22 The Sunday Times December 19, 2021COMMENT
Rod Liddle
North Shropshire wasn’t all bad for the
Tories — just look how Labour fared
T
hose little villages of Shropshire
are no longer the quietest
places under the sun, as AE
Housman had it, but filled with
a people in seething ferment,
desperate to rid themselves of a
government that only two years
ago they voted for en masse.
They are sick of Boris Johnson, with his
parties and his apartments, his grasping
friends, his Peppa Pigs and his porkie
pies, his inviolable, unshakeable
incompetence.
In the seventh-biggest swing in UK
parliamentary history, the Conservatives
were dumped for a party led by the
charismatic intellectual colossus that is
Ed Davey. Housman would have been
most surprised by this rebellion in one of
England’s bluest counties.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps they were
never the quietest places under the sun,
even in Edwardian times. Housman had
never even set foot in the county when
he wrote the (at times unbearably
pompous) cycle A Shropshire Lad. He
scribbled almost the entire thing from
the very un-rural surroundings of
London N10: Hampstead borders. In
other words, he took a kind of Labour
Party approach to poetry: these places,
beyond London, sound absolutely
marvellous, provided one doesn’t have
to actually go there.
Nothing that follows here is intended
to diminish the import of this by-election
for the Conservative Party and its
present leadership, which seems to be
progressing towards a state of
putrefaction with every day that passes.
The deal in the party is very clear: we
have grave misgivings about you, Boris,
but you can win elections. You have,
somehow, an attractiveness with the
electorate. That deal is scuppered when
you’re beaten 8-0 on your own ground
by the least effective third party (in
England) in 50 years.
Ranged against him now are not just
the pragmatic, blue-Labourish red wall
Tories, but also the Covid-doubting
libertarians who rebelled last week, thesurreptitious deal with Ed Davey’s
convocation of woke oddballs: they’ll
give us a free run in Old Bexley and
Sidcup; we’ll ease off in North
Shropshire. This has all been denied by
Labour — but then it would be, wouldn’t
it? The problem, though, is that Labour
came nowhere near winning in Bexley
and was utterly humiliated in North
Shropshire.
It also managed to lose its deposit in
the suburban pleasantville of Chesham
& Amersham. Where, then, can it win —
beyond a few seats representing
affluent, well-educated, inner-city
metropolitans? It possesses only a single
seat in Scotland, down from the 59
achieved in 1997. It is in the process of
being wiped out in the northeast of
England. When Keir Starmer looks at a
constituency map of the country, where
does he think those wins are going to
occur? Because I can’t see them
occurring anywhere beyond the posher
parts of London, Cambridge and Oxford
and maybe Manchester and Liverpool.
It is hard to dislike Starmer: he has a
kind of pathetic eagerness to please that
I always find endearing. But each
election result suggests that his strategy,
such as it is, is not working. He has
jettisoned the economic radicalism of
John McDonnell — which had genuine
appeal in those red wall seats — but
retained the knee-bending identitarian
garbage that appeals only to students
and terminally deluded middle-class
professionals. Nothing of Labour’s
message appealed in those Shropshire
towns.
The caveat that both Labour and the
Tories will cling to is that the vast
majority of the great, tumultuous by-
election victories of the past 50 years —
maybe 60 years, all the way back to
Orpington — have been won by the
Liberals or Liberal Democrats. It’s what
they do.
This may persuade both party
leaders not to bother reading the writing
on the wall — writing that seems, to me,
pretty clear.lThe latest victim of cancel culture is
Facebook’s laughing emoji.
A New Zealand (yes, it’s them again)
magazine has demanded it be banned
because a writer cannot bear seeing
“that little yellow ball of derision
sitting at the bottom of news stories
and posts, cackling at the pandemic,
climate change, inequality — actually
anything where someone is trying to
make the world a better place”.
This followed an article in TheGuardian in which another furious
leftie shrieked: “When I look at its
yellow face, I see the detestable,
carefree smirks of Nigel Farage and
Boris Johnson as they merrily dance
through the current chaos.” Yes, they
want to ban us from even laughing at
them.
“Humour, the last refuge of the
bourgeois,” said someone many years
ago. “Laughter, the last refuge of the
sane,” said me, just now.PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMANSome of my former BBC colleagues
appeared before a House of Lords
committee last week addressing the
corporation’s impartiality, or lack of it.
Only a few days earlier the perky little
actor David Tennant had explained how
the BBC’s new Around the World in 80
Days would portray Phileas Fogg as a
“damaged” individual in a horrible
imperialist Britain that should evoke no
sympathy. Sounds a hoot, doesn’t it?
Oh, and also last week members of the
Jewish community protested outside
Broadcasting House against the totally
unsubstantiated allegation made by the
BBC that an antisemitic attack in
London had been provoked by an “anti-
Muslim” slur.
There have been 4,762 independent
reports on BBC bias now, all concluding
that Auntie is further to the left than a
fish fork. And nothing ever changes,
except to maybe get a bit worse. But
whenever anyone leaves the BBC, they
are struck, in a blinding epiphany, by the
realisation that the institution they
served perhaps was, after all, a little
parti pris on certain social issues.The reason a
coup is still
some way off
is that the
anti-Johnson
factions hate
one another
The only rule in
the BBC building:
keep to the left
Esther Rantzen has been urging people
to give the elderly a phone call on
Christmas Day.
Would she mind awfully if I was
spared? Christmas morning, the phone
rings at 9am and it’s Esther telling you
about a carrot she’s found that looks
slightly like a penis. It might just push
me over the edge.No, Esther, I assure
you that is the
snowman’s nose
Remainers (who have never forgiven
him), the liberals and those who think
that Johnson et al are nowhere near
conservative enough when it comes to
the culture wars. The reason a coup is
still some distance away is that these
factions all cordially loathe one another.
But what possible comfort can you
take from this result if you are a Labour
supporter? In 2019 Labour came second
in North Shropshire, with Graeme Currie
polling a vaguely respectable 12,495
votes. On Thursday Labour came a
dismal third with a scant 3,686 votes,
down more than 12 per cent. OK, it has
never been terribly strong in the shires —
but then, where is it strong?
The suspicion is that it did not even
try to win, and some Labour supporters
are consoling themselves that this was a We held the
booze-up at No 10
because we forgot to
book the breweryPartygate — cabinet secretary explains