The Unspeakable

Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now!
Swell'st thou, proud heart? I'll give thee scope to beat,
Since foes have scope to beat both thee and me.

Richard II, Act III, Scene III

Far from the excitement of the Presidential Debate here in America last Thursday, across The Pond the voters of Hartlepool stirred up their own piece of ballot box brouhaha, creating election history by voting the party of Her Majesty's Opposition into fourth place, and possibly into electoral oblivion. Reasons for the precipitous fall of the Tory Party from governmental grace are as plain to see as the proverbial probosces on the voters' faces: the party is offering an extremist agenda that does not reflect the country's point of view.

The YouGov poll in this week's Economist, commissioned for party organ The Daily Telegraph, tells the whole sorry story. The nation's voters categorized themselves on average as very marginally left-of-centre (-2%), categorized Tony Blair as very marginally right-of-centre (+4%), and Michael Howard / Tory MPs as extremely right-of-centre (+52%). But all is not gloom and doom: the Tories beat Gordon Brown (-21%) and Labour MPs (-25%) by a factor of 2 where they obviously believe it counts: the extreme bastard's stakes.

This is a party that will obsess about issues far removed from the political pivot: Gilbraltar, fox-hunting and asylum / immigration. They will be heartened by the sturm und drang of the noisy and nasty pro-hunting lobby, and will confuse that noise with popular support. They will lurch triumphantly to the right to capture the 5% of votes the UKIP currently enjoys -and leave the field unclaimed to the Labour and Liberal Democratic Parties.

This is a party who includes amongst its members some of the most intelligent and thoughtful people in British politics: Chris Patten, Kenneth Clarke, Michael Portillo. These are men who should be heard loudly and often by their party and the nation, but instead are pushed to the margins of our national discourse by coarser men of little talent and no imagination.

This is a party who, in its headlong, headstrong chase to grasp the baser, darker, less digestible and more desperate sides of our natures, has indeed become Oscar Wilde's the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.