Party animal Boris gets local Tories in a fine election mess
AS local election campaigning gets under way here in Rossendale it could yet be the actions of Boris Johnson and local MPs, rather than people actually standing for election to the council, which determine what happens on polling day.
The decision by the police to issue a fine to the prime minister, not to mention chancellor Rishi Sunak, for attending lockdownbusting events inside Downing Street, could not have come at a worse time for local Tories standing for council.
Here in Rossendale, just a few hundred votes in key wards is all that stands between the Tories and winning the authority from Labour for the first time in a decade.
On social media, pictures are already popping up on the Facebook pages of Rossendale MP Jake Berry and Haslingden and Hyndburn MP Sara Britcliffe of doorknocking events in key wards, celebrating their strong local candidates and bemoaning the councils in Hyndburn and Rossendale, both of which are Labour-run.
The Tories really need the local elections here in Rossendale to be fought on local issues if they are to win.
The costly empty homes scandal is the perfect narrative in this regard: Fed up of paying more council tax and
then more for additional services like brown bin collections on top?
Just imagine if Labour hadn’t had to spend
£7m and counting on the empty homes fiasco.
But for that argument to cut any ice, they need people to be listening.
Having a leader nationally who has become the first serving prime minister to be sanctioned by the police – albeit by way of a fixed penalty notice – makes that far harder.
We all remember the sacrifices we made in
the face of Covid, the lockdowns we endured, here in areas like Rossendale more than anywhere else.
Unlike many other parts of the country, we rarely left the toughest version of lockdown for almost 18 months.
Children’s birthday parties cancelled.
Loved ones dying alone in hospital.
Cancer diagnoses and treatments delayed.
Small, independent traders forced to stop working.
Months of education
lost for thousands of pupils. Christmas spent away from family. Holidays cancelled.
All of these were done in good faith, in the knowledge everyone was trying to play by the rules. Everyone, that is, apart from those working in Downing Street, led by a prime minister who counted our MP, Jake Berry, as one of his most vocal advocates when Johnson stood to be PM.
And that’s the problem facing Mr Berry and also Ms Britcliffe,
who has Mr Johnson’s election campaign to credit for her electoral success in 2019 as the ‘red wall’ crumbled in the North.
Both have tried to swerve passing public criticism on Mr Johnson so far.
Both are keen to wait for the final publication of investigations by civil servants. But judgement has been passed by the police.
Saying nothing now is not an option, especially if they want to be useful to the local candidates
they are supporting in next month’s elections.
As things stand, it’s very hard to stand as a Conservative and promise to run a council more competently than Labour, when you have a national leader who didn’t even understand his own lockdown rules.
And even harder if you don’t have your local Tory MPs speaking out in the strongest possible terms about their leader, and his contempt for the sacrifices you and I made without hesitation.