What's Goin' On?


 

Just started watching a documentary on Tamla Motown: Marvin Gaye's seminal album, "What's Going On?", changed the direction of the label by pushing firmly into the sphere of politics, and a desire for change in the world despite initial reluctance on behalf of the label. Pieces in the FT this weekend would seem to indicate a similarly radical shift in the Tory demographic over here, in the aftermath of Borisgate and the defenestration of the bear of little brain.

Simon Kuper posits the notion that the bear has well and truly scuppered the resurgence of Tory posh-boy Eton/Oxford entitlement we've seen since the years immediately leading up to the Financial crisis of the early/mid 2000s, with Cameron's ascendancy to the premiership, by souring the brand - hopefully for good - in the eyes of Middle England, with his determinedly gentleman amateur, I'm here-solely-because-of-my-superior-station non-engagement with the nuts and bolts of his job and his commitments. Right on, Doris...

Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Equalities & Human Rights Commission, points the way to the future of Toryism, arguing that the party's voting demographic has shifted away from the taken-as-read white, middle-class and middle-aged suburbanite model, to one represented by candidates for the Tory leadership from 'ethnic minorities' - a now surely, sorely outdated term in itself - such as Kemi Badenoch, Rishi Sunak, et al.

I'm pretty sure that both commentators have put their fingers spot on the state of the Tory Party as we see it currently, but the bottom line is supplied by Camilla Cavendish in the same paper: to survive, the Tories will perforce need to stop waving fantasy economics and false promises about and actually deal with the real world, in order to survive at all: indeed, as Andrew Marr commented in The New Statesman this week, had the Conservatives been infighting to the extent they have been under Johnson's misrule, whilst in opposition; they would have imploded and broken up as a party by now. There's still time yet, I muse hopefully...


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