This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

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ConservativeHome’a monthly poll of Tory party members approval of the cabinet was released today.



Ben Wallace continues to dominate, as he has done since February (no prizes for guessing what triggered his rise). Nadhim Zahawi continues to bounce between second and third place - definitely a dark horse and probable Great Office candidate under the next leader.

Truss has recovered a bit after her stumbles in Moscow dented her popularity earlier in the year - still feels like a frontrunner.

Patel has recovered, from a negative approval rate, and bottom of the list last month, to the middle of the pack. Whatever you think of the Rwanda policy (not a fan myself), it’s obviously working for Patel amongst a small but key demographic.

Boris and Sunak on the other hand have plunged to historic lows - a far cry from ‘20 and ‘21. Sunak now seems entirely implausible as a successor.

ConservativeHome does not do a monthly poll of party members. It does a monthly survey of, mostly, councillors with tree emojis in their Twitter bios who think they're important enough to join a self-selected panel. This is a vital difference but not one that stops journalists from spreading it as though it's the same thing.

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It was indeed a poor Tory result - and partly caused by local party dissatisfaction with the candidate - but the subsequent trajectory of the seat suggests that wasn't the only factor.

I think they could have taken Tynemouth in 2010 (right local-enough candidate (not Michael McIntyre!) and being realistic about their chances in Sunderland Central), but it absolutely would have been regained by Labour in either 2015 or 2017 and held last time.

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Beresford will be seventy-eight when the next election rolls round (assuming the parliament lasts a full term) so it's not surprising that he's chosen to retire, especially given how bad the situation is for the party. As for McPartland, he was (as far as I'm aware) the only Tory to vote against the strikes bill earlier this year, so his decision to call it a day is not surprising either.

In other news, "a leading Conservative business figure" (whom nobody has ever heard of and who founded a PR firm, which I'm not sure qualifies him for the title of "leading business figure"), Iain Anderson, has quit the party due to the transgender issue (amongst other reasons), citing the government's decision to block that Scottish gender recognition law and claiming "it's not the party it used to be". Which is... interesting, because apparently he joined the party forty years ago and if that's the case I'm not sure what kind of party he thought he was joining in 1983.

Whilst I have some sympathy, the Iain Anderson thing does have a feel of what often happens when there is a government with a strong whiff of death about it. In 2010 it was a national media headline when a Labour candidate in a completely unwinnable seat (Norfolk North West?) called Gordon Brown the 'worst PM ever' (by which of course he almost certainly meant the worst PM he knew anything about).

Though we did win it in 1997.

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I think Truss herself is quite demonstrative of how little power the membership has when CCHQ and the party leadership want it to be so.

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An MS—yes, from Wales—is among the candidates for the Tory selection.

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https://twitter.com/hoffman_noa/status/1680991188315250688

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The new boundaries in Northumberland and what they mean for the Conservatives:

Newcastle upon Tyne North, West, and East and Wallsend will all safely vote Labour. No Conservative candidates have been selected for any of these seats.

Ian Levy has run away from his native Blyth to Cramlington and Killingworth. It doesn't matter: he's going to lose anyway, he's just embarrassing himself. This seat would have been very narrow in 2019 and who would have won it differs from notional to notional. I don't have any information on Blyth and Ashington but they don't stand a chance there either.

Tynemouth was held by the Conservatives from 1950 to 1997 but then they lost it to Alan Campbell and made the mistake of selecting Wendy Morton in 2010 (though, if they'd gained it then, they would have lost it in 2015 or 2017 anyway). The Conservative candidate is Tynemouth councillor Lewis Bartoli, who narrowly won re-election this year and got angry at the count just before the result was formally declared.

Hexham now crosses the boundary into Newcastle, and is slightly more favourable to Labour as a result. The way things are at the moment, Guy Opperman would lose his seat to Joe Morris regardless of that change. Labour needs a swing of around ten points to win and we'll get it. If the Conservatives were in a position to keep Labour to a minority they might be able to hold on, but they're not.

North Northumberland is the only seat where the Conservatives really stand a chance at winning. Labour needs a swing of around fifteen points to take the seat, but there's still a decent Lib Dem vote for them to squeeze. Anne-Marie Trevelyan, currently MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed (which is substantially the same constituency as this except for the addition of Morpeth), will be the Conservative candidate, having gained the seat in 2015 when Lib Dem MP Alan Beith stood down; the Labour candidate has not yet been selected.

