Parade’s End

Ben Wildsmith

You’d think it would be a quiet period for attention-seeking Tory buffoons.

With the nation having indicated that they are about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit, a period of quiet contemplation would seem to be the order of the day for braying mediocrities who have been endlessly there for decades.

Knock it off for a bit, eh? Zip it; fermez votre bouche.

Brooding

But no, it’s not in their nature, is it? The ‘Parade’s End’ style of antiquated Tory would have responded to the election by brooding across the moors, shotgun in hand, and only the ghillie for company.

Born into the burden of paternalistic leadership, your Mk1 Tory would be looking within for failures of resolve. Not so the post-Thatcherite vulgarians of today’s party.

For them, blame is externalised reflexively, so their current woes have provoked responses that are predictably suitable for the Jeremy Kyle Show.

First up this morning came news that the stateswoman Andrea Jenkyns, what arrives if you order Andrea Leadsom from Temu, has defected to Reform UK.

Appearing alongside Nigel Farage at a London hotel, she described the Conservative Party as a ‘sinking ship’. Despite her public spat with Richard Tice in July, during which he accused her of bribery, and she called him ‘embarrassing’, Jenkyns explained that she was ‘politically aligned’ with her new party.

Certainly, she is amongst people whose murine instincts are famously suited to the desertion of sinking ships.

The line from, say, Harold Macmillan to Jenkyns and Farage charts a bracing trajectory downwards.

As one insolent bomb-thrower turned her back on the Tories, here in Wales the party was attempting an opposite manoeuvre.

Scenery 

The Tory Senedd group has, it seems, had enough of acting as scenery for Andrew RT Davies’ Trump-on-a-tractor act.

I’m not given to outbursts of sympathy for Tories, but I feel for anybody on the respectable end of conservatism in Wales over the last few years.

Davies’ embrace of culture war outrage farming and online shitposting has managed to cast the Welsh Conservatives in an even more ludicrous light than their parent party in London.

Davies is popular with the membership. In particular, he is well-loved by members in England, where his scattergun ejaculations aren’t sprayed over the populace at the expense of providing a competent opposition.

His fate will tell us much about the future of politics, not only in Wales but potentially globally.

After 18 months of elections around the world that threw up a confusing picture of prevailing political attitudes, the US presidential vote provided an emphatic full stop.

The Senedd elections will be an early indicator as to whether MAGA sensibilities translate beyond the personality cult of Donald Trump.

Reform UK is widely tipped to capitalise on its 13 second places in Welsh constituencies at the General Election. Representation.

Powellite terrain

Whilst Davies and Kemi Badenoch clearly believe that the Conservatives’ best hope lies in following Reform UK on to Powellite terrain, it may be that Conservatives in the Senedd see a different route.

By the time of the 2026 elections, there will be over a year of actual Trump governance to knock the sheen off his fantastical promises. It may well be that, by then, the world is tiring of offensive old men telling self-serving lies.

Closer to home, Labour’s ‘fixing the foundations’ approach to public finances may never bear fruit and it certainly won’t have by 2026.

In the absence of economic improvement, it could be that Starmer and Reeves cease to look as sensible and competent as they are keen to project.

All of this could open up political space for responsible conservatism, the sort that seeks to conserve rather than to wreck.

That, presumably, is the logic of Conservatives in the Senedd who have sought today to end the pantomime in their party.

If they are successful, will Davies himself find a home in Reform UK? If they fail, what on earth do they do next?