‘Even Tory MPs don’t want to fight for another Tory government’

When historians of the future turn their gaze on the 2010s, they will write the entire decade off as a colossal waste of time and money.

From the moment David Cameron agreed with Nick Clegg in the Downing Street Rose Garden, to today with our third Prime Minister in as many months, economic chaos and claims of actual rapists prowling Westminster, the ability to come up with one, good, valuable thing that happened draws a big fat blank.

Tell a lie: there’s one thing I can think of. More on that later, but we don’t owe it to the brilliance of any Tory government.

Cameron told Clegg the price of power was screwing over every university student until the end of time. It led to riots, fattened vice chancellors, bankrupted teenagers, and corporatised further education to the point where learning skills and expanding your mind is now mere market forces: successful delivery is determined by economic and not personal growth.

Cameron made the catastrophic decision to employ a phone hacker as his head of press, which meant the press could smell what a wrong’un he’d employed. The appointment led to gossip, then Guardian stories which exploded into police investigations, court cases, a public inquiry, and jail time. It cost millions, in multiple directions, and made everyone involved seem slightly less admirable.

“I am extremely sorry I employed him,” said Cameron in 2014. Too late, mate: your wish to control what Fleet Street wrote about your decisions led to Fleet Street writing how bad your decisions could be.

To distract attention from his terrible decision-making, Cameron then decided to let his party have a referendum on membership of the European Union. It all went BRILLIANTLY.

The longest argument in English history, which started with the Norman invasion of 1066 and has rumbled ever since, was refought over two months without swords. Instead, it involved fish, lies, dog whistles, racism, economic fantasy, and a man in yellow trousers. It forced the nation’s media, by law, to give sane people and lunatics equal amounts of column inches and air time.

The end result was so close nobody liked it, and the person who liked it least was the person who’d made it happen, so Cameron resigned and ran away to his three houses and two shepherd’s huts writing a book nobody read, because by the time it was published power was in the hands of bona fide schizophrenic amnesiac toddlers.

Nadine Dorries. Jacob Rees-Mogg. BORIS. Dominic Raab, for heaven’s sake, a man who has the same Pret sandwich for lunch every day or else he throws his tomatoes across the room! You might as well have plucked a Cabinet from the nearest nursery school, and turned on the sherbet taps.

Of course Theresa May was in theoretical charge, in the same way as a supply teacher and with roughly the same level of success. She tried to square the impossible circle of racism and economic downturn with a vote that was even less authoritative than she was, and ultimately fell, weeping, on her sword.

Which brings us to Boris. Finally released from the constraints of being a loose cannon in his own marriage, other people’s marriages, and on the world stage, he grasped the levers of power with sticky-fingered and baseless enthusiasm. He was even less able than Cameron or May at uniting his party, or making Brexit happen, and in the end forced it through by pretending that Northern Ireland wasn’t part of the same United Kingdom that had been on the ballot paper.

Things were said. Parties were held. Trips to Barnard Castle were authorised. And at the same time the Queen was lied to, Parliament illegally shut down, and 5% swiped off the nation’s GDP at just the point that everyone could really have done with it, and which was warned about from the start.

Under Cameron, the NHS had been reformed at a cost of billions in a reorganisation that had to be unpicked at a cost of billions more. Under May, junior doctors went out on strike. Under Johnson, the country was told to IMAGINE new hospitals and nurses MIGHT appear ONE DAY.

And then the pandemic the Tories had been warned about for years happened, and they cocked it up so thoroughly they’d rather go on reality TV than have to face their own constituents.

We could all think of other things to add to the list of Tory trouble – the increased death rates every winter, not just in the pandemic; the increase in zero hours and low-paid jobs; the hate crime that came in the wake of a ‘debate’ about immigration that was actually just people screaming at the sky.

But when you boil this down – from Cameron all the way to the fifteen minutes of infamy of Liz Truss – there was absolutely nothing that we are the richer for, financially, socially, morally or physically. We’re sicker, we die sooner, we’re poorer, we’re fatter, and public services are in such a dire state you’d be better off setting your own broken leg. building your own home, and walking to work rather than relying on trains, planes, or automobiles.

A dozen Tory MPs are so determined to be somewhere else that they’ve decided not to face the voters at the next election. Sajid Javid, the man whose resignation brought down Johnson, is now so resigned he can’t be bothered to argue for the Tories any more, which tells you clearer than anything else that Rishi Sunak’s job is to sweep up the broken institutions and shattered promises so that it doesn’t look too awful when Keir Starmer walks in.

The one good thing they did was to finally deliver a medal for nuclear test veterans, a body of men the same Tories had spent the past 12 years refusing to give a medal to. It was won, not because they decided to change their minds, but because the government was so politically weak it had no choice.

Some of the more decent Tories are prepared to stand their ground; to do what they can in the time they have left to fight for a cause. Agree with them or not, they have principle. Most are looking for work, and every single MP in Westminster knows that the clock is ticking on their removal.

But not one – not a single one – is prepared to admit that the reason they’re on the way out is because they have been so utterly, appallingly, disastrously bad for the country from day one. That austerity, Brexit, closures, public sector wage cuts, privatisation, student fees, anti-immigration policies, failure to accept climate change, and economic illiteracy were all terrible ideas, executed badly, by people with less common sense than a roll of Sellotape.

You could have made the England Lions and Lionesses a government, and they’d do better. You could have put Gazza in charge and had more coherence over the same period. When they write the history of the past decade, it will be known as the Era of Unforced Errors – own goal after own goal, from a party that never realised privilege is something you’re supposed to earn.