Memo to Tories: don’t tell Labour’s lies for them

“It may take a lot of defeats for conservatives to work out that providing a pale imitation of the other guy’s manifesto is not a route to electoral success.”

– Fredrik Erixon, Swedish economist

There is a worse error still: pretending you did what you promised in your own manifesto when you didn’t. Gordon Brown’s Big Blowout was a fitting end to 13 years when Labour spent like there was no tomorrow. Today is the tomorrow Labour spent like there wasn’t. The coalition won 60% of Britain’s votes in 2010 by promising to remedy that – and the Tories still say they did, they are and they will. Can anyone count on their fingers how many pounds of debt have been paid off? (What do you mean, you don’t have a negative number of fingers !) They paid off nothing. They even increased the debt. The increase was nothing compared to Gordon Brown, of course – and nothing is something when compared to Gordon Brown, who in turn compares well to Jeremy Corbyn – but not one pound was paid off.

The UK is like a couch potato, so ashamed of a spectacular blow-out that he tweets all his friends he’s switching over to the DASH diet and gym workouts. He doesn’t actually do it – he keeps lazing on the couch, eating at the rate to which he has now become accustomed, and each month the old bill for that huge takeaway binge has only its interest paid on his credit card statement – but he’s been tweeting so much that his even fatter friends now reply, “Hey, you deserve a break after all this! Come and join us for another big blow-out.” Now he is trapped by his own lies.

For seven years, austerity has been talked about. It suited Labour, it suited the media – and it suited the Tories to pretend they were doing some. Now the Tory party is caught in its own lies.  Surely, after all this austerity, Britain could afford another night out with Labour.

Back in the ’80s, under the austere Margaret Thatcher, interns and electives loved working in A&E – and patients did not wait so long to be seen. The reasons they don’t love it today have nothing to do with austerity – quite the opposite – but how would you know if you listened to the public debate on it? Likewise, many a green is justly called a watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside. Grenfell tower was made green on the outside and was red that night: red is the colour of fire and of blood. How many would be alive today if the £9 million it cost to clad it had been austerely withheld?

I very sincerely hope it will not take the next Tory leader an actual electoral defeat to work all this out.