END OF PARTY

by Ralph Berry

The Conservative Party has now become a Californian death cult.

Having got rid of Boris Johnson, they are now looking to depose his successor Liz Truss. Daily, the TELEGRAPH letter pages, that valve for surplus steam, thrills to ‘Liz Must Go’ calls. Even the Tories must see that the fall of Liz must lead ‘inevitably’–I dislike the word, but it is unavoidable here–to a speedy general election and the extinction of the party.  The country will not endure another leadership contest, nor a quick fix by the management.  So, Liz goes on.  Probably.

The general election is not due for two years.  Whenever it comes there will be a slaughter, not of the innocents–there are none in sight–but of a Conservative Party now widely despised. Of its track record, the most glaring failure is mass immigration, which has just reached on a fine day 1,000 in 24 small boats. Once landed, they are settled in fine hotels (having to edge out the Ukrainians who also need quality accommodation).  The Camelot Castle Hotel, Tintagel would have been their home had not the owner refused the deal.  In the event, they need not have bothered.  Today we learn that Albanian migrants are walking out of hotels to work on cannabis farms.  They can live in empty houses and industrial buildings, and will work to pay off the Kurdish people smugglers who brought them across the Channel.  Albanians now account for 60% of the migrants crossing the Channel.  The Government is powerless to stop the traffic, and seems to be slumped into a stoical resignation of its fate.  ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come–the readiness is all.’

Sir Keith Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, will be the next Prime Minister, and will inherit leadership of a troubled and perhaps ungovernable country.  I wonder what his fate will be.  Here is a thought.  Some years ago, I read a brief notice in the TELEGRAPH of the death of a Mrs Olga Kerensky.  Could it be…? I checked.  It was.

Olga Kerensky was the divorced wife of Alexander Kerensky, the last liberal leader of Russia.  She spent her later days in Lytham St Annes, a pleasant seaside resort in Lancashire with a famous golf club.  Her husband had got out of Russia, just, at Murmansk in a French vessel.  Thereafter his life was spent mainly in Paris and New York, latterly in California, that home of lost causes, working in the Hoover Institute.  A liberal leader should choose with care his period in history.