Conservative Party's chronicles

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by thenry

14 years wasn't it.. I think.

How many years was it with a condom on

On what?

[thenry]

Well David was the dominant one. And Nick had cling film on.

[1andrew1]

Sky News promoting its interview with Cummings with this prediction from him.

Kemi Badenoch will be gone as Tory leader within a year - and there are plots already under way to oust her, Dominic Cummings has said.

The former Number 10 aide also claimed the Conservative Party "might be dead".

https://news.sky.com/story/nigel-far...-says-13375541

[Russ]

The former Number 10 aide also claimed the Conservative Party "might be dead".

Ooooh don’t tease us like that!!

I usually think you have to take the proclaimed death of one of the two main parties with a large pinch of salt. It's been said of both of them so many times over the years. Tories in '97, Labour in '10, but especially in '19 and now the Tories again.

What gives me some cause for doubt is that Reform does seem a real threat to them. They are not gaining at all from Labour's unpopularity, and Badenoch doesn't have a good read on the country outside of Twitter. Farage is much better at connecting with what people are feeling.

The other side of that is that Reform at the moment has less broad appeal. About 30% of Conservative voters are going for Labour over Reform in a hypothetical match-up. There is a reason why Labour are trying to position Reform front and centre over the Tories because, if the Tories got their act together, they're still a bigger electoral threat. Farage is a big turnoff for moderates and the centre ground. I am not sure of they are capable of broading that appeal in the way Cameron and Johnson did to win their elections.

Reform’s support is skin deep. It has councillors (and MPs) who don’t show up to work and who resign and swap parties. It is quite possible it could do very well in the next election but at some point it will do well enough that the spotlight is properly on them and that’s when it’ll go bad.

The Scottish Socialist Party was a thing at Holyrood - formed in 1998, got one seat in the first Scottish parliament, six seats in the second, and then utterly beclowned themselves with a series of stunts and pronouncements that would make a student activist blush. They lost all their seats in 2007 and gave up contesting Scottish elections prior to the 2021 vote.

Populists are great at pointing out problems and getting people angry enough at what’s wrong to support them on the basis that they made people agree with them that everything’s awful. Whether they are as good at implementing workable solutions, especially solutions that take time, cost money, don’t have universal support and which involve some people winning and some people losing, is another matter.

The Tories are the most successful political party in the world for good reason. They have a depth of support and a heritage. They may look awful now but they’ve looked awful before.

[denphone]

Originally Posted by 1andrew1

Sky News promoting its interview with Cummings with this prediction from him.

https://news.sky.com/story/nigel-far...-says-13375541

Exaggerated media hyperbole as if my memory serves me right they were saying the same thing about the Labour party several years ago.

[1andrew1]

Tories secured most donations of any UK party in first quarter of 2025, data shows

The Conservatives raked in more donations than any other big UK political party in the first three months of 2025 as backers returned to the fray, while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK failed to secure big-ticket supporters.

The Tories received more than £3.3mn in donations in the first quarter, the Electoral Commission said on Tuesday. In the same period, the governing Labour party received £2.3mn, while Reform and the Liberal Democrats received just £1.5mn.

Kemi Badenoch’s party received its single biggest donation of £1mn from gaming entrepreneur and new donor Jeremy Elliott San in February, according to figures published by the UK elections watchdog.

Media reports suggest he donated a further £1mn ahead of the local elections in England in May, though data for that period has yet to be published.

The rise in donations for the Conservatives reflects enduring support for one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world, from both new and historic backers.

https://www.ft.com/content/f97d0740-...b-7578f1a1904b

Un-paywalled version

https://archive.ph/1twxo

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-tory-failures

Truss accuses Badenoch of not telling truth about Tory failures

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not telling the truth about the “real failures of 14 years of Conservative government”, the former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss has said.

Writing in the Telegraph, Truss said: “In a recent speech Kemi said: ‘From now on, we are going to be telling the British people the truth even when it is difficult to hear.’ If she’s not willing to tell the truth to her own supporters, the Conservative party is in serious trouble.”

Truss’s comments came after Badenoch’s own Telegraph article in which she claimed the current Labour government was failing to heed the warnings of the disastrous mini-budget that defined Truss’s short-lived premiership.

The former prime minister has been fighting a desperate battle to rewrite the narrative around her 45 days in office in 2022. She released a memoir and embarked on a campaign tour that allowed her to talk up her record and offer her views on the political landscape in the UK and US.

In her Telegraph article, she claimed her mini-budget would have helped the UK escape a “doom-loop” of low growth and high taxes. “Yet, it was sabotaged by the Bank of England and the Treasury – which didn’t want to be challenged and wanted to cover up their failings – and Conservative MPs who either didn’t believe in supply-side economics or cravenly wanted preferment under a Sunak premiership.”

But Truss has faced an uphill battle – not least when she was mocked by the campaign group Led By Donkeys, which unfurled a banner during one of her appearances bearing the phrase: “I crashed the economy.” It also included a picture of a lettuce – a reference to a Daily Star livestream stunt that sought to determine whether Truss’s battle to survive in No 10 could last longer than a 60p iceberg lettuce from Tesco.

Illustrating her criticism of the current Labour government, Badenoch invoked Truss’s failures in No 10. “Picture the scene: a new prime minister and chancellor spending billions without also making the necessary savings to offset their splurge and balance the books. The markets react adversely, interest rates spike and the cost of living gets worse with prices soaring.

“For all their mocking of Liz Truss, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have not learnt the lessons of the mini-budget and are making even bigger mistakes,” she wrote in the Telegraph on Saturday.

Hitting back, Truss wrote: “She is wrong. Labour is doing the opposite of the mini-budget, which is why the country is headed for disaster.”

And listing several policy recommendations that place her close to the US president, Donald Trump, politically, Truss added: “It is disappointing that, instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated.”

[Sephiroth]

Truss has her reputation to protect. There is no doubt, that her measures were intended to stimulate economic growth; as in her heart was in the right place. But she wasn't in her right mind when she announced £45bn of unfunded tax reductions without consulting the relevant regulators (OBR/BoE).

Writing in the Telegraph, Truss said: “In a recent speech Kemi said: ‘From now on, we are going to be telling the British people the truth even when it is difficult to hear.’ If she’s not willing to tell the truth to her own supporters, the Conservative party is in serious trouble.”

BI hope that Kemi's words were sincere and not the usual weasel words that all politicians use in one scenario or another. So, in that regard, not only is Truss right, but the Conservative Party IS in serious trouble. Very serious trouble. Kemi's front bench is infested with those who caused the past Tory failure. What's worse, people at large know this and say this.

Kemi needs to meet me for a curry and implement my advice which starts with a front bench clear-out and the introduction of the 2024 intake. Also she realistically needs to acknowledge that a large proportion of Reform UK are natural Conservatives and to win them back, an accommodation with Reform UK is necessary.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Hugh

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-tory-failures

Her lack of self-awareness is the casualty here.