There’s no shame in being ‘weird’

Are Conservative politicians ‘weird’? A series of focus groups carried out by More in Common suggests that voters – particularly in seats won by the Lib Dems – find elected Tories increasingly strange. It’s hard to disagree, but this isn’t the party’s only problem.

As the Tories battle it out to elect their new leader, the reality is that hardly anybody out there recognises any of the candidates. The one that rings the most bells is Priti Patel. This is because, as anybody who has ever worked in marketing will tell you, she possesses an alliterative name. Tom Tugendhat also scores here, but loses because his surname is unfamiliar to most people outside Westminster and also impossible to spell. By such tiny things are careers made or destroyed.

But are Tugendhat and Patel – and indeed Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly – really weird? The accusation seems to have originated, like most of the things that bedevil us in Britain today, from America, coming hot on the heels of the Democrat campaign attempting to portray Donald Trump and JD Vance as ‘weird’.