It really is quite extraordinary how a minor setback causes some rather small people to try to seize their moment in the spotlight. So it was with the entirely unimpressive and treacherous Quentin Davies: a large man with a red face who’d never been heard of before, and who the cuckolded people of Lincolnshire hope they’ll never see again.
Granted, both Ealing and Sedgefield were disappointments. But what can we learn from the Liberals who did so well? They rally themselves as one effective unit, they work incessantly, and they use their small resources well.
I went to Ealing Southall twice, and spent a few hours telephone canvassing too. The lack of manpower was glaring. At the splendid and no doubt highly valuable K&C offices just off Chelsea’s Kings Road banks of phone lines were available. Yet on an evening just ten days before the election I was the only telephone canvasser. A rum deal from the membership of one of the most populous Associations with more approved candidates than anywhere else in the land.
So we only have ourselves to blame for managing to maintain but not extend our vote in both Ealing and Sedgefield, despite excellent candidates in both.
And yet it seems rumours abound again about letters to the Chairman of the 1922 committee.
If a single MP really is calling for a leadership contest they should listen carefully to the members of the Conservative Party. The Party members are wonderfully loyal, and they make it clear that we’ve only just had a leadership election in which they voted resoundingly and overwhelmingly for a new direction. With the largest and most engaging policy review in thirty years under way now is the time for all Conservatives to hold their nerve. By Christmas much of the policy review will be in place, and that exciting new direction will be clarified for all.
To a degree it is the Conservatives’ misfortune that the media has a new Prime Minister with whom to garner favour, and that the new PM is making some fairly popular and frankly unsurprising gestures to show that he is different from his co-Leader of the past ten years.
But if anyone is clamouring for change in the Conservative Party they should aim their fire where change is truly needed lest they forget that Gordon Brown has been the past that so damaged Britain.
It was Gordon Brown who raided our pension schemes and caused thousands of small businesses to be bankrupted and tens of thousands of pensioners to be left with nothing.
And it was Gordon Brown who sold off Britain’s reserves of gold bullion. The so called "iron chancellor" made the most incompetent decision in the modern history of the British Exchequer selling 400 tonnes of gold at $280 an ounce, investing the proceeds in Euros. With the price of gold now up by 147%, experts estimate that Brown’s bullion decision alone cost £2 billion.
So if anyone in Conservative politics is lining up for a fight, their target must be Gordon Brown, the most incompetent, arrogant, profligate Chancellor Britain has ever known.
And, as I was when visiting Rudyard Kipling’s home, Bateman's in Kent last weekend, they should be reminded of those immortal lines:
