Patrick O’Flynn

Margaret Thatcher was said to have once remarked that every prime minister needed a Willie. Given that humour was not her natural domain, perhaps she didn’t even intend it as a pun. The Willie she was referring to was, of course, the vastly experienced William Whitelaw who served as her effective deputy – and most famously as 'minister for banana skins' – for almost a decade despite being from the patrician and 'wet' side of the Tory party. Since Thatcher’s day, it has become fashionable for prime ministers to appoint an official deputy and that position is currently held by Oliver Dowden. But there’s a snag: Dowden is the wrong kind of Willie.   Aged just 45, Dowden is very far from being the wise old owl to Sunak that Whitelaw was to the Iron Lady.

Why are the Conservatives doing quite so badly? Smashed in two by-elections, dropping further in the polls, last days of the Roman Empire on the backbenches, morale and purpose visibly ebbing away. Partly it must be because Rishi Sunak has been unveiled as a nerd rather than an authoritative national leader. Banging on about gobbledegook AI plans, ideas for reforming A-levels a decade down the line and the removal of the right to smoke via a too-clever-by-half moving age limit. Beware of geeks bearing grifts, as someone almost said.  Why not sit on your hands and let the Tory party take a pasting?

Amid all the discussion in Tory circles about whether the next election will have more in common with the narrow victory of 1992 or the landslide defeat of 1997, nobody has ever made the case for 1993. But after the Conservatives’ shattering loss of two of their nominally 'safest' seats to Labour in by-elections in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire last night, it is time for that year to be given a podium in the debate. The election which took place in 1993 in Canada was a near-extinction level event for its Conservative party, which went from an outright majority in the House of Commons in Ottawa to just two seats.

Could our current record levels of immigration be a flash in the pan, a statistical spike brought about by the confluence of several exceptional factors? After the figure for the twelve months to June 2022 came in at 606,000 net and more than one million gross, that would be a comforting notion for those who believe that mass immigration on this scale is feeding multiple social pathologies, from housing shortages to collapsing cultural cohesion. So perhaps we should rejoice at the news that two of our leading universities have put their seal upon a report suggesting that 2022’s net migration is not the shape of things to come but the product of several one-off factors which are likely to unwind in the years ahead.

As a longstanding supporter of ancient over modern in the architecture stakes, it can only grieve me to see the front wall of King’s College, Cambridge defaced by the orange paint of Just Stop Oil. But that’s what happened to a ten-metre stretch of stone wall near the porters’ lodge yesterday. I left those very hallowed portals more than a quarter of a century ago. In my day, a similar attack was carried out on the college by visitors from the Polytechnic of North London who had been invited to an event by chi-chi socialists in the King’s student body. Back then, King’s was the home of radical chic, while 'PNL' was the leftist real deal and its students no-doubt rejoiced on the way back down the M11 at having put one over on their over-privileged hosts.

Conference season 2023 is done and dusted, with punchy Wes Streeting having performed the final significant act yesterday via his speech depicting Labour as the great engine of NHS reform. How has it gone? Who has done best? Has it changed the political weather overall? Those who have attended all of it will have their view, but so do those of us who followed conference coverage and news bulletins from, as they say, 'the comfort of our armchairs'. These are my top ten TV takeaways: Keir Starmer emerged personally strengthened. His unflappable demeanour during the 'glittergate' rumpus will have cut through with the electorate. He showed nerves of steel and an impressive determination not to be deflected from his major task by 'that idiot'.

What is Labour’s offer for Nigel Farage? Yes, you read that right. Of course, Keir Starmer’s party detests almost everything the former Ukip leader stands for, including Brexit and immigration control. That almost goes without saying. But we are well into the phase of the political cycle when grubbing for votes is far more crucial than are purist ideals. A generation ago, in advance of the 1997 election, Tony Blair and his gang were making regular overtures to Margaret Thatcher, who they knew to be deeply unimpressed by her successor John Major. Early in 1995, Blair caused consternation among many Labour left-wingers by praising aspects of Thatcher’s premiership, describing her as 'a thoroughly determined person' whose emphasis on enterprise had been proved right.

After Suella Braverman announced her candidacy for the Tory leadership on ITV’s Peston show in the summer of 2022 the liberal left laughed at the very idea. Someone even asked Robert Peston online: ‘How did you keep a straight face when Suella B said she’d stand for Prime Minister?’ Well, as Bob Monkhouse once observed of those who scoffed at his youthful declaration that he wanted to become a comedian, they’re not laughing now. Braverman’s Conservative conference speech confirmed what her recent Washington speech suggested: that she has become one of the most compelling figures in UK politics, unignorable indeed for the British left who find themselves lapsing into paroxysms of rage every time she opens her mouth.

Were you a centre-right leader seeking the perfect person to condemn you for implementing a mildly populist measure then a harrumphing Al Gore would surely be about as good as it gets. To have this cold fish, liberal left American jet-setter – known for excusing his own giant carbon footprint on grounds that he purchases 'offsets' – leading the elite outcry against his climate change speech must count as a major win for Rishi Sunak. Gore described Sunak’s policy shift as 'shocking' and 'really disappointing'. He claimed that friends of his in the UK Conservative party were privately expressing their 'utter disgust' about the move.

