All hail our hero’s return! The past 12 months have not been kind to James Cleverly. A man who was used to being the most important person in almost every room he entered. Not so much these days. It was bad enough when the Tories were heavily defeated in the last election. Even Jimmy Dimly had seen that one coming. But the final straw had been the inability of his own supporters to count. Come the leadership election, his campaign team had accidentally voted him into third place in a failed bid to undermine Kemi Badenoch. Out of the race before it had even really got going.
Old habits had died hard for Jimmy. Turning left on to every aircraft he boarded, only for an embarrassed steward to glance at his boarding pass and redirect him to economy. Automatically getting into the back seat of every car and wondering why it wasn’t going anywhere. It still took him a while to notice that he no longer had a driver. Doomed to get caught in traffic like the little people. The red box that he had kept as a souvenir now used only to house the shopping list he had been given.
It was the emptiness he found hardest. The sheer grind of being a nobody. When Dimly had been a cabinet minister he had had a whole army of staff to keep the show on the road. Every day he would be up by 7am, ready to be briefed on what to say and do. His time had never truly been his own. And he had loved it when people deferred to him. “Yes foreign secretary. No home secretary”. Nor did the knighthood he had been given as a thanks, but no thanks – the inevitable reward for mid-ranking politician – make up for it. He felt as hollow as the title sounded.
Now the alarm still went off early, but there was nothing to get him out of bed. It was no longer his voice that boomed in the prestigious 8.10am slot on the Today programme. He couldn’t even get a shout out in the graveyard slots granted to shadow ministers. Instead he had to listen to halfwits – to be kind: quarterwits more accurately – like Chris Philp and Priti Patel embarrass themselves. And all he could do was howl at the radio. It should have been him.
Except it wasn’t. And that had been his decision. When his leadership hopes had crashed and burned, he had tried his hand at being a grandee. The voice of wisdom from the backbenches. Too important to be one of Kemi’s shadow cabinet stooges. Arm’s length from the stench of her inevitable failure. Just biding his time until someone tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Your time has come, Sir Jim Dim. The Tory party needs a new leader.’
But the waiting had been a killer for him. Nothing to do but go in to Westminster and be ignored. He had tried inviting himself to endless lunches with journalists. To keep his flame alive. To remind himself of his own existence. That he mattered. Time was when it had been him who had to get away first. Important matters of state. Now it was the hacks who kept looking at their watches. Then he had tried making speeches. Not just speeches, but keynote speeches. Only there had never been a keynote. Just an audience often measured in single figures. Hacks waiting for a news line that never came.
So Dimly had chosen to cut his losses. Why hang around hoping for another shot as leader when the Tory party was doomed for the foreseeable? Better to be a half-person on the inside than a nobody on the out. So he had let it be known he would consider a post in the shadow cabinet. And now that moment had come. He could feel the relief coursing through his veins. OK, it wasn’t shadow foreign or home secretary. Roles he vaguely understood. But shadow housing secretary would do. He couldn’t be worse than the last person. He would have to check with the whips to find who that was. Jimmy Dimly was back in business.
As one quasar flickered, another was born. The Word of Nigel made Flesh. Nigel Farage has always traded in fantasies. A World as he would like it to be. Reality scares him to death. Because with reality comes responsibility. Sometimes. Nige has yet to take the credit for Brexit and its economic and social consequences. In fact he gets very narked when people try to remind him of the part he played. Everything is always someone else’s fault.
But now Nigel has a son and heir. Step forward, George Finch the new leader of Warwickshire county council. A slightly awkward, not very bright 19-year-old boy who looks like an intern on work experience. Which is pretty much what he is. A boy who is in charge of £1.5bn of council assets and with a spending budget of £500m. You couldn’t make this kind of thing up.
So Warwickshire council is now a laboratory experiment. A place where we get to see what Reform policies look like in action. It’s also a place of high comedy. Soon to be sent to the Edinburgh fringe. I say policies, but the Reform councillors are outraged if anyone accuses them of having a plan of action for the county. Shortly before Tuesday’s vote for a new council leader, one of the Reform councillors made a point of saying he was proud to have no policies at all.
The actual vote lasted three rounds as the Greens and the Conservatives were knocked out. The Greens had brought in a copy of Lord of the Rings and a model of the Titanic as props. The final count between Reform and the Lib Dens was tied on 23 apiece with eight abstentions. The casting vote went to the council chairman, Edward Harris. “This is very difficult,” he said. It really wasn’t. Harris is a Reform councillor and had already voted for Finch.
And guess what? Finch’s first move as leader was to propose a £150K handout for Reform to avail themselves of four special advisers. You couldn’t make this up. So much for the party of the anti-establishment. Next Finch and some other Reform councillors tried to persuade the council to vote against climate change. It wasn’t real, said Councillor Waine. Finch was adamant that climate change couldn’t exist because people in Reform had told him so. He didn’t seem to realise Reform may be the biggest party but they are still a minority. Maybe George will learn to count when he goes back to school. What could possibly go wrong?