Is anything more fun than watching a political party you despise come apart in slow motion? This isn’t innocent fun, I admit, because the Conservative Party’s woes risk tearing the country apart as well, but as long as it’s happening I see no reason not to enjoy the spectacle. 

What’s going on? The most recent news is that a section of the Conservative Party seems to be plotting the overthrow of yet another prime minister. That’s a prime minister who belongs to their own party, remember. Who leads their own party and who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who they put in office to replace a prime minister from their own party who–

Et cetera. 

Irrelevant photo: primroses and lesser celandine.

What’s the latest plot?

A group of MPs (Members of Parliament; you’re welcome) met to discuss replacing Rishi Sunak with Penny Mordaunt. The group comes from the right wing of a party that has no left wing and whose anatomically awkward center wing is increasingly hard to spot (at least from the vantage point of my couch). Still, they seem to have located a few moderates to meet with and discuss their plotlet.

When I talk about the party’s right wing, mind you, I’m not talking about some unified group. They split apart as easily as mercury. This particular group could, if they’d wanted to, have backed Mordaunt in the last battle over who would be prime minister (she did run) but they wouldn’t because they didn’t like her views on trans rights. 

What are her views on trans rights? Good question. Two years ago, she either did or didn’t want to make it easier for them to transition. And she either did or didn’t make a U-turn on whatever her earlier position was. Or wasn’t. But since she hasn’t denounced them as a threat to women, weather, and western civilization, the culture warriors consider her woke.

Am I work? I got up at 5:30 this morning, walked the dog, and had two cups of tea. I’m writing this at 7 a.m. and I’m about as woke as it’s possible to be in that situation.

But we weren’t talking about me; we were talking about important people. If the right wing of the party–or this winglet of the right wing of the party–is going to back Mordaunt, the papers say she’d have to agree to farm out culture war issues to them. That way she could protect the purity of whatever she turns out to believe while still letting people who believe the opposite do whatever they think will earn votes from the rabid wing of the country’s electorate. 

Am I biased? I do have a few biases. They’re like accents: everyone has at least one, whether they know it or not. I like to take mine out and waive them around once in a while–it keeps them as fresh as if I’d dried them on the line–but my posts are as accurate as I can make them and I do my best to link to reputable sources. 

Will Mordaunt bite at the bait the plotters are dangling in front of her? She hasn’t said so, at least as I write this, but she also hasn’t said she wouldn’t, although her supporters make it sound unlikely.

This is political maneuvering, though. We can’t expect what people say to always match what they mean. Polls predict Mordaunt will lose her seat at the next election. It’s not out of the question that she’d rather wander out into the allegedly real world as ex-prime minister than as a lowly ex-MP.

Why choose Mordaunt?

The plotters have several reasons to have taken Mordaunt off the hanger when they chose their outfit for the day. One is that, as I’ve said in multiple posts, the Conservatives have an extremely shallow talent puddle and they’ve pretty well splashed all the water out of it. That’s what happens when you give kiddies rubber boots and turn them loose in wet weather. But the most important factor may be that during the king’s coronation she carried an eight-pound sword, upright and well in front of her body, for fifty-one minutes. 

The newspapers all agree that this is no easy trick. Since I’ve never tried it–we don’t have a lot swords at my house–I’ll have to take their word for it. The articles were written by serious journalists who wouldn’t just close their eyes and trust Mordaunt’s publicity machine on something this important. They will have borrowed eight-pound swords and tried it themselves.

If any of you have relevant experience, I’d love to hear about it. A reader who drops in to Notes from time to time is a weightlifter and has pulled a truck in competitions. Is she a good candidate for prime minister? She’s looking better all the time.

Sam, if you’re out there, we need your help here, at least as a sword-carrying consultant and quite possibly as a candidate for prime minister. Our slogan will be, Our candidate can pull a truck. Can yours?

Does the sword really matter?

Maybe not. Some people in the know are speculating that it isn’t Mordaunt the plotters want. They’re using her to hide their real plan, which is to trigger yet another leadership contest in the Conservative Party before the next election. Then they could put her in as prime minister and when she leads them into what pretty much everyone expects to be a disastrous defeat at the next election, they can blame her. That will clear the path for candidates who are further to the right to really, really lead the party, because waiting in the wings and oozing ambition are Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, and Grant Shapps.

Will anything come of this? Anyone who thinks they can predict where we’re headed is delusional. 

As for Rishi Sunak, our prime minister du jour, he says his party’s united and life is fine. I have no information on how long he can hold a sword upright.

When will the next election be? Best guesses at the moment are that the election will happen in November. Or October. Or some other month. The latest possible date is January 25, 2025–five long years from the last one–but prime ministers can set earlier dates if they get lonely. 

What’ll happen at the next election?

Polls suggest a disaster for the Conservatives, although they’re hoping that if they postpone it long enough the economy will improve, all the gods I don’t believe in will descend from Mount Olympus to intervene, and they’ll scrape through. One of many wild cards, though, is that the main challenger, Labour, has divested itself of almost everything it ever stood for. That’s supposed to make them bulletproof. You know: if you don’t hang up a target, it’s hard for anyone to hit a bullseye. 

Whether that will get people to vote Labour is anyone’s guess. It’s hard to work up much passion for a party whose slogan is We’re not the Tories. Vote for us and we’ll all find out what we stand for. If anything.

As for the Liberal Democrats–the other major nationwide party–no one ever did know what they stand for. Or at least no one I know.

In the meantime, multiple MPs–whole flocks of them–are announcing that they won’t run again. Many have taken phone calls from reality and realized they can’t win, but it’s not just Conservatives who are giving up. Across the political spectrum, many are saying, essentially, “I can’t stand this anymore..” 

As Carolyn Lucas, a Green Party MP, put it, “In any other walk of life, if people behaved as they do here, they’d be out on their ear. . . . It is utterly, utterly dysfunctional. I mean, really, it’s loopy.”