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Notes -
Well, they’re obviously flailing. Sunak is cursed like Major, if he was PM during Covid it’s unlikely partygate (which directly and unambiguously led to the polling collapse) would have happened, he even quite deliberately ensured he stayed away from most of the parties in question, but now he’s going to lose because Boris and aides made a bunch of stupid decisions.
The Conservative Party doesn’t really have any ideology beyond the preservation and/or return to power of the people who are currently in charge of the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher famously declared that “we ought to have an ideology” because her opponents on the left did, and it was this that allowed her to graft from Hayek the policy program with which she governed. But over the last 350 the one constant of the party is its supreme adaptability to whatever is necessary to win.
This is also why certain defeat at the next election is so dizzying. If your only purpose and intention is to win, then knowing you’re going to lose turns the whole thing into a press tour for a movie the cast all know is going to bomb. The only thing for it is for all the top people to make sure they seem appropriately serious and normal enough to get good jobs after office. This is far from an irrelevant consideration - one of the reasons Trump struggled to recruit good staff who knew the system in DC is that they were worried they’d find it hard to get good patronage jobs in finance, lobbying, corporate America and so on afterwards.
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