Get the pop corn, there’s another row in the Tories over ‘PopCon’, as right-whingers reveal themselves once more as ‘the Nasty Party’. By our political editor, WALTER CRONXITE
Nasty party: Thick Lizzy showed she’s lost none of her natural charmlessness or ingrained incompetence
Gavin Barwell, the former Croydon MP and now a semi-detached member of the Conservatives, has called for ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss to be sacked from the Tory Party at Westminster, after hateful remarks she made yesterday at her launch of something called “PopCon”.
The event, held in Emmanuel Church in Westminster (let’s hope they exorcised it afterwards, or at least used a decent strength bleach), was apparently intended to mark “the reinvigoration of right-wing conservatism”.
Basically, four years after the greatest act of self-harm in this nation’s history, and undaunted by her own charmlessness and incompetence, Truss is trying to get the Brexit band together again under the banner of “Popular Conservatism”, desperately hoping no one remembers what calamitous effect she and her rabid right-whingers had in such a short period of time when she was in No10.
With the country on its knees after 14 years of Tory government while the Conservatives have nothing left to offer beyond invented and imagined sleights from so-called “Wokery”, yesterday’s event was a barely-disguised assault on the leadership of Truss’s rival, Rishi Sunak.
Whip backlash: Lord Barwell says Truss should be sacked as a Tory MP
At times, it looked like a revival of the Three Stooges Musical Hall act, featuring “Thick Lizzy” Truss, Lord Snooty and the world’s first living brain donor (former Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson, who must be thicker than a seam of coal after describing mining as “sustainable”).
Truss urged her colleagues to stop worrying about getting a job in Sunak’s government and take the fight to “left-wing extremists” who Truss claimed included “environmentalists” and those who are “in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities”. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Nasty Party has never really gone away.
According to one respected political commentator, “Liz Truss has given up imitating Margaret Thatcher and decided to have a bash at being Joe McCarthy instead.”
Truss’s remarks were enough to light Barwell’s blue touch paper.
Lord Barwell called for Truss to have the Tory whip removed. Such an act, the ultimate sanction by a party for sitting MPs, would effectively de-select Truss from being the Conservative candidate for her constituency of South West Norfolk at the General Election expected to be held later this year.
“‘Environmentalists’ and those ‘in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities’ are not ‘extremists’,” Barwell wrote on Twatter, where he has 57,000 followers.
“Liz Truss has done more than enough damage to the Conservative party already. She should apologise for this offensive nonsense or lose the whip.”
Barwell has some experience of the power of the parliamentary whip, having worked in the Tory whips’ office himself when David Cameron was Prime Minister. Today, the former chief of staff to Theresa May is broadly regarded as being politically homeless, having drifted away from the Conservatives, where he’d previously worked at CCHQ as a campaign organiser, since May left Downing Street in 2019 over unresolvable rows within her own party over Brexit.
Although ennobled in May’s resignation honours list, Barwell has been on indefinite leave of absence from the Lords since soon after he was discovered to have not made full declarations of his business interests (he provided more detail on his Twitter profile than he did to Parliamentary officials). He has not attended a vote in the House of Lords for more than two years.
Yesterday’s PopTarts launch also coincided with the announcement of what is effectively the end of the political career of one of Thick Lizzy’s co-architects of interest rate rises, steepling mortgage charges and runaway inflation, as Truss’s Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, confirmed that he would not be standing as the Conservative candidate for Spelthorne at the General Election.
‘Wrought havoc without any expression of regret or responsibility’
Kwarteng, an Old Etonian like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Hitler, has been MP for the safe Tory seat in Surrey since 2010. He had a 18,000-vote majority at the last election.
But as Truss’s Chancellor in 2022, Kwarteng delivered the “Kami-Kwasi” mini-budget for the rich, including a £45billion tax-cutting package sent the pound crashing to its lowest level against the US dollar in 37 years.
Truss sacked him as Chancellor after 38 days. Truss, of course, quit as PM a few days later, out-lasted by a supermarket lettuce…
More than 80 sitting MPs have announced they will leave parliament at the next election, more than the 74 who retired in 2019.
In Croydon, following Kwarteng’s announcement, there was immediately speculation that the vacancy created might see Coulsdon councillor Mario Creatura make yet another desperate pitch to Conservative Party members for him to be their choice of candidate.
Putting the ‘con’ into PopCon: Mhairi Fraser, Epsom Tories’ first choice. She wants more deaths from smoking and covid
Creatura’s last attempt at selection as a parliamentary candidate showed him not to be right-wing enough, as party members in Epsom and Ewell opted instead for Trump supporter Mhairi Fraser, who had her far-right credentials on show at yesterday’s PopCon launch where she took the stage to attack smoking bans and covid lockdowns.
Clearly, not enough people have died from lung cancer or related illnesses or had suffered from the impact of coronavirus for Fraser’s liking… “Once one freedom is surrendered, other freedoms follow, because the state is no Mary Poppins,” she said. “Let us never forget the nanny in her most monstrous form – the covid lockdowns… It’s time to put nanny to bed.”
Imagine how it must feel to have once been a mentor, or a teacher, to these pillocks.
There was certainly a strong feeling of deep regret expressed by John Claughton, for 17 years a teacher at Eton College, in a letter published in The Times last year, which he expanded upon in a later interview.
Eton’s most important mission should be to ensure pupils were “saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience which can produce alumni like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng and Ben Elliot [former Conservative Party chairman] and thereby damage a country’s very fabric,” Claughton wrote in the newspaper.
“Sadly I failed in that purpose.”
‘Sadly, I failed’: at least someone is taking responsibility for these upper-class pillocks
Claughton left Eton in 2001 and became head at a Birmingham independent school. In an interview following his Times letter, he said, “Schools have a moral as well as an educational purpose, and they must have the courage and honesty to face the hard questions.
“I taught a lot of outstanding young men who have become outstanding men. What I am saying is that Eton is a place of extraordinary, probably unique privilege and that carries with it the danger, the fatal flaw of what I described in my letter.
“Perhaps it is painful to hear but even Etonians feel that it needs to be said and heard.”
Claughton said he had spent years of retirement “angered and saddened that men who were educated at Eton, where I taught for 17 years, have wrought, without any expression of regret or responsibility, such havoc”.
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After his adventures with Arab Girls and Twinky on twitter we dread to know where Barwell keeps his party whip since it hasn’t been used on him for the last two years.
Maybe his lordship, Barwell, should strip himself of his peerage for destroying Croydon but these hypocrites never take their own advice.
So finally Gavin Barwell assumes he can now raise his head above the parapet and start slinging mud. How wrong he is. The Grenville fire will never be forgotten nor will the fact that if it hadn’t been for him, lives might have the chance to be lived.
Barwell’s all over Twatter most days, Helen. It’s just that not all his little homilies about the state of the Conservative Party are not as reportable as the call for a former PM to be sacked by the party.
And it was the fire at Grenfell Tower that won’t be forgotten