MANY people won’t be voting Conservative again today. You agree with their decision, until it emerges that they’re only annoyed with the Tories for not being right-wing enough. Here are the warning signs.
At first they sound totally reasonable
They’ll say things like: ‘The Tories haven’t done anything for ordinary people.’ And you think: ‘Yes, levelling up was bollocks and public services desperately need investment.’ But actually they mean the Tories should have brought back hanging, cut all benefits to £0 a week and deported anyone who isn’t ‘Brilliant White’ on the Dulux colour chart.
You’ll praise them prematurely for changing their minds
It takes a big man, or woman, to admit they were wrong. As you prepare to applaud their humility, you’ll discover they don’t regret voting Conservative, just that the Tories haven’t got an effective leader like, say, Adolf Hitler.
They haven’t voted Labour or Lib Dem instead
Rather unfairly, voters use local elections to register disapproval of parties at a national level. So when a former Tory confirms they’ve voted differently this time, it’s easy to assume they’ve opted for Labour or the Lib Dems. They won’t have. They’ll have voted for the most right-wing candidate on the voting form, whether it’s Reform UK, Britain First or a lone nutter claiming to be ‘The Anti-Woke Common Sense and Rights for Whites Party’.
Wait for immigration to come up
It won’t take long. About five seconds after they’ve said the government needs to sort out the immigration system, they’ll be ranting about how the Royal Navy should sink dinghies coming to Dover with torpedoes and machine gun the survivors in the water. It’s all totally ridiculous and mental, but at least they’ve cleared up any confusion.
They still f**king adore Brexit
If a former Tory says ‘Brexit is a total mess’ they don’t mean Brexit was a bad idea – they mean our negotiators didn’t magically ‘get a good deal’ (they can’t explain what that is) and make all the Brexit promises come true. In their eyes Brexit is only a complete f**king disaster because of the EU, Guardian readers and the Devil in human form, Gary Lineker.
Don’t expect any form of consistency
They’ll say they don’t like Rishi Sunak because he’s rich. If you point out that, while not in the same league, Boris Johnson was rich, as are most Tory MPs, they’ll rapidly get bored with applying logic. Eventually they’ll admit they just want a leader who hates Muslims and sends in the riot police to beat hippyish middle-class protesters unconscious.
They don’t give a shit about actual Tory incompetence
Examples of Tory incompetence abound – f**k-ups like PPE procurement during Covid; Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s economic lunacy; or Britain’s polluting water companies, which prove they can’t or won’t regulate to solve a relatively simple problem. However the former Tory voter’s definition of incompetence is: ‘There’s a benefits family on my daughter’s street who bought their son a new pair of trainers. Why aren’t they stopping that?’
