Bland, boring, but looks-great-in-a-suit MP Chuka Umunna wants you to know that this new ‘centrist’/Remainer party he has founded with some other MPs marks a break from “politics as usual.”
No it doesn’t. If you had to create a party that embodied why it is that Britain voted Brexit, Umunna’s groupuscule of bloodless, centrist, technocractic, dreary, remote, Europhile losers would be it.
This is what I told two high-profile, very rich and influential Remainers a couple of years ago when I first heard this new centrist party being mooted.
The scene was a large country estate, somewhere in England, a few months after the Brexit vote. I was off for a walk round the grounds with the two Remainers. The conversation went something like this:
Remainer One: We need a new centrist party to counter all this extremism from Corbyn and Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg and Farage – and do something to reverse this ridiculous Brexit vote.
Remainer Two: I’ve been thinking on the same lines myself. But who would lead it?
Remainer One: Well the obvious candidate would be Ed Miliband, if we can somehow lure him back from America and persuade him to give up his enormous salary. Or Chuka Umunna.
Me: Oh God not Chuka Umunna. I met him on Any Questions once. Looks great in a suit but that’s it. He’s bland and boring, he’s got nothing to say for himself, no ideology, he’s just…
Remainer One (as if I weren’t there): Would it have traction?
Remainer Two (also if I weren’t there): Oh I think so. A lot of people who voted Brexit are starting to wake up to what an awful mistake they’ve made…
Me (after about ten minutes more of this drivel): Guys, I’m sorry, but you are talking absolute bollocks. People didn’t vote Brexit because they are racist or extremist or any of that other nonsense you Remainers believe. They voted because they are sick to the teeth of the status quo: an antidemocratic stitch up where it really doesn’t matter whether you vote Labour or Conservative because you get the same bland, career-safe, politically correct bureaucrats making petty new rules, wasting money on pointless projects, bowing to the EU, sucking up to the eco-loons, slowly chipping away at every last thing that might make us proud to be British. And now here you are saying: what we need is a new centrist party offering them exactly the same thing only more so.
Obviously I don’t remember the exact details. But this, I swear to you, was the gist of what was said – including the mooting of Chuka Umunna as leader.
Anyway here we are, two years on, and this new centrist party has been launched and I’m very happy because not only will it flop but – like a flame to moths – it is attracting all manner of other pests to their doom, not just Labour ones, but pretend Conservative ones like Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston, and Heidi Allen.
It will weaken Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist Labour, which is good.
But even more usefully, it will weaken the large faction of squishes in Theresa May’s Conservatives. Since May lost her flimsy majority in the last general election, her government’s policy has essentially been: “Look, we’ve got to govern from the centre-left like we’re Tony Blair Mk III and we’ve got to fudge Brexit because if we don’t Jeremy Corbyn will get in and that will be much worse…”
Umunna’s party has just deprived Theresa May and her Remoaners of that feeble excuse. This may well be the one and only useful thing the Independent Group ever does for Britain.