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Labour's results in the Tees Valley were more of a mixture than the snap judgements implied - the result in Hartlepool was actually very strong and only obscured because it still elects by thirds. Taking back control of Middlesbrough was a good solid result as well. Redcar/Cleveland was a mixed bag (in some places Labour very likely still hasn't recovered from the nonsense that went on before the 2015 elections) and Stockton was one of their few results that can be fairly described as disappointing.

(the latter not helped by incredibly cynical Tory opportunism in a couple of wards)

I wouldn't say it was disappointing. The results strongly resemble the 2005 locals, which took place on the same day we won Stockton South with a 14-point majority and Stockton North by almost 35 points. We were never going to break into the rural areas, and between the Thornaby Independents and the demographics of the likes of Fairfield...

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Are party HQ *really* going to try and foist Seb Payne on the Bromsgrove party membership?

It gives us the chance of a banter outcome where he gets imposed, an independent runs and he ends up losing a very safe seat.

And of course the independent would turn out to be cartoonishly corrupt and would fall back on populist rhetoric before being inevitably jailed. Seb Payne wouldn't be selected for the subsequent by-election but by then would be the host of some unnecessary podcast.

Labour would be quite hopeful of coming through the middle in that scenario, I would have thought.

We ought to be capable of getting at least 30% of the vote in Bromsgrove, given that the eponymous town has some decent areas for London and a lot of the smaller settlements are precisely the sorts of Birmingham overspill in which the government is bombing most heavily. We did win the seat in a 1971 by-election, although at that point it also included Redditch and we presumably wouldn't have won it on current boundaries.

The town itself (actually, now I'm wondering: why does Labour do so well in Hill Top?), but other than one specific bit the rest is a death zone. I can't say I know the modern region well but the rest seems more Shenstone than Tamworth electorally.

We'll get 30%, certainly, but that's not really that impressive given we got that in 2017. Anywhere between 35% and 40% seems easily doable. Even if there isn't an independent standing against him as the local Conservative choice or whatever a Labour gain is at least plausible.

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Are party HQ *really* going to try and foist Seb Payne on the Bromsgrove party membership?

It gives us the chance of a banter outcome where he gets imposed, an independent runs and he ends up losing a very safe seat.

And of course the independent would turn out to be cartoonishly corrupt and would fall back on populist rhetoric before being inevitably jailed. Seb Payne wouldn't be selected for the subsequent by-election but by then would be the host of some unnecessary podcast.

Labour would be quite hopeful of coming through the middle in that scenario, I would have thought.

We ought to be capable of getting at least 30% of the vote in Bromsgrove, given that the eponymous town has some decent areas for London and a lot of the smaller settlements are precisely the sorts of Birmingham overspill in which the government is bombing most heavily. We did win the seat in a 1971 by-election, although at that point it also included Redditch and we presumably wouldn't have won it on current boundaries.

The town itself (actually, now I'm wondering: why does Labour do so well in Hill Top?), but other than one specific bit the rest is a death zone. I can't say I know the modern region well but the rest seems more Shenstone than Tamworth electorally.

We'll get 30%, certainly, but that's not really that impressive given we got that in 2017. Anywhere between 35% and 40% seems easily doable. Even if there isn't an independent standing against him as the local Conservative choice or whatever a Labour gain is at least plausible.

You've also got Rubery and we'd probably carry Catshill in a general election right now (the independent who won a ward there this year is ex-Labour.) The rest is certainly stony enough ground that I wouldn't expect us to win the seat without an independent, but it wouldn't take a massive vote split on the right to make it competitive.

As mentioned, yes. Bernard McEldowney is ex-Labour but whether or not that extends to his voters is another matter. I am rather surprised: despite his Twitter timeline being exactly the sort of (ex-)Labour right-ist I utterly despise he doesn't have the factionalism-induced brain soupification that is the unhesitating, unceasing, and unnerving obsession with defending Israel.

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• Daniel Kawczynski intervenes to raise accusations against the Rwandan administration by the Congolese government, going as far as to call Paul Kagame "a Hitler-type figure" and question Rwanda's status as a safe country. An unexpected intervention from someone very much on the Brexiteer right.

Has he holidayed in Kinshasa recently?

99% sure Kawcynski is too stupid to know the history of Rwanda and assumes Kagame is the one behind the genocide.

