The Tories just don’t get it

Sometimes it is the little details that tell you everything you need to know. So when, as Politics Home revealed yesterday, the chief whip meets Tory backbenchers to assuage their concerns over the transitional arrangements for the fishing industry as the UK edges its way out of the EU and tells them not to worry because, look, “It’s not like the fishermen are going to vote Labour” you know there is something deeply wrong at the heart of the government. 

This, remember, is what passes for the government’s intelligence unit. And with leaders like this, who needs enemies? It is not evident whether the ignorance is more startling than the complacency or vice versa but neither appraisal reflects well on Julian Smith, the chief whip. 

Spectator readers will not need reminding, even if the chef whip does, that the threat to Tory constituencies in Cornwall does not primarily come from Labour and nor does Labour challenge the Tories in fishing constituencies such as Moray and Banff and Buchan where, though this is evidently news to some senior government ministers, the SNP – that little known, rarely-in-the-news, party – were the power in the land until last June.