The Times - UK (2021-12-18)

Let’s dream of rail adventures

to be had next year

Weekend essay

Pages 44-45

Carol Midgley Notebook

name “Starvation Nation”.

Though if they really wanted to

take the mick they

could have gone for

“Living La Vida

Lockdown”. Better

still they could have

called themselves

precisely what they

were urged to do by a

senior official when

the dodgy quiz

finished: “Leave By

The Back Door”.

Home win

N

ow that Covid

cases are soaring,

those of us who

failed to secure a

Christmas supermarket

home delivery slot

because the smug gits

got in first can at least

make virtue out of necessity by

pretending we did it deliberately

to leave them free for the vulnerable.

“Oh, you’ve taken a much-needed

delivery, have you? Wow. Oh, well,

each to their own.” Facetiousness

aside, I actually kicked my Tesco

home delivery habit during the first

lockdown and didn’t even try this

year. Instead I find click and collect

to be the just-right Goldilocks

option. You still get the lazy person’s

gratification at not having to trudge

round the aisles but when you unload

the car at home, the neighbours think

you’ve been battling crowds at

Sainsbury’s coal face. Win, win.

Labour of love

A

lec Baldwin’s wife says that he

once told her to “shush” while

she was in childbirth because he

was on the phone. That’s even worse

than men who quip that seeing their

partner in labour is like “watching

my favourite pub burn down”. What a

pity for Alec that Hilaria Baldwin isn’t

into Scientology, which requires

women to push out the baby in

silence. I suppose I should feel grateful

that my husband only sat in the

corner of the hospital room writing a

newspaper column while I was in

labour, saying: “Well, it gets it out of

the way.” I know one woman whose

partner said, “It can’t be that bad”, as

she bellowed for more pain relief.

Another told me that after a long,

messy labour a midwife asked her:

“Would you like tea and toast?”

“Ooh, yes please. It’s been a rough

night,” replied the husband.

Deliver us

T

he Times’s exposé on parcel-

chucking Hermes workers was

fascinating but am I the only

one who also worries about couriers

judging me? Specifically, when you’re

out and they send a photo of the

parcel by your front door and you

cringe at the shabby paintwork and

cobwebby leaves on the step. It’s

known as “porch shame” and is the

property equivalent of catching sight

of yourself in a shop window and

thinking: “Who’s that old bag?”

Tits”). Anything Python-related

— just no. Ditto Harry Potter:

you’re adults.

Judging by the team names

for Boris Johnson’s

lockdown-busting

Downing Street Christmas

quiz last year, staff had put

thought into them,

suggesting this was an

event planned well in

advance. True, some

such as “Next Slide

Please” and “Professor

Quiz Whitty” were basic,

entry-level efforts. Heard

’em all before, mate. But

“Cheeses of Nazareth”?

“The Six Masketeers”?

Trouble had been taken. As

someone tweeted, picking

names mocking the

lockdown restrictions

such as “Hands, Space,

First Place” and “Quizzness

Rebels Without a Claus” is like

Oxfam’s staff having the team

C

hoosing your team name is
the hardest part of any pub
quiz. You must be careful,
as my veteran quizzer
friend says, not to sound
like jerks, though he used a stronger
noun. Be overly conceited with, say,
“I am Smartacus” or “Brainiacs” and
your humiliation is only funnier
when you lose. Big-up your alcohol
intake with “Menace to Sobriety” or
“Alcohooligans” and you are in David
Brent territory (though in The Office
his team was “The Dead Parrots”;
they went to a tie-break with “The

Named and

shamed on

a quiz night

to forget

Tories have swallowed the poison of populism

Pandering to Ukippers delivered a temporary cheap thrill to the Conservative Party but it is now paying a heavy price

Comment

asset leaking almost imperceptibly

away. For want of a better term I

characterise it as solidity. I’m even

tempted to use the word

“conservative”.

Take the adjectives those who

dislike Conservative governments

might use — “heartless”, “uncaring”,

“philistine”, “snobby”, “reactionary”

— and pit against these the

adjectives supporters might prefer:

“pragmatic”, “careful with money”,

“sound on crime”, “business-minded”.

Then put the vocabularies both of

praise and of blame aside, and ask

what both fans and critics might at

least agree on. You’ll get a sort of

Venn diagram convergence over

what has distinguished the

Conservative Party in the national

imagination; a family of words that

has an almost stodgy ring: stodgy but

in its way reassuring. “Boring”,

“stable”, “conventional”, “firm”,

“anchored”, “dull”. The party had

what gents of a certain class like to

call “bottom”, which doesn’t mean

clever or even necessarily right, but

denotes an almost suet-like

steadiness. “Solid” captures it.

The party has lost its bottom.

Helen Morgan, the Lib Dem by-

election candidate, will have hit the

right nerve among rueful Tory

supporters when, in her victory

speech in the small hours of

yesterday morning, she called recent

Conservative governance “a nightly

soap opera of calamity and chaos”.

Populism will always yield that result

because tummy-tickling can never be

a recipe for sound government.

