The National (Scotland) - Seven Days
Crunching the numbers on Tories’ vanishing majority
Hamish Morrison’s Worst of Westminster diary
COULD the Tories find themselves by-election’d out of Government simply because they cannot hold onto their MPs? It certainly seems like the Tories could find themselves in a Ship of Theseus-esque conundrum whereby their majority could slowly be chipped away and replaced with Labour
MPs until they are a minority government.
The day aer the 2019 General Election, then-Tory leader Boris Johnson commanded a beefy majority of 80 seats.
That has since dwindled to 49 – that’s nearly eight MPs gone from the Tory benches every year since.
At the present rate of calamity, it would be around six and a half years before the Conservatives found themselves without a working majority, byelection’d into catastrophe.
Happily for them, there will be another election before they have the chance to inflict that embarrassment on themselves.
Mark Menzies this week became the latest MP to inflict embarrassment on his party. The
Scot – who represents Fylde in Lancashire – faces accusations of misusing party funds to pay o some “bad people”. Menzies denies the allegations.
He follows hot on the heels of William Wragg, who withdrew from the party aer it emerged he gave the numbers of colleagues to the now-infamous Westminster honeytrapper.
Before him it was Lee Anderson
(below le) aer he refused to apologise for incendiary and allegedly Islamophobic comments about the Mayor of London. He said “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, who is a Muslim, adding: “He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates.”
And before them, there was the Tory MP who told a protester to “go back to Bahrain” outside that country’s embassy, there was David Warburton who admitted to taking drugs, Andrew Bridgen who compared the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust and Matt Hancock who made an unsanctioned appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here, a television show in which contestants are forced to eat kangaroo testicles and get covered in bugs.
Actually, among this rogues’ gallery, our earlier thought experiment doesn’t seem so outlandish aer all …