Conservative Leadership Contest Nearing A Climax

The never-ending struggle to be Britain's chief script-reader has thrown up some interesting tidbits. I've been playing with numbers this morning. Apparently there are around 160,000 members of the British Conservative Party and each one gets a vote on the Sunak/Truss face-off. As there are roughly 70 million people in Britain, just one in every 437 is a card-carrying Tory. Given that many of them might be pretending they're not, the chances are you could go for weeks without bumping into one. 

I, on the other hand, could probably go for several months between Tories, but I live on a small island quite clamped in the jaws of the Scottish National Party. If you think of Britain as a prison -and you may as well- this place is the political equivalent of the Punishment Wing. Mature football hooligans from Glasgow meet their families here and pretend to relax. Women and children are dumped on the shorefront while the alpha-Jocks deal drugs and clone the debit cards of confused pensioners queuing at the only two ATM machines. 

Locals shopkeepers and publicans are philisophical, accepting this as 'the annual summer crime wave'. In any case, they know the cash will mostly be spent on the island. Behind that practical compromise, however, lies the unspoken truth that both islanders and the predatory tourists are -first and last- extremely and aggressively Scottish. 

Although we're on a lump of rock blessed with the warm gulf stream, there is a comforting sense of being locked up with your own kind. Any Scot set loose in England or Wales -as I was for decades- feels like a spy, in constant danger of discovery and execution.  Inherited race-memory dictates that all Scots are born guilty, condemned to break laws and be sentenced to a lifetime of disillusion. 'Down south' as we say, 'they do things different'.

On the island, by contrast, you can lapse into the gutteral accent of your childhood,rent clubs and balls at the shorefront putting-green -we invented golf, after all- and potter through nine holes in a fair imitation of civilised behaviour. 

But the putting-green's proprietor isn't letting anyone off the ethnic hook; he has a large stereo system which berates customers with Scottish 'folk' music - the kind of grim dirges that can conjure a cloud of suicidal misery out of the sunniest sky. Bent over their putters, you can see punters flinch as the voice of some sorrowing Highland brute croons "There is blood on the the snow that sweeps Glencoe..." 

SPOT THE TORY

It's hardly surprising that English visitors -the smart ones at least- tend to keep their mouths shut in our public spaces. Post-modern Caledonian cynicism -you might call it The Sturgeon Principle- lays all sins conveniently at the door of Downing Street and the Sassenach. We've always known you can't vote your way out of anything.  After centuries of betrayal by our own chieftains and a further 100 years of Labour Party lies, Scots have, alas, opted for an extended period of betrayal by the Euro-Nationalists instead. The other alternative is simply a historical impossibility. Naybiddy votes Tory, awright?        

Nevertheless, with just six and a half thousand inhabitants on the island, as many as fourteen could -in theory- be genuine Tory Party members. In fact there are reasons to suspect the total might even be higher. At least a hundred yachts are currently at anchor in the two major bays, and that kind of vessel does tend to carry the odd Thatcherite. 

The island's economic divisions make for an intriguing model of what is rapidly becoming the British societal norm: a visible, underclass majority servicing a nearby -yet distant- monied elite, with nobody in between. Island demography is further skewed by a disproportionate number of old and infirm people. The absence of any kind of stimulation beyond the gently lapping waves has a lot of appeal for coffin-dodgers. They do say that old people are much more likely to vote Conservative, having crossed the bridge from left to right after their anarchistic fantasies crash into the harsh practicalities of middle-age.  

It's likely then, that actual, fully-fledged paid-up Tories walk -well, trudge- among us. In the posh Victorian houses above the harbour and the mansions lurking in the woods, there could be dozens. Freemasons run the council and the police. So even here, on the Island That Time Forgot, is a smattering of that privileged 160,000 who will shortly decide whether the Asian billionaire or the silver shrew gets to run Britain into the ground.       

OPEN THE BOX

It's a thorny business, this particular leadership election. I was assuming they'd have had it wrapped by now but the process is advancing like a team of snails  dragging a tractor uphill. It's far from reassuring that the execrable Johnson has somehow wangled himself another six weeks or so of playing PM. September 5th, to be precise, is the theoretical date that has been set for his long-awaited eviction. 

To my thinking, this is a potentially dangerous scenario. Judging by recent history, a hell of a lot can change in two weeks, let alone six. What kind of emergency, I wonder, would derail a leadership election?  Or require that it be 'postponed'? 

Let me put this another way. In your minds eye, zoom down from the satellite-packed stratosphere, down like the penetrating eye of Google Earth, upon the British mainland, the City of London, upon Westminster, Downing Street - upon the iconic door of number 10 itself. At the end of a short corridor, an oak-panelled door is slightly ajar. Inside, behind a massive, paper-strewn desk in an otherwise empty room, sits the corpulent, bedraggled figure of the Prime Minister. 

 

The phones, for once, have stopped ringing. He has not slept for 20 hours -nothing unusual about that- but he no longer has the stamina for the game. Soon he will be yesterday's man. Only a week or two ago he was -in his covid-addled brain- the very image of Churchill, back forever to the wall, inspiring the nation with pompous speeches and jolly quips. What days those were!

Now -alone with an avalanche of bittersweet memories, he is the Reichfuhrer in a sealed underground Bunker in the ruins of the capital. Abandoned, betrayed, and filled with a savage, vengeful hatred of those who have conspired to thwart his master-plan. He has weathered so many storms, clung to the wheel as battle followed battle: Brussels...Wuhan...Ukraine... He sips from a glass but the wine is warm. In two minutes he has to call those bastards in Switzerland -again.

What kind of emergency, he wonders, would be so dire, so immediate, so overwhelmingly urgent, that the only solution would be to take unprecedented power into his own hands? A crisis so awful that all other considerations would be be swept aside. An emergency  that required him -just once more- to "save the country". What -exactly- would that kind of emergency be? He crosses to the door and very quietly pushes it shut.

A ray of weak, late sunshine falls across the desk, reminding the Prime Minister that time is short. He reaches into the small, steel-lined box that goes everywhere he does, and lifts the blunt reciever of a maximum-security telephone. Flicking two switches to engage the scrambler, he punches an all-too familiar number into the keypad. There is time for one deep breath. As the call is answered, he glimpses his drawn, pale face reflected in the polished crimson glass of the desk-lamp.

"London Calling," he says. "I've had a bit of an idea."

 Ian Andrew-Patrick

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