As little sympathy as I have for the French and their attempts at grey-washing, it is fairly clear that a genocide--though not of the scale of the first--was committed by the RPF.

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Anyone who doesn't know what party they should stand for--being generous enough to accept her explanation of what occurred--should refrain from standing at all. Hilarious person.

It's almost as bad as (and related to) the Cameroon obsession with getting token 'outsiders' and 'ordinary people' as candidates. The sort of nonsense that led to idiots like Sarah Wollaston getting elected, not to forget all the backbench (and overpromoted) waste who were estate agents until succeeding a retiring Labour MP whose boots they wouldn't be fit to lick the bottom of in 2010.

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Lmao lee Anderson claims he went into the no lobby, but was embarrassed because some Labour MP's laughed at him and said he was rejoining the party, so he skulked out and abstained. A special mind.

Had he not decided to do the full caricature I do think he would have crossed the floor with Wakeford.

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Of course—but I don’t think the party would pass up the Red Wall man hero voter opportunity, such as the return of a non-LARPing Lee Anderson (after leaving the party because of Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit, and the Hard Left) would have represented.

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Will Dry, as with so many other young people involved in politics, has motivated me greatly to have political ambitions I previously lacked. I have no idea how you can be hired by the PM as some polling prodigy and think Labour will be in for a decade--no, Labour will be in for two decades, and when that comes to an end it will not be the Conservatives who follow. The party is dead going forward (no, the Conservatives do not have any unique talent for reinvention; no, it has never before been this way, Major won the 18-34 vote) but young people involved in politics live in a bubble where young Tories actually exist so they refuse to recognise that.

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Will Dry, as with so many other young people involved in politics, has motivated me greatly to have political ambitions I previously lacked. I have no idea how you can be hired by the PM as some polling prodigy and think Labour will be in for a decade--no, Labour will be in for two decades, and when that comes to an end it will not be the Conservatives who follow. The party is dead going forward (no, the Conservatives do not have any unique talent for reinvention; no, it has never before been this way, Major won the 18-34 vote) but young people involved in politics live in a bubble where young Tories actually exist so they refuse to recognise that.

They also can't really use the excuse of 'this is happening all around the world'. There are quite a few countries in Europe where the right does better than average with the young and some polling has Trump ahead with the under 35s.

Well, most American polls are useless.

Interestingly it does seem to be the case in at least 2/3 of ANZUK (Canada is not comparable politically and of course its Conservatives aren't doing badly with young people): Australia has a similar collapse of Liberal support, though the distribution between the Greens and Labor is roughly equal (all on first preferences). I've searched for New Zealand data, even just age subsamples, but can't find anything. Does anyone know if it exists?

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Simon Clarke was right: they need to get rid of him. It's not going to win them the election, but I think they can still make it 150-180 seats. "He's prone to saying stupid things under the lightest of questioning, OK?" is not the argument some seem to think it is. The man really is going to collapse in a campaign--which will neatly distract from Starmer being boring.

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...are there any truly safe Conservative seats in the North East?

No.

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Beyond that aspect of it, generally it's truly pathetic how MPs are willing to dance like this in an  attempt to save their seat they should know won't work. Well—I suppose the likes of Stuart Anderson might actually, genuinely buy into it.

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And just as Baroness Foster has been forced to cough up for going after a student and delusionally accusing them of racism (their team had a soft toy).

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And just as Baroness Nicholson has been forced to cough up for going after a student and delusionally accusing them of racism (their team had a soft toy).

Baroness Foster, not Nicholson.

Note that:
- the University Challenge episode in question was filmed long before 7 October;
- the mascot in question was quite clearly the mascot of the whole team, yet one student was singled out.

Yes, my fault: ex-MEPs very active on Twitter in two subjects often adjacent in the hearts of people of that age.

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Simon Clarke was right: they need to get rid of him. It's not going to win them the election, but I think they can still make it 150-180 seats. "He's prone to saying stupid things under the lightest of questioning, OK?" is not the argument some seem to think it is. The man really is going to collapse in a campaign--which will neatly distract from Starmer being boring.

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McGuinness is one of a number of deeply stupid Tories, all from North London, who seem to have devoted their careers to embarrassing themselves on Twitter for attention. Ben Obese-Jecty, who whines that anyone who makes fun of his name is a racist, is another one of them; he's their candidate in Huntingdon.