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LONDON: 04/05/2025

Our new contributor, Gunter S. Gonson who is covering national Politics for The Cumbria Chronic from London, gives his take on where next for the Conservatives in the fiercely opinionated style of ‘Gonzo journalist’ Hunter S. Thompson.

One-Eyed Kemi In the Kingdom of the Blind Is Driving The Conservatives Off A Cliff

By Gunter S. Gonson Holds His Breath Amid The Charred, Smoking Ruins Of The Tory Local Election Results

There was a moment—late on Friday night, late on Saturday, hard to tell under the falling electoral ash and wilting Tory bunting—where someone, somewhere, probably a weary Conservative councillor in Buckinghamshire, looked around the wreckage and whispered: “We’re f***ed!”

18 Conservative councils lost.

What did Kemi do? She stood in front of a cheering, whooping Tory crowd whipped up for the television cameras like she’d just run the London Marathon in an hour. She talked about the results being “disappointing” in the doomed, detached and downbeat style of a football manager facing the boot after a pitiful relegation.

She looked like the last cocktail waitress on the Titanic. Smiling faintly but unable to deny the deep, troubling, rumbling noise below her feet. It was the iceberg of public contempt slamming firmly into her party’s hull. You could almost see her shudder as cold reality flooded in.

This should have been the long, dark night of the soul for the Conservative Party. 14 years of Government and how many leaders? Two full-blown disasters (Boris, whose premiership was a grotesque pantomime of political complacency, entitlement, and self-immolation. Then there was Liz Truss, the economic ideological bottle rocket who exploded minutes after takeoff).

Add to that the unholy mess of illegal immigration, a party that no longer knows whether it’s worshipping the ghost of Thatcher or hugging trees in Islington, and you’ve got a political corpse twitching live on national television.

But not Kemi. She wears that unruffled, lazy air of cabinet-room complacency—the kind cultivated in the insulated ignorance of Tory high office. Ministerial cars and green rooms filled with half-digested focus group reports. She thinks she has “time”. She thinks that by the time the next General Election comes around the public, after 14 years of austerity-flavoured chaos, will still be waiting to give her a chance for her “turn” on the throne!

Time? What time? At this rate and based on these results, the Conservatives will have fewer MPs than the Monster Raving Loony Party. And still, Kemi smiles privately to herself infront of the cameras like a woman mentally picking out curtains for a house that’s already on fire.

There’s no soul-searching because the party lost it years ago. It traded it for being blue-tie Lib Dems. Easy on sleaze. Throwing away an 80-seat majority. The Brexit psychosis. The PPE contracts…it goes on and on.

They thought voters would be distracted forever by throwing money at the French and a flights to Rwanda policy that never took off.

If Badenoch is “The Future” of the Tories, the party is dead, especially if Jenrick really is all they’ve got left to come off the Subs Bench. After GE 2024, there’s been no urgency and no reckoning. Just the soft whimper of a party dying slowly in its sleep.

And it will—unless someone wakes up, throws a drink in the mirror, and screams: “We became the thing we promised to destroy!”

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Read more National Political opinion from Gunter at our special page called The Gunter Files.