After two delicious weeks in the south of France, your diarist returns to open the diary and once again pick up his pen. So now tell me, my dears, has anything happened in my absence…?
We jest, of course.
“So little trouble do men take in the search for truth; so readily do they take what first comes to hand.”
So observed Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, though he might as well have been talking about voters for any one of today’s right-wing parties – Referendum, Ukip, Brexit or Reform.
News that Nigel Farage has now darkened our door was not met with unmitigated joy at Bylines Towers. Images of Dorries, Hunt, Truss and all those others who circumstances have forced your reluctant diarist to write about loomed out of the dark, but when we’re talking of creatures of the dark then the protean leader of the Reform Party is the real ravioli.
There will be no escaping him and his Farage farouche during the rest of the campaign.It will not have escaped readers’ attention that Rishi Sunak called the election the day after he was quite sure your diarist had left the country. He has thus avoided a couple of weeks of revelations and ridicule at the opening of the campaign. But Pecksniff returns, and to misquote Louis XV: “Avec moi, le déluge”.
The polls grow increasingly dire for the Tories. YouGov produced one which gave them only 140 seats, and they describe 79 of those as ‘tossups’ (with a lead of less than 5%). The Liberal Democrats are getting close to being the official opposition on 50. (Though a former LibDem chief while told your diarist this week that he would much prefer his party to be third: the Commons accommodation is much more congenial.)
One can only put the champagne on ice and await the long election night to come. And long it will be. Because in the past, early results have been from urban areas and so mostly Labour, with the Tory shires piling in during the early hours. But this time, the shires seem no longer to be Tory. So it’s only as dawn breaks that we will begin to see the magnitude of their eclipse.
