Note: this is part of my objective and carefully-researched opening take on the 2024 UK General Election contest.

We’re a few days past Rishi Sunak’s election announcement and the Tory campaign is already going very badly. Hopefully, that’s how it will continue.

But it does give me a problem: there is so much to say about their time in power and now I’m faced with a veritable banquet of unforced errors, whole platters filled with abject foolishness threatening to topple over and crush me before I can fill my plate. And that’s just the first few days of the campaign. So, apologies in advance for how long this will probably end up being.

Where to start, then? Maybe the slogan, which serves as basically every form of punctuation on their website:

More on this later. Consider it scene-setting. A self-indulgence that will become clear. A staggeringly bland message from a party with nearly 15 years in government to come up with something better.

But, quickly, just one aside: which fucking genius decided to put “CLEAR PLAN” in Labour red, when the main line of attack is that Labour have no plan?

Let’s start at the end and work backwards. That seems to be what they are doing, after all.

The Campaign

It’s a clusterfuck. I really could end it there and you’d know everything strictly necessary to understand the state of play. But doing so would miss out on a lot of fun details.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think they’d manage to make such an unholy mess of launching their campaign. And so quickly, too. It isn’t so much that the wheels immediately came off, as it was Sunak shuffled out of Number 10 in a box with “kar” written on the side in crayon. Then it rained and the cardboard went all droopy.

Nearly the entire country wants an election and has done for some time. Perhaps realising the only exceptions to this were his own MPs, Sunak decided it best not to tell them, lest they oust him and install somebody competent. They don’t have anybody competent, but that wouldn’t stop those involved in the process from trying: the membership quite literally don’t give a shit and the MPs are in full-blown panic mode.

Maybe they’d bring back Liz Truss. Boris might suddenly stop hanging around the B&M Bargains car park and hastily waffle his way to Downing Street. Gove could show up to cabinet one morning, wearing Sunak’s boneless carcass as a skin suit. So, best hang his MPs out to dry like his favourite suit before they can act. That’s the only rationale I can come up with.

Out he wandered, then, taking up the famous lectern from which all such announcements are delivered. Once there, he promptly got utterly drenched while the New Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better blasted out in the background. Phenomenal. And entirely avoidable.

Showing how seriously he was taking it, he immediately hit the campaign trail. All the classics: the ExCel centre where Sky political correspondent Darren McCaffery was physically removed, the shipyard where the Titanic was built, and a pub to insult the locals about how bad the Welsh football team is. He took some tough questions from Tory Councillors dressed as Ordinary Working People (they were in hi-vis jackets) and then didn’t have breakfast with some veterans at a Wetherspoons.

Smashing it. Clearly concerned that the pace of things might take a hit over the bank holiday weekend, it was decided to launch a key new component of the Conservative Planifesto: bringing back National Service.

Now, I know this whole thing isn’t exactly written with the straightest of faces, but Poe’s Law dictates I need to clarify something here, because that sounds like me being snarky. “A-ho-ho, what would be a funny way to convey how out of touch and insane the Tories are? I know, I’ll pretend one of their first campaign promises is to bring back National Service! Chortle snort guffaw, I’m really very funny.”

To be clear: I am not joking. That isn’t a clumsy attempt at satire. It’s real. They have it on their website.

They aren’t committing to this being paid work, either. You’ll just have to do it, although you won’t go to prison if you refuse. Instead, you’ll have to pay a fine, so anyone worth hundreds of millions of pounds can just buy their kids out of the scheme and not worry about it. Or move to California.

For everyone else, it’ll be mandatory work for the state, with little or no renumeration. The payoff is it will build national pride and equip young people for life in the workplace, while helping the Tories claim they’ve hit their pledge to increase defense spending.

Great stuff. And what it says to me is the Conservatives aren’t fighting this election against Labour; they’re fighting it against Reform UK. Who the hell else is going to be won over by post-war, stiff-upper-lip, the kids are all snowflakes bollocks? Certainly not young people or the parents of young people. AKA much of the electorate.

The other central pillar of the campaign is that Labour don’t have A Plan. Aside from the fact that the election has only just been called and nobody has released a final manifesto yet, it’s rank hypocrisy. The Tories have been in power for well over a decade and have got through three prime ministers in the last 2 years.

They spent a full third of their time in power arguing over 1) whether we should be in the EU and, then 2) how not in the EU we should be. Because they didn’t plan on us actually leaving, then when we did they had no plan for how to leave or what leaving should look like.

So no, don’t buy into any of this crazy bullshit: the Tories don’t have a plan, haven’t had a plan for years, and are still dealing with the fallout from when their last plan – the referendum – blew up in their faces. They have lurched from crisis to crisis, often entirely of their own creation, very obviously not having anything like a plan. The whole party is the living manifestation of being planless; a hive of waffling drones with no-one to serve but themselves.

Meanwhile, Starmer has unified the Labour Party by kicking out the tankies and then built – and maintained – an absolutely enormous lead in the polls. Is he a fount of charisma? No. Has he done a good job of clearly communicating what a Labour government will do? Not yet. Is a lot of that lead because the Tories are so widely loathed? Oh yes! But he has taken his party on a journey that is the photo negative of what has been going on within the Conservative Party for years.

The results of this haphazard realpolitik is spelled out in letters a hundred feet high, by the reaction of what are usually the stalwarts of a Tory campaign: the conservative press. The Telegraph, Mail, and bloody Spectator have all published articles endorsing Labour. This is unheard of. The Spectator article was written by no less than Nick Boles, an ex-Tory cabinet minister who left the party over the Brexit Wars. They’re not amplifying the Tory talking points, and this speaks volumes. It isn’t because they don’t believe them – that has never stopped them trumpeting Tory campaigns before – but because they don’t want to back such an obvious, stinking turd. The fact that turd is a lie is neither really here nor there.

