Episode description

The French post-revolutionary politician Talleyrand said of the Bourbon royals that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. In contrast, the Tories appear to have learned nothing, and forgotten everything - particularly about winning elections - including the longstanding UK political rule that the further the drift from centre ground politics to batshit extremes, the more certain the thrashing at the ballot box.

Nick Cohen - @NickCohen4 - chats about the increasingly dire state of the Tory party with Nick Tyrone - the author, policy advisor and Tory Party observer and commentator whose Substack column as Neoliberal Centrist Dad - nick.tyrone.substack.com - is a must read for those of us desperate for the return of sanity to our national political discourse.

If the Beatles were "The Fab Four" - then how would you describe the 4 remaining contenders for the hollow crown of the Conservative Party - Kim Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick? "The Unfab Four?"

The Tories were obliterated in the 2024 General Election - reduced to a rump of just 121 MPs compared to Labour's 404 and the Liberal Democrats' 72. And yet - according to @NicholasTyrone - the Tories have learned absolutely nothing from their rout - believing that the party's mistake was "not being right wing enough", and that eventually, the Great British Public will see the error of their ways and look kindly on all the Tories' failed policies from Brexit to its failed economic and immigration policies.

Former Tory MP Theresa May recently warned her party that it has become so obsessed with chasing votes from Nigel Farage's Reform votes that it had ignored the flight of support to the Liberal Democrats and Labour.

Nick Tyrone believes the 2 leading contenders - Kim Badenoch and particularly Robert Jenrick- are also in thrall to a doomed electoral strategy that they would probably prove to be electoral duds. He tells Nick the Tories are still chasing the "mythical 52 per cent" of the electorate who voted for Brexit in 2016 - refusing to accept that public opinion has now moved decisively against Brexit and that many who did vote for it have either died or woken up to the damage it is doing to the UK

As ever, the Tories seem obsessed with getting voters back from Reform while ignoring liberal minded Tories who've rejected the party's match to radical right extremism and voted for Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Greens at the election. But Nick believes the greater threat facing the Tories is internal - a probably unavoidable schism between the sensible so-called One nation Tories - so far bullied into silence - and the hard right wing who dream of rapprochement with Farage and co.

Read Nick Cohen's Substack column Writing from London, Politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

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