Who's The Daddy: The Tories made a mess of it and they got their comeuppance

This election was a referendum on the last five years of Tory rule, and a Labour landslide told them exactly what the people thought of them.

Brexit, Partygate, the PPE scandal, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and her reckless mini-Budget, gambling on the election date, you name it, the Tories made a mess of it and they got their comeuppance at the ballot box.

Everything’s expensive, nothing works and it all happened on their watch. Labour, Lib Dems, Reform UK and millions of British people all queued up to give them a kicking, the severity of which has never been seen before. To go from an 80-seat majority to losing two-thirds of their seats in under five years really takes some doing.

And thanks to their flag-banging band of grifters, chancers and malevolent incompetents, they did it. And good riddance. I’m not anti-Tory by any means, but when we were burying relatives at Covid-era funerals, like my mum in February 2021, this lot were on the ****, and then Johnson lied and lied and lied about it, and they lined up to defend him. And we remembered who they were. And we sent the vast majority of them packing.

Austerity was a lie and Brexit is a disaster. And after 14 years of what at times felt like lunacy, this will be the Conservative Government’s legacy. That and a slew of Prime Ministers who were about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Sir Keir Starmer is Labour’s seventh PM in its history, the Tories have burned through five since 2016.

So where do they go from here? If they get into bed with Nigel Farage and Reform they’re done for, and if the far-right nutjobs who hijacked the party after Brexit are leading it again then they should prepare for long years in the wilderness. Elections are won from the centre, as a jubilant Starmer discovered last Thursday after he purged his party after the 2019 Jeremy Corbyn apocalypse.

The veil slipped in the hours after Labour’s landslide win and, for once, Tory high-ups were candid about the reasons for their catastrophic defeat. But by last weekend they were circling the wagons and jockeying for position to replace Rishi Sunak, so the penny still hasn’t dropped yet. And until it does, they’re in for many years of irrelevance.

For what it’s worth, I think three things cost them this election. Dominic Cummings’ indefensible lockdown trip to Barnard Castle which was defended to the hilt by Johnson and the Tory Cabinet, Partygate and the lies and cover-up that followed, and Truss’ disastrous mini-Budget which, among many other things, meant mortgage payments rocketed for millions during the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades.

Will Starmer’s Labour do any better? Your guess is as good as mine, but they’d be hard pressed to do much worse.

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