the Tories by replicating it precisely. The main slogan Labour is using to attack UKIP is ‘More Tory than the Tories’. It’s true of course. If you dislike the political principles of the Tory party, you will object even more strongly to those of UKIP. But what possible campaigning value does that have for Labour? How is comparing the Tories and UKIP going to persuade a single person to vote Labour? It should be a chance for Labour to tell the country what’s good about them - instead it sounds like they’re changing the subject. Every time Labour says, ‘UKIP are more Tory than the Tories’ they may as well be saying, ‘Looks like it might rain’. It's like trying to sell oranges with the slogan, 'Bananas are yellower than apples'.

Looking at the polls, Labour have made a pretty poor job of persuading people that the Tory plan for the British people is bad news. Why do they think there is any value at all in tarring UKIP with the Tory brush? You would think that Labour had vanquished one right-wing foe, and are now gleefully dispatching the next. In fact, having inflicted very few scratches on their first combatant, they are expecting the second to be terrified at their fearsome reputation. No wonder Farage always seems to be giggling a bit.

Like the Conservatives’ ‘Wake up with Farage’, Labour’s ‘more Tory than the Tories’ tries to explain political parties by forming an analogy with political parties - as metaphors go, it’s wildly uncreative. It is the sound of politics eating itself. And all the while, the true danger of UKIP goes unskewered.

UKIP preaches isolation on the EU and intolerance on immigration. It does both in a highly populist way. The mainstream parties are then frightened of their popularity. So the Conservatives offer eurosceptics enough treats to keep them sweet, and Labour attempt to talk tough on immigration. It shows a depressing lack of imagination, and a low opinion of the public.

You don’t oppose UKIP by impersonating them. Then you're giving them little victories, and encouragement. The way to oppose populist intolerance is with populist tolerance. You don’t beat Farage by stealing his song and singing it worse - find a better song and sing it better. He appeals to people’s worst instincts, so appeal to their best instincts. Actually, they will like you better for it. Assume people are tolerant and nice and they’ll take it as a compliment.

We can’t complain that the public are intolerant if we never gave them anything inspiringly tolerant to cheer along with. The narrow-minded can say, ‘I agree with Farage’, but currently there’s no credible banner for everyone else. Farage is good at his job, but from the reaction of the main parties you would think he cannot be bettered.

If that is what they really think, they must have a pretty low opinion of the country, and themselves.

Say 'the economy', and the argument's over

We on the left want make the world fairer, more equal, and happier. Then the right says, ‘Yeah, we’d love to do that too, but I’m afraid it’s not going to work.’ And when we ask why, they say, ’Er, cos of the economy?’ And we run away, terrified by their acuity.

There is often a perception that the right owns economics. Left-wing plans are idealistic and admirable, but if anyone ever tried them the economy would snap in half. We’d all like to do something for the needy, but if we did, within a week you’d all be carrying your daily wage home in cash in a wheelbarrow.

The right owns economics because the right owns everything, especially the money. The source of most of our economic punditry is large financial corporations. We ask the banks, we ask the City, we ask the markets. And these people predict doom and disaster if a left-wing agenda is proposed. Is this because left-wing policies genuinely cause economic meltdown? Or because so many economists’ employers think a left-wing agenda might make them a tiny bit less filthy rich?

There are voices in the economic world that don’t follow this relentlessly pro-business line, but not many. And not because it doesn’t have the arguments - it just doesn’t have the spokesmen. Think tanks, universities, and public sector organisations all employ economists without being owned by a financial behemoth. But they pay a lot less than a bank. So a career economist is unlikely to resist the top wages for their whole career. An economist working in the public sector was probably in the private sector in their previous job, and is probably heading straight back there once they’ve ticked the government box. Banks may not own all the economists all the time, but they own almost all of them most of the time. And any economists the banks don’t currently own either started there or will end up there - banks are their training ground, or at least their pension plan.

There are left-wing economists. Some of them have written marvellous books about the harm that the right-wing economic consensus has done the world - including, but not limited to, the financial crisis. But the market in economist employment doesn’t allow many of them to exist. And those that do exist are not accorded a regular platform. The media will talk to them about their new book, but to the media a ‘left-wing economist’ is a newsworthy oddity, like a skateboarding duck. If the media just wants an economist to be an economist, they want a right-wing one that works for a massive bank. For an economic argument you want an economist on the right, and on the left you want an environmentalist, or perhaps an aromatherapist. Anything else would confuse the viewers.

