Last night five of the six contenders to be Prime Minister were interviewed on a TV Channel that I hadn’t watched for so long that I didn’t know the password.
Four candidates accept a no-deal Brexit. Rory Stewart stands apart. My guess is that he will not get through to the run-off with Boris but he can state his case clearly; he belongs to the Athenaeum and the Special Forces Club; he has an uncanny resemblance to another Etonian: Alec Douglas-Home. The only other candidate that owns up to belonging to a club is Michael Gove (Queen’s Park Rangers). No other candidate looks like a previous Conservative PM except for Michael Gove – in drag he could pass for Margaret Thatcher.
Last night’s debate made clear the divisions within the Conservative party that reflect the divisions in the country. The only way out of the tight corner we are in is to have a General Election and allow a Labour government to drink from that poisoned chalice called Brexit. Disaster will ensue but it will be a Labour-led catastrophe that will destroy the party.
“Believe in the bin; believe in Britain,” Rory Stewart animatedly decried in last night’s debate on Channel 4. Sadly, he described the Tory leadership contest simply as a “competition on machismo.” He was the only person who was realistic in that he accused the other remaining candidates of wishful, magical thinking. How is the new Prime Minister to achieve Brexit, given the fact that the European Union has adamantly declared that the EU will not renegotiate the withdrawal bill and Parliament won’t allow any PM to leave without a deal? Merely announcing that the next Tory leader will take the UK out of EU by October 31st is like believing that one can get three rubbish bags into a bin that only holds two.
A poll in today’s Telegraph reveals that in a general election, the Brexit Party would garner more votes than the Tories. Perhaps that is why Boris is acting like Britain’s Trump? Is there no longer any place in UK politics for a thoughtful, commonsense politician like Rory Stewart in today’s severely divided country?