It shouldn’t be a shock to the Left-wing media that people vote Tory – Telegraph.co.uk

I think Boris can safely re-tile the kitchen now. Much of the broadcast media was convinced his No10 makeover would hurt him in last Thursdays elections: we werent far off a Newsnight reconstruction with Lewis Goodall, dressed as Carrie, running around an animated John Lewis with a can of petrol. But the mood on Have I Got News for You on Friday, recorded when the votes werent counted but obvious nevertheless, was funereal. Why, the host asked, didnt Wallpapergate cut through? Given that this show created the Boris phenomenon, much like The Apprentice invented Donald Trump, the confusion is strange.

Have I Got News is a microcosm. Hip when it started in 1990, anti-establishment and witty, it now creaks on as an uncancellable institution, the echo chamber for a cultural elite that is powerful yet not in power and magnificently out of touch. You could not tell from the TV or tinternet zeitgeist that the Tories were going to win Hartlepool, and journalists looked suicidal when they did. Social media fell out of the sky like a rocket made in China. I was reminded of Paul Masons verdict on the 2019 general election: a victory of the old over the young, he tweeted gracefully, of racists over people of colour, selfishness over the planet. No doubt the nurse gently touched his arm and said: And what planet do you think youre on right now, dear?

Hes not even on the distant moon of London, where we were told Count Binface, a joke, woke candidate with zero laughs, would surge in the mayoral race and Shaun Bailey, a black Tory candidate, was a bigot that Londoners would reject. Binface got 1 per cent; Bailey, in the second round, 45 per cent.

The Green Partys Sian Berry said she wanted to make London the most trans-inclusive place in the world, thus adding the capitals tiny trans community to her rainbow coalition of 7.8 per cent, just 91.2 per cent off the 99 per cent socialists claim to speak for. Trans people pay tax and get burgled, too; you might want to talk more about that. Or stick to green stuff! But the Left, which feels every bit as culturally alienated as the dissident Right, betrays its abiding concerns every time it sinks to its knee, recommitting itself to a culture war a very old-fashioned war that began around the time Have I Got News started that in some quarters it has already won and in others doesnt amount to a hill of beans. Laurence Fox, the anti-woke candidate got just 1.9 per cent of the vote in London. He finished behind a YouTube star whose most interesting policy was to freeze the Thames to create an ice rink.

The beat goes on. Someone at Sheffield University says Darwin justified white supremacy. A school has reported its own chaplain to an anti-terror unit. And among the stories on the BBC website, at the time of writing, is a 23-year-old girl who has come out as asexual.How many elections must the Left lose how many viewers, how many readers? before the penny drops that many people find all this irrelevant? Or that when they vote Tory, its not because they dont care about standards in public life, but that they cant see the scandal in this instance?

And far from being a bunch of little Hitlers, they are drawn to a Tory party that has cleverly occupied the centre ground of cultural feeling, a centre ground, incidentally, that is much more liberal than it oncewas. Just not completely bonkers.

But is the Left still winning the war? The Conservatives, once the party of hunting, will this week relaunch as the party of pet welfare, completing their trot from Chipping Norton to Uxbridge, and they couldnt have broken into the Red Wall seats without dumping austerity for big spending. Central banks and governments across the world will continue to print money while keeping interest rates low.

Last week, incumbents did well as voters rewarded them for the vaccine rollout, yes, but probably for the lockdown and furlough, too. There has been hardly any popular resistance to the most shocking assaults on our civil liberties, let alone a mainstream anti-lockdown movement like there is in America. An early rival for Trumps Republican nomination is Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who wanted to keep schools open. Who is the British equivalent? Laurence Fox, and look how he did (sorry to rub it in).

Im not totally against this as Im not a libertarian and I think there are things a strong government should do to help their citizens, but theres irony in it being Boris Johnson who has transformed the Tories into a social democratic force. He once said that his favourite character in Jaws was the mayor. Why? Because he kept the beach open. Now the Tories are like Chief Brody, obsessively scanning the shoreline for fins. Will they ever let us go back in the water again?

Me, I was always pro-shark. I have one at home: my pups teeth are coming through. A fang fell out the other night and he was rushed to the sofa for an emergency cuddle. This Wednesday he goes to doggy daycare for the first time. I have to pack a lunch. They grow up so fast! Yet, strangely, they never ever learn to take themselves for a walk. What are they teaching them in schools nowadays?

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It shouldn't be a shock to the Left-wing media that people vote Tory - Telegraph.co.uk