Politics has its supergroup, but is it already McBusted?
You wait 40 years for a small number of MPs to break away from a mainstream British political party citing infiltration by extremists and then two come along at once.
And not only do two come along at once, but they then merge. Yes, with news that three Tory defectors are to join the eight Labour MPs that have already done the same, the Independent Group has become The Independent Supergroup, a centrist McBusted out to change British politics while desperately hoping no one notices they are not merely flying without wings but by the seat of their pants.
It was Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen’s turn to summon the press on yesterday afternoon, to take down the tablet of stone and read out “the speech” given by MPs who leave their parties. “Proud of what we have achieved ... With a heavy heart … I have not changed ... the party has changed … etc”.
Still, the speeches that make change rather than mark its milestone are only identified in hindsight, and it may yet be that Soubry, in particular, has changed the country. Things fall apart, as Yeats once wrote, and here was the centre, saying no to its poetic role in proceedings. That actually, it is going to hold, thank you very much.
Yesterday, as on Monday with Labour, as Soubry laid bare the scale of bullying and intimidation that has taken over the grassroots of the Conservative Party, there was a palpable sense of catharsis.
“The hard right, anti-EU awkward squad that has broken every Conservative leader for the last 40 years are now running the Conservative Party from top to toe,” she said.
She spoke of the infiltration of local parties by “Blukip” and “Purple Momentum”, who were intimidating MPs such as Sir Oliver Letwin and Sir Nicholas Soames. It had reached the point, she said, “where they fear them more than their electorate, the people they are in politics to serve”.
That is a politics that is, as has been said a lot in the last week, utterly broken. But now, The Independent Group is a cross-party endeavour and that makes its role and its challenge ever more complex.
As the 11 of them posed for smiling photographs, it all had a very Downing Street rose garden feel to it, and we know how that ended
Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger sat in the front row looking rather stony-faced as Soubry defended the coalition government of 2010-2015, defended chancellor George Osborne, and the economic policy they pursued that has not unreasonably come to be known as austerity. She did all this in the same breath as pleading with like-minded Liberal Democrats to come to join them. Liberal Democrats came and joined them in 2010, and they have paid for it with electoral wipeout.
Indeed, as the 11 of them posed for smiling photographs at the end, it all had a very Downing Street rose garden feel to it, and we know how that ended.
The concept, really, seems to be that British politics has now become so marginalised and so extremist on both fronts that the sensible people can come together and, in effect, pretend that the 2015 general election never happened. That David Cameron and Ed Miliband never contested an election because they were always one and the same, more or less, which they weren’t, and they aren’t.
They might be right that the public is crying out for change, for a sense of normalcy to return. But then again, they might be wrong. The public was given a chance to vote in 2017, and it did so for Corbyn’s rather-more-left-wing-than-normal Labour and Theresa May’s very-hard-Brexit Tories in absolutely overwhelming numbers. People predicted Liberal Democrat victories in Remain seats such as Vauxhall, that they in fact lost by 20,000 votes or more.
And if they are right, it seems very hard not to think that this Tory and Labour supergroup will find it impossible to escape from its very recent past.
Who knows anything about British politics anymore? But when it’s said you win elections in the centre, that usually involves one side reaching out and capturing the centre because the centre is the contested bit. Their own territory, on the left and right, is secured. Anyone parachuting into the narrow strip in the middle and taking the fight simultaneously outwards in both directions, well, the very best of luck to them.
All this was put to them, of course. To which Tory MP Allen could only say: “We are prepared to dare to dream. It is something worth fighting for. I am prepared to give it everything I’ve got.”
Which they no doubt are, but quite what “it” is could hardly be less clear.