In politics, economics used to be thought of as rather a left-wing notion. When Tory prime minister Alec Douglas-Home confessed to understanding little of economics, he wasn’t just being a crusty old booby refusing to get with it. He was expressing a political idea of the time that the right held dear: the economy cannot be controlled by politicians, and it’s a damned fool that tries. Harold Wilson’s Labour government later in the 60s introduced a Department of Economic Affairs, because they had this new idea that the economy was something which could be managed by a government. A certain portion of the right will have looked on Wilson’s DEA much as global warming deniers now look upon a ‘Department of Climate Change’: a vast and costly attempt to control something which can’t be controlled and possibly doesn’t even exist.

That’s all a long time ago now. Now economics so firmly belongs to the right in political discourse, any proposal to the left of the status quo is automatically assumed to be financially ruinous. And one big coincidence has really helped cement that idea in people’s minds: when the global financial crisis happened, Labour were in government.

Labour had a very good line about this a year or two ago, which they seem to have stopped using. They said that Lehman Brothers did not go bust because Labour had spent too much on schools and hospitals. Sadly, a really cracking line like that is water in the desert to Labour MPs at the moment, so suddenly everybody said it for about 48 hours. Then they realised they were sounding like over-briefed automata, so they all stopped saying it again.

But it’s right. And they should start saying it again, but perhaps with everyone using their own version of it, substituting the collapsed business and the Labour policy of their choice. (Look forward to ‘Blockbuster didn’t go bust because Labour spent too much money calling Rochdale pensioners a bigot.’)

The global crisis happened ‘during’ the Labour government, not ‘because of’. They are very different things. Labour being in government cannot be blamed for the global financial crisis, any more than Bryan Adams being at number one can be blamed for Boris Yeltsin getting sworn in, Liz McColgan winning World Athletics gold, or Vauxhall launching the third-generation Astra.

The biggest impact on the nation’s finances is the enormous bail-out Labour gave to the banks which no one, and certainly not the Tories, opposed. Nor would they oppose it now. The greatest contribution Labour did make towards the financial crisis was in over-liberalising and under-regulating financial markets. The Tories supported those moves then, and they still believe those things now. The Tory party sometimes criticises Labour for their poor regulation of the markets between 1997 and 2010, but even they never have the cheek to claim that they wouldn’t have done exactly the same themselves - or possibly gone even further.

The narrative states that Labour broke the economy, and since 2010 it’s got mended. It’s a gross simplification which conceals more than it reveals about the economic reality. The Tories have pushed this story, understandably; the media have lapped it up, predictably; and Lib Dems have backed it up, irritatingly. In fact, it’s one of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems at the moment. In a list of the most irritating things about the Lib Dems, it would easily make it into the top 300.

Traditionally, the Lib Dems have represented a kind of casting vote. Tories say X, Labour say Y - which way will the Lib Dems jump? Although they have lost any true claim to that role by siding with the Tories, some of that lives on. So when the Lib Dems join in with the Tory chorus that Labour broke the economy, it sounds a little like an independently verified fact. Whereas, of course, the Lib Dems on this subject could scarcely be less independent.

If, in 2010, Labour’s internal election rules had allowed for a swift replacement of Gordon Brown, we could be looking at a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, and the Lib Dems would never have demonised the last government’s economic record to the ludicrous extent they have. If the coalition talks had lasted a few weeks - much closer to the European norm than the hasty weekend that created this government - and if the Labour party constitution allowed a new leader to be elected that quickly, then the Lib Dems would surely have gone for the Labour option. They only opted for the Tories because there was no non-Brown Labour party as a possible partner.

Instead, the Lib Dems teamed up with the Tories, and claimed the nobility of the ‘national interest’ for their unlikely union. That story required a national crisis and a national enemy for it to stick properly - the economy and the Labour party fitted the bill perfectly.

And in so doing, they have perpetuated the myth that the left don’t do economics. This is perhaps their most harmful contribution to British politics. If you are going to shore up the right, and demonise the left, then you are indistinguishable from the right. You are the right. The danger is that when the Lib Dems are extinct, their dangerous lie might live on.

The wrong traitors

It’s perfectly natural that David Cameron is suffering from defections, but why on earth are they coming from the right wing of his party? This government is cutting and selling off everything in sight. This should indulge the fantasies of every economic right-winger. They should all be staring moist-eyed at the television saying, ‘It’s happening, it’s really happening. I never thought I would live to see the day.’ But they’re not. They’re getting on the phone to Farage.

