What are you stockpiling? Wes Streeting says we need water and food to last 72 hours in case of national emergency, as well as wind-up radios so that we can check in on how the apocalypse is developing in Ambridge. Personally, I have a two-week supply of jokes about the government that I can draw upon even as the zombies break down my front door.
Andy Burnham, far from stockpiling, is busy chucking stuff out. This week Labour’s much cherished commitment not to allow new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea went into the skip round the back of Downing Street, where it lies next to a complete set of European Union red lines, a plan for digital ID and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson.
Tory frontbenchers waved their hands in amazement as the prime minister explained that the government is now in favour of dashing for gas. The argument Burnham was using about security of supply was exactly the one they’d been throwing at the government for months.
To Kemi Badenoch, it’s a sign that she’s winning the argument. But then the Tory leader’s self-confidence is so total that she sees the rising of the sun each morning as a sign that she’s winning the argument. A more thoughtful opposition leader might wonder what she will have left to throw at Burnham after he’s finished jettisoning the unpopular and hard-to-explain bits of policy that Keir Starmer left cluttering up Downing Street.
Badenoch is having her own clear-out. All of us do this when we move into a new place and find that the previous occupant left something hideous behind: a phallic ornament in the garden, for instance, or a list of approved candidates featuring Grant Shapps.
Of course, as anyone who’s spent a weekend driving to the local tip knows, there’s always something so toxic the council simply refuses to take it off your hands. In Badenoch’s case, it’s Liz Truss, who has a new book out next week on how everything was someone else’s fault.
That’s a line that the Tory leader has decided to recycle, as she bags up any sense of responsibility for the government in which she was a cabinet minister and leaves it out for the binmen along with a pile of “Mel Stride for chancellor” posters.
On Tuesday she was asked why, if cutting taxes and welfare spending is so easy, her party didn’t do either when it was last in power. “Well, I didn’t raise those taxes,” she replied, explaining that she had disagreed with the government she was part of, but had decided to keep this to herself. Courage takes many forms.
The effect of all these unwanted old positions hitting the Westminster landfill is that the electoral battleground is clearing nicely. We find ourselves in the unusual situation that both Burnham and Badenoch agree on the argument they want to have: was Margaret Thatcher right?
One party that is definitely stockpiling is Reform, which continues to lay in supplies of nasty ideas about race, as though there was the slightest danger they might run out. The party’s headquarters has now been so thoroughly turned over that it’s an open question whether there’s anyone on the staff who isn’t an undercover reporter. But if you want to know what Reform thinks, you really don’t need to spend six months hiding a camera inside your lapel. Just listen to what the party’s MPs are saying.
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Danny Kruger, who defected from the Tories last year, has usually been seen as a genial soul, certainly relative to the Slytherin tendency that is Robert Jenrick and Andrew Rosindell. But introducing Nigel Farage on Tuesday, he made a determined effort to prove that his “nice but dim” image is only half right. “The problem isn’t with individual Muslims,” he told his audience. No, the problem is Muslims as a group, “who are taught by their clerics that their loyalty isn’t to the United Kingdom, but to the global Islamic community”. It’s an argument that was applied to Catholics 200 years ago and to Jews 100 years ago: you just can’t trust them.
Farage is too canny to say this stuff himself, and as an election approaches, he may find himself disavowing it, just as he’s distanced himself from his great buddy Donald Trump. But the trouble with stockpiles of the wrong stuff is that they can be hard to clear out at short notice. Just ask the Liberal Democrats: it’s weeks since they put Ed Davey on Freecycle, and they haven’t had even a nibble of interest.