The idea of the United Kingdom becoming an ‘associate member’ of the European Union is a non-starter because it would settle nothing and satisfy almost nobody politically. For Brexiteers it would involve a future British government – presumably one led by Sir Keir Starmer – breaking its word by setting off on a mission to take the country back to full EU membership and from there to the inner-core of the eurozone. Rather than settling Britain’s future relations with Europe, it would tip the country back into uncertainty and angst For ardent Rejoiners it would be a nicotine patch measure.

Labour’s long-awaited approach to stopping the Channel boats is so pusillanimous that it ought to be a political gamechanger for the Conservatives. But it probably won’t be. As Sir Keir Starmer outlines in various newspapers today, an administration led by him will abandon the Rwanda removals plan and get rid of the Illegal Migration Act which puts in place a bar against people who have arrived illegally claiming asylum. Instead, he will enter talks with the EU about the UK taking a percentage of the ever-increasing flow of irregular migrants over its southern and eastern borders.

Next year’s general election could either be a 1992 or a 1997, commentators have speculated: a slender Tory win or a Labour landslide. Last weekend David Blunkett suggested it is more likely to be a 1964 – the narrowest of Labour wins leading to a much bigger majority in another election called a couple of years later. I’m afraid things are shaping up more grimly than that. The most likely outcome may be a 1974, a year which saw the replacement of a failed regime that had lost its nerve with another that proved to have no answers to a profound national malaise. Few would dispute that Britain is in the doldrums once again – maybe not quite as broke and broken as in the mid-1970s but not far off.

The news is grim for supporters of Kemi Badenoch: our heroine has climbed to the top of the Conservative Home website’s monthly cabinet popularity table. This further cements her rating with the bookies as favourite to take over as Tory leader when Rishi Sunak’s race is run – and let’s be honest, that race does not seemed destined to go beyond the mid-distance.  Surely this is a happy turn of events for we Badenochians, you might think? Hardly. She might as well now have a target painted on her back. As one colleague puts it: 'When you are seen as heir apparent, you are the person standing in the way of all the other people who think they should be the next leader. And that’s nearly everyone, by the way.

There is something curious about even the very modest degree of success the Prime Minister has been able to herald on his key priority of stopping the boats. Every time the wind drops and the sun comes out the numbers crossing surge just as they did during the long hot summer of 2022. This happened, for example, immediately after Rishi Sunak's last set-piece outing on the subject in Dover on 5 June. Then he declared that the government’s policies were 'working' and were reducing numbers in a way that 'we haven’t seen before'. On reducing small boat crossings, Rishi Sunak is missing the wood for the trees As it turned out, June went on to be the best month of the summer weather-wise and it saw 3,824 irregular migrants crossing – the highest number for any June on record.

When a party’s own natural supporters decide they have good reason to turn against it then the writing is normally on the wall. Things, though, are rather worse than that for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives: Tory-leaning voters would now seem to have not one but two good arguments for hoping the party loses next year’s general election. The first reason is obvious. There is a stone-cold fury at the multiple betrayals, losses of nerve, defenestrations and incompetent U-turns that have taken place since the sweet victory of December 2019 – and an ensuing wish to take revenge.  The party would suddenly have the time and space to develop a coherent policy programme But the second is potentially more deadly still.

The metropolitan bohemian Withnail, played by Richard E Grant in the film Withnail & I, is so appalled by life away from inner London that he declares: 'We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.' Among the metropolitan bohemians who run the Tory party in the capital, the selection of Susan Hall as mayoral candidate was regarded with similar abject horror. Only in their case the sentiment was: 'We’ve chosen a real Conservative by mistake.' One of their usual more-liberal-than-the-liberals types was supposed to have glided to the nomination. But Dan (Daniel Korski) and Moz (Mozammel Hossain), called up from the open-necked shirt brigade of smooth talkers, both self-immolated during the campaign.

Rishi Sunak has led voters to believe that his new Illegal Migration Act will mean no illegal migrants will be allowed to stay. According to the Prime Minister, this in turn will break the business model of people traffickers, by rendering it pointless for any migrant to pay big sums for a place in one of their dinghies. And thus will he be able to ‘stop the boats’. Mr Sunak seemed to take a partial step back from this bold talk earlier this week when he confessed that he might not be able to stop all the boats by the next general election given the ‘complexity’ of the issue. Now we can see why.

It has long been suggested by senior politicians from both main parties that civil servants in the Home Office pick and choose which government policies to implement and which to ignore or undermine. On the Labour side, David Blunkett once complained of his reforms being ‘swamped by the history and practices of the Home Office’ while John Reid famously branded the section of the department charged with running immigration policy as ‘not fit for purpose’. It certainly looks like yet more evidence of a department whose personnel are engaged in a cultural rebellion against the policies of an elected administration On the Tory side, a source ‘close to Amber Rudd’ accused the department’s then Permanent Secretary of having been ‘purposefully opaque’ with her.