We're about to witness the first "extremely online" Tory opposition

Ready your dank memes

You can tell this is AI generated because it implies the Tories are popular enough to draw a crowd this big.

The Conservative Party is staring down a dark path, and last weekend felt like a preview of the grim future ahead.

Lee Anderson, the hard-of-thinking provocateur, lost the party whip after refusing to apologise for claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. That’s less a dogwhistle and more of a fog-horn.

Then on a trip to the United States, former Liberal Democrat/Remainer Liz Truss continued on her radicalisation speed-run. She didn’t just speak at CPAC, the conference for the most certifiable Republicans, but she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast¹, and didn’t even blink when Tommy Robinson was described as a “hero”.

And what makes Truss’s actions more disturbing is that far from being disqualifying, this incident arguably improves her standing within the party, positioning her as a potential king-maker on the party’s right. Hell, you wouldn’t be completely crazy if you were to wonder if this could actually help position her for a second run at the Conservative leadership.

In any case, both incidents were illustrative of what has already become the conventional wisdom among Westminster watchers: That after they lose the next election, the Tories are going to go absolutely fucking mad.

In fact, I think at this point, everyone would be more surprised if the Tories somehow manage to avoid having their own period analogous to the Corbyn wilderness years. And despite trying to position myself as a mildly contrarian commentator, you’ll find no dissent from me on this analysis.

However, there is something more interesting happening here which is worth commenting on, and it’s more important than whether it will be Braverman, Badenoch or some other no hoper who will lose against Keir Starmer’s Labour in 2028. And that’s the question of… Why is this happening?

If we can all see with our own eyes that the Conservative Party is rapidly going insane, why can’t anyone stop it happening? Why are the next few years almost predestined to be utterly disastrous for the party? Does no one want to avoid the iceberg the party is steaming towards?

I think the explanation is that this lurch to the crazy won’t just be one solitary moment of madness for the Conservative Party. In fact, it’s a reflection of a new structural reality of our politics that is going to shape everything from now until the heat-death of the universe.

So if we want to understand British politics going forward, we’re going to need to understand a weird new fact about British political life.

The insanity cycle

On one level, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Conservative Party is going mad because as history demonstrates, when a governing party loses power it nearly always moves away from the political centre.