It defies the laws of political gravity that the Tories, while continuing their firmly right-wing agenda, should then suffer defections from its own right wing. Given this government’s political direction, the exodus should really be coming from its moderate left. These kind-hearted patriarchs should be saying to the Tory leadership, ‘Hang on a minute chaps, this is just not on, what?’ But where are they?

When Labour moved leftwards in the early 80s, it was the right wing of the Labour party that defected and formed the SDP. That’s the way it should be - when a party moves one way, those at the opposite end get itchy feet. The political river appears to be running uphill at the moment because this is an unusual time for the parties closest to the Tories. There are normally options to the left of the Tories but not the right. At the moment it is the other way round.

For the first time ever there is something credible - at least, electorally credible - to the right of the Tories. Despite there being almost no room on that side, UKIP have squeezed their clapped-out Bentley into the space. They have managed this by focussing on other subjects - Europe and immigration - and been vague and incoherent about bigger issues. When asked about tax and spending, Farage orders another pint, unveils another ex-Tory MP, and everybody cheers.

So why is no one jumping off the Tory ship to the left? Because there is no seaworthy vessel within leaping distance. Who in their right mind would join the Lib Dems at the moment? The sole purpose of the Lib Dems over the past four and a half years has been to make Tory dreams come true. A Tory joining the LibDems would look like a spy sent from head office to keep a closer eye on an under-performing branch.

If a Tory joined the Lib Dems, it would be assumed that they were a pro-European (or just suicidal). It must be tricky being a pro-European Tory, much like being a Jehovah’s Witness haematologist. Eventually something has to give. Any Tory MPs leaving the party now because it is too right wing wouldn’t join the Lib Dems. They’d probably just stay quiet, stick around til the election, then find themselves something more lucrative to do with their time.

The only examples of a left-wing Tory defecting to the Lib Dems come from the last days of the John Major government. Major’s government was gaining a sleazy reputation. Desertion had a nice mix of high and low motives - Major had lost moral authority, so could no longer be supported by decent people. Or anyone, really, decent or otherwise. As a career move, it was a handy moment to stop being a Tory.

It is strange, then, that there were so few defectors under Thatcher - just the one Tory MP who joined 28 Labour MPs in forming the SDP’s Commons presence in 1981. The Tories were tacking hard to the right every bit as much as Labour to the left in the early 80s. But the parliamentary drama only drew attention to Labour’s abandonment of the centre ground - the Tories’ lurch hardly lost them anyone. They were having too much fun winning elections, drinking champagne, wearing striped shirts, and carrying around enormous mobile phones to notice that part of their party’s identity was being discarded.

Strength of leadership is clearly the issue here. People defect from weak leaders and towards strong ones. Partly they are preserving their careers. But it can be a principled move as well. You can leave your party because you think poor leadership would be bad for the country, as well as your personal electoral ambitions. 

Maybe, in the Thatcher years, the one-nation Tories on the party’s left were just being patient, and thought the pendulum would swing back their way once she was gone. The problem is, it took her so long to go, and by the time she went she’d changed everything.

She also created a generation of new Tories - and that’s what stands behind the bizarre rightwards exits from an already right-steering party we are seeing now. Tories elected to the House of Commons over the last couple of general elections came of age under Thatcher. Anyone aged 42-57 turned 18 during Thatcher’s party leadership. This was a period where right-wing views were strong, brave, and proud, and the left-wing was weak, wet, and disloyal. Ever further right-wing opinions were lionised, like an escalating drinking game.

And that is where this generation of right-wing Tory candidates comes from. They have never encountered a right-wing opinion they didn’t admire. They know how to play a Tory selection committee, and say the right things about Europe, to get the job. But what they really crave in politics is Thatcherism to the nth degree.

So when a strong, charismatic leader comes along and trumps even David Cameron in terms of right-wing purity, no wonder they are tempted. When asked her greatest achievement, Thatcher said ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’. To that list she can now certainly add Cameron’s current Tories, and UKIP.

Why is a right-veering Tory party losing people to the right? Because of the kind of people we’re dealing with. Tory MPs last year proposed what they called an “Alternative Queen’s Speech”. Their suggestions included bringing back national service and the death penalty, privatising the BBC, and renaming the August bank holiday ‘Margaret Thatcher Day’. That’s what we’re dealing with here. That’s why the parliamentary Tory party is behaving in such an eccentric way. It is nuts.

The bank holiday policy seems unnecessary, though. Surely to people like this, every day is Margaret Thatcher Day.