Kruger

A liberal Democrat parliamentary colleague leaned over the gangway towards me on Monday, confiding that he had been listening to James Obrien’ s LBC news programme as he drove to Westminster: Danny Kruger’s defection from the Conservative Party to Reform was under discussion; Obrien asked for listeners to text him with their prediction of who would be the next turncoat.
Apparently, I was the most favoured choice!
Well, I suppose that I should be mildly flattered that the listeners even know my name.
I accept that I have been very critical of my own party when I thought that it properly deserved such criticism. Nevertheless, I remain a ‘Church and King’ Tory, even though I have also picked up much that was part of the Whig, and indeed, National Liberal traditions. Furthermore, I’m a former whip: A parliamentary political party is so much like a pack, where colleagues are bound together, not just in a common purpose, but also in friendship and loyalty. More often than not, it is the loners and semi-detached, that tend to peel off, being less encumbered by those bonds.

I do not underestimate Nigel Farage, he is a very clever politician who, in the estimate of Professor Vernon Bogdanor ‘makes the weather’. But I could never reconcile myself to his fondness for President Trump, his equivocation over Ukraine, and his stated admiration for Putin. To say nothing of some of the superficial and ill thought through policy positions he has recently taken.
Nevertheless, many constituents have urged me to support some form of electoral pact between Reform and the Conservative Party in order to prevent a right-of-centre split among voters, which would ensure another Labour victory at the next election. My answer is that no such arrangement is on offer: Farage believes that he can destroy and replace the Conservative Party and secure a majority in Parliament.
(I doubt it, and current polling doesn’t support such a conclusion).

Notwithstanding the Government’s current difficulties, the probability is that we are still three and a half years from the next general election. Anything can happen in that time.
 Political parties have come and gone in our modern history, but the Conservative Party has endured. Given the form of the parties over recent years, were I to take a bet on the one most likely to implode, it wouldn’t be mine.
Even if it  were it so, I’d prefer go down with the ship.