On Thursday the Tories held their annual Black and White Ball at London’s exclusive Hurlingham Club.
Tickets cost up to £1,500 with the finest champagnes on offer to wash down oodles of posh nosh. Thursday was also the longest day of the year. How apt that this time it falls in a month when the party of privilege is trying to sell the longest suicide note in British political history.
How fitting that Tory bigwigs and donors waltzed around in ballgowns and dinner jackets like first-class passengers on the Titanic, basking in their own infallibility, as the iceberg fast approaches.
The reason you have to pinch your bicep to see if you are dreaming when another forecast of a 200-seat Labour majority flashes before your eyes is that those eyes have never seen a ruling party so in denial at the damage it has caused.
The Tories are facing their worst wipeout in their history, yet rather than try to understand why the country despises them, their politicians and media tub-thumpers attempt to frighten the horses with an apocalyptic vision of the future under Labour.
Instead of asking how they ended up facing electoral Armageddon they seek to delude voters about Labour conning its way into power and creating a Stalinist Starmergeddon. Hence right-wing papers trying to guilt-trip readers with headlines that scream “Don’t risk a generation of socialism”.
Ex-minister Robert Jenrick warned Telegraph readers: “The UK could soon be run by more than 500 left-wing MPs. We are on the brink of a one-party state that will change our country for the worse.”
Nadine Dorries told Daily Mail readers she’s “dreading the prospect of the elected Labour dictatorship we face when we wake on Friday, July 5”, blaming the coming annihilation not on crippling austerity, a disastrous Brexit, Partygate,
Truss’s kamikaze budget, a no-growth economy, record taxation, a cost-of- living crisis, obscene nepotism, vicious infighting and a stench of sleaze which permeates to this day with a betting scandal, but on the “leftist” plot that brought down Boris Johnson.
And what was her dashing knight in lying armour’s take on how the Tories have thrown away the 80-seat majority he led them to in 2019? Well, in a long column for the Mail he failed to mention any of the above failings.
Nowhere in those 1,200 words is there mention of his Brexit betrayal, his broken promises about levelling up, his absence from Covid Cobra meetings or the Downing Street lockdown parties when the rest of us could not see dying relatives. There is no trace of a mea culpa.
Instead the serial liar constructed a nightmare fantasy about the coming effect of “Starmergeddon” when an army of “finger-jabbing, Palestinian flag-waving Corbynistas” will take over Westminster to persecute us with wokery and higher taxes, punish aspiration and drag us back into the EU.
Self-denial has rarely looked so beautiful.
The truth is that Labour is on course for a historic landslide, not because it’s selling a radical vision, but because Britons are sick of being used, abused and let down by self-serving Tory governments.
Never has a political party so deserved the wipeout and humiliation heading its way. If there is any bubbly left over from that Black and White ball I’d like to buy it all. Because July 4 is going to be one long and joyous night.