Wes Streeting says we need water and food to last 72 hours in case of national emergency, as well as wind-up radios so that we can check in on how the apocalypse is developing in Ambridge. Personally, I have a two-week supply of jokes about the government that I can draw upon even as the zombies break down my front door. Andy Burnham, far from stockpiling, is busy chucking stuff out.
This week Labour’s much cherished commitment not to allow new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea went into the skip round the back of Downing Street, where it lies next to a complete set of European Union red lines, a plan for digital ID and a signed photograph of Peter Mandelson. Tory frontbenchers waved their hands in amazement as the prime minister explained that the government is now in favour of dashing for gas. The argument Burnham was using about security of supply was exactly the one they’d been throwing at the government for months.
To Kemi Badenoch, it’s a sign that she’s winning the argument. But then the Tory leader’s self-confidence is so total that she sees the rising of the sun each morning as a sign that she’s winning the argument. A more thoughtful opposition leader might wonder what she will have left to throw at Burnham after he’s finished jettisoning the unpopular and hard-to-explain bits of policy that Keir Starmer left cluttering up Downing Street.
Badenoch is having her own clear-out. All of us do this when we move into a new place and find that the previous occupant left something hideous behind: a phallic ornament in the garden, for instance, or a list of approved candidates featuring Grant Shapps. Of course, as anyone who’s spent a weekend driving to the local tip knows, there’s always something so toxic the council simply refuses to take it off your hands.
In Badenoch’s case, it’s Liz Truss, who has a new book out next week on how everything was someone else’s fault. That’s a line that the Tory leader has decided to recycle, as she bags up any sense of responsibility for the government in which she was a cabinet minister and leaves it out for the binmen along with a pile of “Mel Stride for chancellor” posters. On Tuesday she was asked why, if cutting taxes and welfare spending is so easy, her party didn’t do either when it was last in power.
Courage takes many forms. The effect of all these unwanted old positions hitting the Westminster landfill is that the electoral battleground is clearing nicely. We find ourselves in the unusual situation that both Burnham and Badenoch agree on the argument they want to have: was Margaret Thatcher right?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
