DAN HODGES: Stop screaming into the void. The Tory leadership infighting is already a farce. Everyone needs to do just one thing…

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Following his team’s European Championship exit last night, France’s fallen idol Kylian Mbappé was in reflective mood.

‘In football you’re good or not good. I wasn’t good,’ he conceded. ‘My Euro was a failure. I wanted to be European champion… I will now go on holiday, I will rest well, it will do me a lot of good, then I will get ready to start a new life. There’s a lot to do.’

As he was speaking, the cream of the Conservative Party were fanning out across the Spectator magazine’s annual summer party. 

And as the champagne flowed beneath a steamy gazebo overlooking Westminster’s Birdcage Walk, they were not reflecting. They were lashing out.

Liz Truss, the former prime minister and recently deposed MP for South West Norfolk, berated those shadowy ‘establishment’ figures she believed had undermined her premiership.

A parliamentary ally of Kemi Badenoch explained how she had just read the riot act to Rishi Sunak. Leaving the D-Day celebrations early had been ‘a disaster’, she had informed her broken leader, while his decision to call an early election had bordered on the ‘unconstitutional’.

Priti Patel, who has been tipped to run, leaving the Spectator summer party last night

Priti Patel, who has been tipped to run, leaving the Spectator summer party last night

Liz Truss, the former prime minister and recently deposed MP for South West Norfolk, berated those shadowy 'establishment' figures she believed had undermined her premiership, at the garden party yesterday

Liz Truss, the former prime minister and recently deposed MP for South West Norfolk, berated those shadowy ‘establishment’ figures she believed had undermined her premiership, at the garden party yesterday

An ex-minister tore into former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, calling her ‘a maniac’. Another member of Sunak’s new shadow cabinet responded to reports former foreign secretary James Cleverly is preparing to enter the Tory leadership race by branding him an ‘idling dilettante’.

A week ago, the Tories lost the election. Now they are losing the plot and whatever remaining shreds of unity, humility and sanity a furious electorate didn’t tear from them on July 4.

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SARAH VINE: For once, it’s nice for us Tories to have someone else to blame

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In his dignified speech to the House of Commons yesterday which helped usher in Keir Starmer’s new administration, Rishi Sunak said: ‘Restoring trust begins with remembering that being here is an opportunity to do what those we serve expect from us. In our case, that means holding the new Government to account.’

He was whistling in the wind. His colleagues currently have no interest in honouring their constitutional responsibility to keep Starmer and his ministers honest. Instead they are embarking on an orgy of bloodletting, buttressed by a parade of transparent and self-centred political voguing.

So Sunak now needs to get a grip. Or rather, stage an intervention to try to save a party that is teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Firstly, he has to terminate the nascent but already farcical Tory leadership election. Nobody wants to see the various candidates setting out their stall on what the Conservative Party should do next. 

Suella Braverman blames the Tories’ election defeat on an edict by Downing Street advisers to fly LGBT flags from the roof of government buildings

A parliamentary ally of Kemi Badenoch, pictured at the Spectator summer party, explained how she had read the riot act to Sunak

A parliamentary ally of Kemi Badenoch, pictured at the Spectator summer party, explained how she had read the riot act to Sunak

Because none of them own a stall. They do not even have a trading licence. Or any goods to sell. And the marketplace has recently been demolished and turned into some well appointed luxury flats.

No one in the Conservative Party currently has anything to say that anyone in the country is remotely interested in listening to. The British people don’t want to hear another peep from the Tories for months, if not years.

So instead of just screaming into the void – and at each other – Sunak’s small rump of shadow ministers and MPs need to do one basic thing. Shut up.

The next thing Sunak should do is announce a formal structured review into precisely how his party took an 80-seat landslide, and in the space of 60 months turned it into a 170 Labour super-majority.

French footballer Kylian Mbappé was reflective after his team lost to Spain in last night's Euro 2024 semi-final

French footballer Kylian Mbappé was reflective after his team lost to Spain in last night’s Euro 2024 semi-final 

It should involve professional psephologists, communications professionals, brand experts, political consultants and policy gurus. Not one of them should have any connection with the Tory party. And they should have a single, simple brief: ‘Go away and find out why everyone hates us so much’.

Some of the self-appointed leadership candidates think they already know the answer. Robert Jenrick thinks it was partly due to insufficient supply-side reforms. Suella Braverman blames an edict by Downing Street advisers to fly LGBT flags from the roof of government buildings.

But the reality is they haven’t got a clue. No one in the Tory party has the faintest idea why they lost. 

Because they haven’t bothered to go out and actually ask anyone. Instead, they’ve spent the week since their cataclysmic defeat rushing to the broadcast studios, and dashing off opinion columns, telling that microscopic subset of the electorate that is the Tory membership what they think they want to hear so they can secure their vote in a future leadership election.

So the final thing Sunak should do is this. He should order his MPs and shadow ministers to get away from Westminster and back out into the country. 

They should return to the high streets and housing estates and leafy terraces that rejected them so decisively. And instead of begging the people they find there, ‘Please don’t give Starmer a blank cheque’, they should say two other things.

‘We’re so very sorry for letting you down’. And ‘What can we do to make things right?’

Then they should do an Mbappé. Go on holiday. Rest. Reflect. Get ready to start a new political life.

And remember to do the most important thing of all. Shut. Up.




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