‘How are we going to cope without Amber Rudd?’ Said no one, ever.
If you believe the usual parti-pris suspects — the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian, The Times, etc — then last night’s ‘stunning’ announcement by Rudd that she is quitting her Cabinet job represents a major blow to Boris Johnson.
No it doesn’t. Boris Johnson only appointed Rudd as Pensions Minister as an act of magnanimity: an acknowledgement that — though heaven only knows why — she had once held one of the great offices of state (Home Secretary). Also, it was an olive branch to the Remainer faction in the Conservatives — to demonstrate that there was still room for them in the party so long as they agreed to stop undermining Brexit.
So if anyone emerges badly from this scenario it’s not Boris but slippery traitor Rudd. He gave her a chance; she threw it back in his face — almost certainly as a result of pressure from her multimillionaire brother Roland, a leading lobbyist for the Remain campaign.
Rudd (Amber, that is) really hasn’t much to lose by resigning: in her Hastings and Rye constituency she has a wafer-thin margin of just 346 — so she would have been highly likely to be booted out anyway given that it is a Brexit majority seat.
But the fuss being accorded by the mainstream media to the non-story of Ruddy Useless’s departure — see also the equally welcome and happy-making departures of various other Remainers from Boris’s brother Jo to Sir Nicholas Soames (trivia corner: it’s rarely mentioned and he likes to keep it quiet but Soames is the grandson of Winston Churchill) — is vastly out of proportion to its actual significance.
Outside the Westminster bubble, Boris’s mix of cheery optimism, generosity of spirit, and utter ruthlessness, is playing very well with a country which has had just about enough of parliament’s Remainer shenanigans and just wants to leave the EU pronto.
The polls speak more loudly than a thousand hysterical columns by Max Hastings and Jenni Russell about how the right has hijacked the Conservatives and how Britain is about to be ruined for ever: the Conservative Party and the Brexit Party combined are riding high in the polls, suggesting the British people are not losing their nerve over Brexit.
As I’ve written before, I’m enjoying all of this. I believe that Special Advisor Dominic Cummings has a plan. (He has urged aides to be ‘cool like Fonzies’ in the face of the Remainer meltdown.) And I’m not remotely worried we’re going to lose this one — not least because God, like the Queen, is most certainly a Brexiteer and a proper, old school conservative.
What we’re witnessing now in both the mainstream media and in parliament are the staked-vampire writhings of a corrupt old order which is on the verge of death.
And good riddance to it!
Just as one example of what we’re about to leave behind us, I learn from the Mail on Sunday that one of the Conservatives’ most able ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg was nearly denied a place on the Tories candidates’ list for the 2010 general election because party HQ deemed him too white and posh.
Tory HQ — following the orders of white, posh, Old Etonian sell out traitor David Cameron — was keen to get more female, ethnic minority and state-educated MPs into the party. Regardless — by the looks of some of the ones we ended up with — of talent.
I think that story — from Michael Ashcroft’s new biography of the Moggfather — gives an indication of just how much the Conservative Party surrendered to the identity politics of the left. It also indicates — contra my cucked friend Toby Young who still ludicrously persists in claiming otherwise — what an utterly rubbish prime minister David Cameron was. And just how badly we need the new Boris broom to sweep out all that old dead wood.
Meanwhile, if you want a laugh, here is an extract from a piece that Remainer Jenni Russell wrote in the New York Times, so that you can get an idea of the drivel that left-liberal Americans are reading about Brexit right now:
These convulsions have caused uproar in the Conservative Party’s ranks. The former prime minister John Major is demanding Mr. Cummings’s sacking, saying he’s a “political anarchist” who must be ousted before he poisons the government “beyond repair.” Incensed and appalled members of Parliament are watching their party morph before their eyes into a hard-line vehicle for the most intransigent, right-wing Brexiteers, in which centrists and Remainers are welcome so long as they shut up and do as they are told. A senior party figure told me, with classic English understatement, that this is “a ghastly mess.” “I’m not sure that Boris read the small print of the Cummings plan — this is the ultimate proof that one is a charlatan and the other a psychopath,” he said.
lol
and here is dear old Max Hastings completely losing it in the Financial Times:
By adopting the Trump playbook — a full-frontal appeal to his own supporters, heedless of the rest of the country — Mr Johnson may prove able to form another government. But the Conservative party as we have known it, as a slightly right-of-centre alliance, will be gone. Absent the purged moderates, absent cosmopolitans who profess enthusiasm for our European neighbours, together with most of its more intelligent MPs, it will become a thing apart, repugnant to millions of British voters who recognise that government must be conducted on the centre ground.
I love the wails of losing losers on a Sunday morning. It sounds like victory.