What is it about English speaking Conservatives in Britain, Canada and Australia that appears to render them completely incapable of running competent election campaigns? Theresa May started the rot in 2017. Her mantle as a useless campaigner was inherited by Rishi Sunak, and now they’re all at it.
Canada goes to the polls a week today and all the indications are that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has blown a 25 point opinion poll lead and the Liberals, under the new leader Mark Carney, will win outright or as the biggest party. Carney has done what Poilievre should have done and whipped up anti-US sentiment, but his opponent has always been seen as Trump-lite and therefore incapable of standing up to the Great Orange One.
In Australia, opposition leader Peter Dutton looks set to lose out to Labor incumbent, the lacklustre Anthony Albanese when Aussies vote in two weeks’ time. He’s made gaffe after gaffe and has had to make apology after apology, each one of them easily avoidable. Dutton’s Liberals are leaking support among the very demographics they need to win over, especially in the suburbs of the big cities. If they can’t reverse that trend they’re toast.
We have elections in England too, on May 1, although you could be forgiven for not noticing. So far, I have seen only one Reform UK poster and received not a single leaflet from any of the seven candidates contesting my ward in Tunbridge Wells. Yes, seven candidates including all five main parties plus two independents.
This is not untypical of seats all over the country where for the first time, voters will have a much larger choice than they’re used to in local elections. The last time these seats were fought, in 2021, the Conservatives were in the ascendent following the vaccine rollout. At that stage, Boris Johnson was at his most popular, so as Kemi Badenoch has forecast, they’re on a hiding to nothing this year.
However, the unpopularity of the Labour Government ought to work in their favour, but of course with more parties and more candidates contesting seats, there are plenty of other boxes for voters to put their crosses in. And that’s why these elections are almost impossible to predict with any degree of confidence. For what it’s worth I expect the Greens and the LibDems to be the big winners nationally, with Reform UK establishing a real local government presence for the first time, winning two if not more mayoralties.
The conferences of the teachers’ trade unions usually provide great entertainment, and this year has proved no different. My father used to watch news reports of their proceedings in the 1980s shaking his head in bemusement at the pseudo communist rantings of long haired, bearded teachers who looked as if they hadn’t acquainted themselves with a shower in living memory.
“And these people are teaching our kids,” he used to say, followed by “No wonder the country is going to the dogs”. The National Union of Teachers doesn’t exist anymore, but has merged with the smaller Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), to become the NEU, the National Education Union.
It also has a new, 35-year old, very Left-wing leader in Daniel Kebede. Last week he got his way, and the NEU conference endorsed a strike ballot over the Government’s 2.8 per cent pay offer, which is a smidgen above the rate of inflation. You’d have thought our kids would have suffered enough without the prospect of losing more of their education through a teachers strike.
And then they came up with the maddest policy of all. They think as a union they should provide schools with “resources” to teach our children about Gaza. I can think of few organisations less appropriate to do this, given the language used in the debate.
They also called for the Science Museum to be boycotted over fossil fuel sponsorship and for the union to campaign against Labour MPs if they do not support teachers’ strikes. The question is, who would they campaign for? The Greens? George Galloway’s party? Because my acute political instinct tells me it won’t be the Tories.
Back in 1995 I saw a turquoise Audi Cabriolet on the forecourt of Dovercourt Audi in north London. I bought it, and not only because it turned out it had previously been owned by Princess Diana.
I adore convertibles, so much so that at the weekend I bought another one, albeit second hand. Indeed, it had to be second hand as Audi stopped selling the A5 Cabriolet into the UK market in 2022 having only sold 224 units in the first half of that year.
Overall, convertible sales are at an all time low. Only 22 convertible models from the top 30 car manufacturers are reported to be on offer in the UK, down from 37 twenty years ago.
This decline in sales of cars with character mirrors the increased sales of the often characterless SUVs. Still, at least my new one is purple, and not the ubiquitous grey, which most cars seem to be nowadays.
