To save Britain from disaster, Rishi Sunak must go

Ten years of Labour would be so dreadful, it is surely worth the Tories gambling on a leadership contest

Anyone who has ridden the rapids of misfortune will attest that loyalty is a marvellous quality in a friend but, as Mark Twain observed, “loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul”. Nor rescued a political party from extinction, we might add.

Despite yesterday’s poll, which put the Conservatives on 19 per cent and Reform on a fast-closing 15, despite a death-rattle net approval rating of minus 48, Rishi Sunak survives as Prime Minister. That is largely due to the misplaced loyalty of his colleagues, but also because, as one Tory MP said, the idea of a leadership challenge at this stage is “utterly bonkers”. It really isn’t, you know. What is bonkers is sticking with a course so calamitous, so certain to end in ruin, that it could spell the demise of a political party that celebrates its 190th birthday this year.

Of the 348 current Tory MPS, how many do you reckon will be left standing after the Autumn annihilation? Present polling suggests the losses of the charge of the Light Brigade – 113 killed, 134 wounded – were a mere scratch compared to what lies in wait electorally for the Conservative parliamentary party.

So, what?, I hear you cry. It’s no more than the b------s deserve. Spitting in the face of their base with 745,000 legal net migration in a year, outbidding normal families for scarce rental properties to get asylum seekers out of hotels so Rishi can claim to have kept his “promise” before the election. And they seriously think people who voted Tory in 2019 are going to make that mistake again?

Normally, I would agree. The sense of betrayal runs very deep, the desire to teach the Tories a lesson they won’t forget is almost overwhelming. So, you may not like it when I say that acting now to install a true Conservative as leader of the Tories is well worth the gamble, but please hear me out.

Do we really want 10 years of Labour supercharging woke in our institutions, brainwashing schoolchildren to despise their country, banning parents from talking their own children out of mutilating their young bodies, giving comfort to Islamists and far Leftists who wish to destroy our way of life, pursuing a “safe routes”, all-barbarianswelcome immigration policy, expanding the WFH quango class and suffocating free enterprise. Purselipped cultural revolutionaries making that British pastime “having a laugh” illegal ( just you wait). To cap it all, legislating away free speech to the point where even discussing any of the above is a hate crime.

That is the very real danger if we, as many of the right-minded among us intend to do, either vote Reform UK or refuse to vote at all. Unfairly, Reform will end up with no seats and the Tories could hold so few that it will take more than one term to get back into government. The Conservative Party may deserve that decade in the wilderness, but what about Britain?

A courageous new conservative Conservative leader – a Kemi, Suella, Priti, Robert – committed to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and taking back control of our borders, who is elected straight after the May local elections, could do much to mitigate that awful fate, I think.

There is a precedent. In May 2019, Theresa May’s government suffered the worst Tory local election performance in 24 years (Sunak is about to seize that grim title). The Conservatives lost more than 1,300 seats. Three weeks later, Mrs May announced her resignation. Boris Johnson became party leader on 23 July. Five months later, the new prime minister won an 80-seat majority with 43.6 per cent of the popular vote.

I am not suggesting a victory of that miraculous magnitude can be pulled off now. The rot has gone too deep. Whatever your personal frustrations, Labour does not deserve the landslide it will have pocketed by the end of the year if Conservatives don’t ditch Rishi.

Study the result of every recent by-election, and you detect no great enthusiasm for Sir Drear Starmer. Quite the contrary. Wellingborough saw the Left’s total go up from 13,737 in 2019 to 13,844. A mere 107 votes. It was disillusioned Conservative voters like thee and me who handed Labour the seat on a silver salver.

As long as Sunak remains, wild horses on their bended knees could not persuade those voters to give the Tories another chance. Hang on, Allison, won’t a fourth change of leader in as many years make the Conservatives a national laughing stock? It sure will. Better to be mocked than deceased, I say. Anyway, people soon move on and I bet they will relish a feisty woman knocking seven bells out of drippy Keir.

A leadership contest could be swift. MPS whittle candidates down to two. Then, party members need to choose between the finalists. With online voting, the whole thing could be over in under a fortnight. By the end of May, the Conservatives will have themselves a brand new leader who is actually prepared to honour their manifesto pledges and Rishi Sunak will have brought forward his private-jet flight to California by six months.

“Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.” The Tory party is not obliged to re-enact the pointless slaughter of the charge of the Light Brigade, which appears to be the current strategy. Try another Tennyson poem, my favourite: “Some work of noble note, may yet be done”.

Pick a Conservative leader who will restore the faith of at least some Conservatives and give them something to hope for. Faced with the alternative, it’s got to be worth a try.