Get used to the words “ex-Tory minister”, too. A lot of them are standing down, including party heavyweights like Michael Gove. Of those who aren’t standing down, plenty will lose their seats. Jacob Rees-Mogg is forecast to lose his, for example, and I cannot convey how happy that will make me. Which brings us to the final comment of note regarding the campaign: candidates.

Four days after the election was announced, the Conservatives don’t have candidates selected in nearly two hundred constituencies. Some of those, they’d lose no matter what. But not all. Some are de facto marginals. Others should be fairly safe, but only in a world where you’ve got an established candidate who has been carefully vetted and had the chance to spend some face time with the voters.

This is not what has happened. With anyone of sane mind not wanting to waste several weeks fighting an election they know they’ll lose, good candidates are very thin on the ground. And without the time to properly vet them, I would be flabbergasted if we don’t see multiple cases of Racist Uncle Syndrome between now and election day. Completely unsuitable fruitcakes from local councils or – nnnnghhhghhggghhh – the party membership who’ll quickly turn out to have Facebook accounts following pages like I’m Not Racist But and Not Beating Your Kids Makes Them Bent.

And, in a prediction which I sense will be as accurate as it is emotionally traumatic, a staggering amount of very questionable pornography is going to be found. Because nothing says “out of touch and angry about it” more than a hard-drive filled with borderline (or actually) illegal filth.

It’s just one more unforced error in an already long line of them. One that any competent party, containing any degree of forethought or planning, would have deftly avoided. Something that the party calling the election is uniquely placed to ensure only happens to the opposition.

The Past 14 Years

It’s been shit, hasn’t it? It didn’t start brilliantly, as the global economy had collapsed and the Cameron-Osborne government took the opportunity to push ideologically-driven spending cuts. You’re All In It Together. This occupied the full first five years of their time in power, back when Theresa May was a bête noir of the left, rather than one of the few relatively reality-adjacent Tory moderates, which she became after the party went completely fucking insane.

Governing in a coalition meant they couldn’t fully free themselves to enact all of their “free market, wink wink” dreams. The only way to deal with that was to win back the increasingly demented right of the party. Those being swayed by UKIP. Thus: referendum. The plan – the last time they had one, and it was bad – was the government would win handily, shut down the eurosceptics, and be able to get on with governing with a proper majority.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the nutters won and, with very few exceptions, Brexit has completely dominated our political world for the eight years since. Rather than unite the Conservative Party as the broad church it believed itself to be, it tore it apart. Very publicly, over an extended period of time. Without the capacity to pass any other meaningful legislative agenda. The only tangible legislative ‘victory’ the Tories have achieved since 2010 is something one half of the population didn’t want and the other half of the population didn’t understand. Because not understanding it was a prerequisite for wanting it.

It would take many, many, many more words to fully document what happened during those times. The spectacle of the debates over Brexit bills. The MPs crossing the floor or quitting in disgust. The three line whips being defied by cabinet ministers. Boris. Covid. Parties. Lies. Lettuce. Spiraling immigration figures.

The experience has been utterly exhausting. Mad. Unrelenting irrationality, beyond parody, too much to even attempt to document in one place. And all to the detriment of the British people, surprisingly few of whom had the nous to simply phone up a Tory MP and offer to flog them some non-existent PPE at 700% markup. What an unenterprising lot we are.

What did we get? A government only interested in tearing itself apart, a shit economy, and exactly the kind of unsustainably high immigration Brexit was supposed to prevent. Far higher than before. Which is precisely what many of us Project Fear killjoys had been saying would happen. In 14 years, they’ve not managed anything else of note. What else is there they can claim – the pandemic response? Everyone had one. Ours was definitely not the worst, but it also definitely wasn’t the best. And even if it were the best, it isn’t a legislative agenda win.

But that’s all really just background to the main point I want to make about The Plan: there isn’t one. There is no reality where the Conservative Party’s conduct over their time in government – and the past few years in particular – could have been in accordance with a plan. It is wholly indicative of people who’re not capable of ever forming anything cogent enough to be described, even loosely, as a plan. What the Tories have is to plans what involuntary rectal spasms are to knitting; painful, shitty, and out of their control. And nothing to do with knitting.

Not just for the country, either. They don’t have any functioning plans for themselves. They had to fire one of their own prime ministers after less than two months, then intervene and break the leadership selection rules they wrote in order to prevent their own membership from electing another wild-eyed maniac to replace her. Because her ‘plan’ was so very bad that merely announcing it tanked the economy.

They need to go. Frankly, it doesn’t matter whether Labour have a plan or not. They clearly do, as poor a job as they’ve made of conveying it, but even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t change anything. The Conservatives need to go. If they can’t have the decency to self-destruct on the way out, at the very least they need to spend a long time out in the political wilderness, while they reflect on how and why they got there. Having a plan doesn’t change things if it’s designed to serve only the power-crazed, morally bankrupt, systemically useless lunatics who wrote it.

Unless they evolve into something entirely unrecognisable from their current form, they are not fit for government. They shouldn’t be running the country, plan or not. Not only is it reasonable to believe Labour will do a better job than them, or that you or I could do a better job than them. Although that, too. But it is also reasonable to believe that if this blatant and remorseless abuse of power goes unpunished, it will only get worse. If we don’t vote them out – by any means necessary – they will get worse. Much worse.

So go they must. Whether you like Labour or the Lib Dems – whoever is the best tactical vote in your area – doesn’t matter. People need to go out and say enough is enough, there’s a limit to what we’ll tolerate, so please:

It really can’t happen soon enough.