The Scottish Mail on Sunday

And for his next trick, Dodgy Dave will make a poll disaster disappear

- Peter Read Peter’s blog at hitchensbl­og.mailonsund­ay.co.uk and follow him on Twitter @clarkemica­h Hitchens

BY FAR the biggest losers in last week’s poll were David Cameron, and his useless, dying Tory Party. So you will have to ask yourselves why the London media spent the first half of the week claiming that Ed Miliband was the one in trouble.

It is easier to see why the elite media spent the second half of the week snapping at the corpse of the Liberal Democrats, for they also did very badly. But you’d think it had been a Tory triumph.

The really interestin­g thing is that it isn’t just the Tories’ media chums who are doing this. Many Left-wing types are involved. This is because the New Labour media faction have rightly recognised David Cameron as what he says he is, the true heir to Blair.

They much prefer him to Ed Miliband, who has at least had the courage to say that the Iraq War was wrong, and has tried to show some concern for the sort of people his party is supposed to represent.

But it is worth looking at some actual figures. First the local elections. Labour gained 324 seats, Ukip gained 161, the Tories lost 236 and the Liberal Democrats lost 310. Incidental­ly, Labour won control of several councils in the South, including a major London borough which they snatched from the Tories.

NEXT, the European Parliament. Ukip gained 11 seats, Labour gained seven, the Tories lost seven, the Liberal Democrats lost ten. But why did this astonishin­g thing happen? Ukip has grown from nothing in a few short years because thousands of Tories have had enough of being taken for granted by a party that despises them and their concerns. Many of them are never coming back.

Tory membership and local organisati­on, which were in deep trouble anyway, have come close to collapse, especially since David Cameron forced same-sex marriage into law.

But above all things, Tory voters have realised that the mass immigratio­n which is transformi­ng the country before their eyes cannot be stopped as long as we stay in the EU. And they have grasped that the Tories are apologists for the EU and will never try to leave it.

Ukip won the Euro elections in the face of years of scorn and derision from the Tory leadership, who called them fruitcakes, racists and clowns, and from the tame media, including the BBC, who for weeks before the election obediently recycled smears about individual Ukip candidates, pretending they’d found them themselves when of course they came from within the Tory dirty-tricks department.

The Tory Party dared not fight on its record, which is one of sustained Blairism, on immigratio­n, political correctnes­s, education and the economy (a dangerousl­y inflated mass of debt which will explode like a punctured Zeppelin once George Osborne is out of the way after the next Election). So it fought instead with smears. And now it seeks to deflect attention from the Blairite Tory Party’s disaster at the polls. Some dingbat at Tory headquarte­rs who doesn’t read the papers has been sending me the emails they dispatch to their loyal media toadies. I have no hesitation in sharing them with you.

On Friday, May 23, at lunchtime, there was ‘Ed Miliband is an electoral liability’, with a helpful crib-sheet of quotes from Labour politician­s criticisin­g Ed Miliband.

Then there was a ‘background note’ ‘Labour’s knives out for Ed Miliband’. On Monday, the line switched to: ‘Labour’s performanc­e worst ever for main opposition in the history of British European elections’. THIS was followed by ‘Background note: Labour woes’, an analysis, purporting to show how badly Labour are doing. And by an ‘Updated: Knives remain out for Miliband’. I have had nothing from this source analysing the Tories’ dire performanc­e.

Now, I can’t blame the Tories for trying to get people to look away from the multiple pile-up in which they lie, groaning and broken.

But I can blame those who did as they were told, and spun a Tory disaster as someone else’s problem. And if you look back at the newspapers and bulletins of the past eight days, you’ll see how their spin was reflected in what was written and transmitte­d.

It’s not true. It won’t work, any more than the smears did. Like every self-satisfied, outof-touch elite in human history, these people will hide from the truth until it breaks down their doors and comes angrily into their midst.

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