Airstrip One

Self Delivering Leaflets

A new technological breakthrough has reached the the Conservative Party, which I think could well be a secret weapon that will simply knock Labour off the political map for a generation. The self-delivering leaflet has, so my sources at Smith Square unreliably inform me, been a great success. The self-knocking door has a couple of teething problems, but the self-manned polling station is almost certainly going to be ready in time for the next election.

After all what other logical conclusion can one draw from the decision of Tory MPs to sack a swathe of their membership, and then boasting to lobby journalists that they were going to ensure that the members were going to go nowhere near the leadership vote because they were so bloody right wing?

So the Tory MPs have decided to lose a bumbling but trusted leader who led them from 20 points behind in the polls to level pegging with the most upopular minister in the most unpopular government since polling began. A Home Secretary who manages to radically cut crime and still remains unpopular certainly has a unique achievement to his credit - but hardly the sort that a party in the business of winning votes should hanker after.

Sadly for my outraged pique, and fortunately for the national interest, the Tories will be saved the full penalty of their vote-blindness. In the next couple of years it will be a good time to be a Tory. The Tories will almost certainly pick up support before levelling off as the election approaches. This will be the case even if they were led by Neil Hamilton (with Mohamed Fayed as his shadow Chancellor). Unless Labour comes crashing to the ground, the Tories will also lose the election but with a respectable showing. Essentially Howard offers them a Faustian pact - you will pick up seats but you won't win the election.

The other sad thing about Howard is that he is as thoroughgoing an Atlanticist as his predecesor - and many of those surrounding him are active in Atlantic Bridge, the thinktank that gamely tries to maintain that there is a serious intellectual case for the "Anglosphere" apart from the laudible but rather negative fact that it really annoys the Continentals.

So, no change on the Iraq war - and there will still be (thankfully short lived) Lib Dem surges whenever Iraq hits the headlines as it will with Kelly or in the very likely event that the Shias around Basra start getting shirty. Of course a group of serious politicians would not choose a man who was as infected as his predecesor with Atlantophilia - although not as compromised financially by all those sponsored trips across the pond. But we're not talking about a set of serious politicians, we're talking about Tory MPs.