Nick Boles says he’s voting Labour (again)

Gosh! Cripes! Gazooks! It seems that those tireless seekers of truth at the Guardian have done it again. They’ve stumbled on something of a scoop: so toxic is new Prime Minister Liz Truss that even her former colleagues don’t want to vote for her. This afternoon the newspaper published a scathing piece by Nick Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford between 2010 and 2019.

Headlined: ‘I was a Tory MP, but Truss and Kwarteng have convinced me to vote Labour’ it opens with this gem: ‘Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng possess a level of intellectual self-confidence usually found among undergraduates. They always have’ before rattling through 30 years of British economic policy-making, ending with this lacerating conclusion:

In two years’ time, voters will be given a choice. By then I expect that there will be millions of former Conservative voters who will have tired of being lab rats in Truss’s and Kwarteng’s ideological experiments. They will look for leaders who are prudent, responsible and steady. Who don’t think they know everything. Who listen, and are in touch with people’s everyday concerns. I predict that they will conclude, as I have done, that it is the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, and his shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who best fit the bill.

Ooft. Talk about damning. There’s just one problem with this denouement – Boles already boasted about voting Labour four months ago in the May local elections, back when the Conservatives were led by Boris Johnson. And let’s not forget that it was some three years ago that Boles resigned from the Tories, telling the House of Commons ‘I can no longer sit for this party.’

So is it really just the new government of Truss and Kwarteng that have convinced Boles to switch? Or might there be more to this than his scathing prose suggests.