Since the European referendum

campaign began, the Conservative

Party has been poisoning itself, and

the toxin is called populism. At first

the experience was intoxicating,

heady. Now the party’s getting the

shakes. The cure will require more

than the removal of one man.

pandered to it and prospered. The

Tories grew more Ukippy in their

nativist rhetoric and headline-

catching initiatives. Priti Patel’s

Home Office became an exemplar of

the vulgarity.

And in a way, it worked — at first.

Ukip haemorrhaged support; indeed

their successors barely registered in

Thursday’s by-election results.

Columnists started to write about the

Tories’ wonderfully shape-shifting

genius for moving to where the

voters are. Johnson clowned around;

Patel doubled down and attacked

judges; second-raters recruited to

cabinet solely for their Brexit

credentials shuffled along behind;

distinguished Tory centrists were

expelled for being Remainers; and

for a while the shift seemed

productive — electorally at least.

But something was being lost, an

Under Boris Johnson, the party has

lost its reassuring sense of solidity

country at large. These were the

Brexiteers within. Unnerving though,

to both the left, centre and even

some on the right of the party, were

the Brexiteers without.

Ukip, led with a showman’s genius

by Nigel Farage, began championing

the idea of a complete and if

necessary antagonistic break with

the EU.

The xenophobia grew in strength,

and fed into a wider sort of populism

that began, if flickeringly, to prosper

at the ballot box. It was embraced by

some Tories with an enthusiasm —

an almost lip-smacking relish — that

seemed so untypical of the party I

thought I knew.

At this point the great, pragmatic,

unideological blob that forms the

centre and probably the majority of

the parliamentary Tory party seems

to have lost its nerve.

I can understand this. As a one-

time Tory backbencher myself I’m

familiar with the panic that can grip

colleagues if they feel their own

majority (and career, and livelihood)

may be threatened.

A theory that Conservatism

needed to move sharply Ukip’s way

to forestall the defection of our own

voters (and even a few of our MPs)

attracted many.

On this page I argued that in the

longer run, moderation, and our

mildly centrist personality as a party,

were the greater assets. Ukip (I

argued) could soak up some of the

toxic impulses of the electorate: the

Tory party would be well rid of its

sometimes xenophobic right or we’d

be in danger of losing the moderate

ground. Let Ukip drain the poison,

I argued.

Instead, the party swallowed it.

The theory that we should

accommodate and absorb populism

prevailed. People like Johnson,

unencumbered by principle,

S

tunning. But as one beast
heading for the abattoir or
one Tory heading for a
general election might
remark to another, it’s
possible to be stunned but not
surprised. The Tories had this
coming. A former Tory lady voter
told a canvasser friend of mine in
North Shropshire last Sunday that
“it’s the lying. We just can’t have
that.” The matronly lament puts me
in mind of Lady Wishfort in William
Congreve’s The Way of the World,
after Sir Wilfull Witwoud has
bellowed: “Ahey! Wenches? Where
are the wenches?” Lady Wishfort:
“This will never do.”
On Thursday North Shropshire
echoed her. Analysts will pick
through particular policies that
might have proved unpopular with
particular Shropshire voters, but
unless I mistake my countrymen,
this isn’t about one policy or another,
but about probity, dignity,
consistency, rootedness. There’s
something almost inexpressibly
tacky about the government to
whom these voters have just
delivered a massive kick.
And, no, there does not follow
another column about Boris Johnson.
He’s finished, and we can chin-stroke
about the when but not the whether.
He’ll be gone before too long.
Yet the party that elevated him will
still be in government, and Johnson
has been in many ways not so much
cause as consequence of a
Westminster tribe that appears to
have lost its head. What possessed
the parliamentary Conservative

Party, like a drunk reaching for the

stabilising arm of another drunk,

to place their future in his hands?

Such an inquiry is more interesting

than the question of which

particular opportunist was able to

take their fancy.

The Tories have lost their keel,

their ballast, their balance; lost the

centre of gravity that keeps a

political movement from capsizing in

the face of any sudden gust. And it

didn’t start with Johnson. It started

when David Cameron called a

referendum on Europe.

I personally believed a sane case

could just about be made for leaving

the EU, and an even saner one for

letting well enough alone. Seeing

some peril and no great benefit in

leaving, I inclined to the status quo

and still would.

Many fellow citizens, however —

and they included a clear majority in

(for instance) North Shropshire —

inclined to leaving the EU. So be it.

But for the country’s interests to be

protected, the terms of Britain’s

departure mattered tremendously.

And at this point a large part of the

Conservative Party seemed to

become inhabited by some kind of

lunacy. A hard core among these

distracted souls were native to the

party: fierce and famously

longstanding opponents of our

association with the European

Union; but their number was soon

swelled by new and younger recruits

and, energised by the referendum

result, the grouping gathered force,

supported by much of an ageing

generation of Tory “activists” in the

Johnson is finished. We

can chin-stroke about

when but not whether

Matthew

Parris

the times | Saturday December 18 2021 2GM 37