MAY’S not for leaving’, Isabel Hardman told us all in her Spectator’s ‘Evening Blend’ emailed newsletter last night. We could have told her that last July.
I guess they’re getting there, the MSM and the Westminster bubble. The Terminator is here to stay, as we at TCW have consistently predicted. Such is the inevitable outcome of the divided, spineless, self-interested and far from conservative nature of today’s Conservative Party.
There are, we know, several honourable exceptions to this general condemnation. And we feel for them. But they appear doomed to failure. Their party is now beyond redemption. And it does not, as we wrote earlier this week, have a divine right to exist.
How can anyone any longer justify their membership of a party that continues to allow someone as incompetent, dishonourable and un-conservative as Theresa May to continue as its leader, simply because it still has a Jacob Rees-Mogg or a Steve Baker for example in it? As Laura Perrins tersely points out on these pages today, the sin of treachery – the unconscionable betrayal of conservatism that was represented by the sacking of conservatism’s leading philosophical light, Roger Scruton as an advisor – should not be underestimated.
Added to the behaviour of the truly pathetic James Brokenshire are the party’s other sins of treachery. Theirs is the party in power and they therefore bear the responsibility. On top of the great Brexit betrayal comes the Huawei scandal – which could prove the greatest and most fundamental betrayal of the county of all.
As Bruce Newsome documents in TCW today, since Tony Blair it’s been Conservatives and Conservative governments who’ve repeatedly ignored America’s and others’ warning of the egregious threat to Western security that Huawei involvement in our phone technology is. And for what? Trade with China, a country which puts Muslims in huge internment camps and allows no freedom of speech, let alone democracy? So much for the multicultural orthodoxies of modern Conservatives. Or as Bruce suggests, is it about the stroppy anti-American Leftist hatred that seeped into the Tory Party that this determination to put two fingers up to America and Trump illustrates?
Last night the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, during his visit to London, invoked Margaret Thatcher to appeal to Theresa May’s government to take a firmer line with China. He urged the UK to resist efforts by Huawei to gain access to Britain’s new 5G network. He insisted that he felt duty-bound to raise these sensitive issues with ‘close partners’. He explained that as a matter of Chinese law Huawei was required to bow to Beijing’s demands for access to its networks, nothing of course that the UK government does not know already.
He added that he could see no circumstances in which the West should allow itself to become so vulnerable. He said: ‘Ask yourself: would the Iron Lady be silent when China violates the sovereignty of nations through corruption or coercion?’
No. Of course she wouldn’t. Nor would she recognise the party she once led. It would feel a betrayal of her life’s work and that which she understood to be the higher value of being British. Not perfect by any manner of means, but constantly striving, not just for the common good but the betterment of the common good, always doing as you would be done by.
That, sadly, we have to accept has died. It died for me yesterday with the inability of the 1922 Committee to re-enact the night of the long knives that did for Thatcher, now, when they really need to. Put to this test, the party has failed.
At TCW we will continue to count the days till May is toppled. But we have lost hope that this will be the result of Conservative Party action – more likely it will now be the result of their inaction, maybe at the hands of the Brexit Party.
Today is Day 35.
