The Conservative Party after BREXIT

Prof Tim Bale has produced a dense but devastating history of the last eight years of Conservative chaos. He tends towards long sentences with multiple bywords and lots of parentheses, as if something can only make sense if it’s explained by three other sub-plots. And that’s probably the point. His relentless narrative first of Theresa May’s doomed bid to agree a softer BREXIT, then Boris’ gung-ho disregard for anything that seemed problematic, can only sound believable in the context of a Party united only by its confusion. In describing the fall of PM Johnson, he enters ground already covered rather better by others (e.g., Sebastian Payne. Ben Riley Smith and Anthony Seldon) and his account of Truss and early Sunak is relatively perfunctory. If only he’d waited till the final denouement! But then, like many of us, he never realised how soon it would come. This could have been the timely requiem for a once great party. Instead, it tells an incomplete story and although he acknowledges that so many of the Tories’ woes arose from the infatuation with BREXIT, neither he – nor the Party - seem to have grasped quite how big a disaster it has been.