Tim Montgomerie’s Pointless Gesture

In the legendary Beyond The Fringe, Peter Cook, as a wartime RAF officer, tells hapless subordinate Perkins (Jonathan Miller) “I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don't come back”. Well, Perkins has come back, in the shape of the serially clueless Tim Montgomerie.

And his futile gesture - which will be followed by so few people as to barely register - is to flounce out of the Tory Party, of which he claims to have been a loyal member for 28 years. The reality, however, is that his loyalty is ultimately to the man who pays the piper, and that man is not David Cameron, but Rupert Murdoch. Monty would not be where he is today without the patronage of Creepy Uncle Rupe.

But he wants everyone to know that his is a decision taken on principle: “I became a Conservative because of Margaret Thatcher. It wasn’t just the colour of her politics, but the strength. When she said she would end union militancy, she ended it. When she sought a rebate from the EU, she got one. When she successfully undertook to retake the Falklands, she ended the Britain-is-in-decline narrative of the postwar period”.

Yeah, forget the mass unemployment, the sell-offs that have blighted many industries and ripped off consumers since the 1980s, the laying waste to much of Britain’s manufacturing industry, fouling up much of the country’s bus services, the Poll Tax, the ramping up of public and private sector debt, eh? The right-wing press and all the chumps who believed the whole sales pitch guff said they felt better - so that’s all right, then.

And Monty does no better as he projects his miserable, isolationist worldview on to Mrs T’s memory: “Mrs Thatcher vowed to fight European integration”. That’s why she signed the Single European Act and took Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precursor to the Euro, then. Mrs T said “Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community”. To suggest she was a “Brexiteer” is utter fantasy.

That cluelessness continues in Monty’s claim that “The PM will no doubt treat with disdain my resignation like the departure of tens of thousands of once-loyal grassroots members who have already walked away. But one day an opposition party will get its act together or a wholly new party will emerge”. And to that I call bullshit.

The Tory Party is the embodiment of the Establishment. That alone tells you why it always bounces back from even the worst electoral setbacks: the Establishment can always look after itself and its own. While the Liberal Party wasted away in the face of modern-day challenges, and Labour emerged, the Tories never really wavered. Because the Establishment is always there, using the party to project its view and protect itself.

And the Establishment has decided that the EU is the only game in town. The problem for Monty, as with some Tory MPs, is that they still don’t get it. Don’t come back, Monty.