Chris Moncrieff: Tories' defeatist attitude will spell doom

IS the Conservative Party sleepwalking towards defeat at the next general election? There is a growing fear that the party is not being assertive enough in Government, notably in its Brexit dealings with the hard-faced EU negotiators.
Do the Tories need to be more assertive over Brexit?Do the Tories need to be more assertive over Brexit?
Do the Tories need to be more assertive over Brexit?

Nick Boles, a former Tory minister, claimed the other day the party was far too timid for its own good. What he was really telling them was to wake up and behave like a Government that has the gleam of victory in its eyes.

The fact a group of Remain MPs, including a number of dissident Tories, travelled to Brussels to confer with EU leaders, looked, on the face of it, like an act of gross disloyalty – especially on the part of the Conservatives involved.

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Some people were hoping the Prime Minister would, during her recent reshuffle, have moved David Davis from his role as chief Brexit negotiator. Davis is a very clever and principled man, but he just seems too laid-back in his dealings with his tough counterparts in Brussels.

So the growing message from worried Tories is that the Parliamentary party should cease bumbling about, roll up their sleeves and show that they mean business.

THINGS are not exactly all sweetness and light in the Labour Party, either. Traditional Labour Party members, including many MPs, have become alarmed at the fact the hard-line
left-wing campaigning body Momentum, have gained a firm foothold in the National Executive Committee, the Party’s highly-influential and and principal policy-forming group.

It is no secret that Momentum
 (which has never, so far as I am aware, been criticised by Jeremy Corbyn)
wants to ‘deselect’ moderate Labour
MPs and replace them with candidates who share their own hard-left
views.

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This, of course, makes a mockery of the much-quoted epithet that Labour is a broad church, capable of assimilating all views from right to left.

Momentum seem even more determined than even the militants who tried to infiltrate Labour during Neil Kinnock’s leadership. Kinnock managed to drive them away. It will be much harder to crush Momentum, especially if Corbyn is ‘relaxed’ about them. Trouble, almost certainly, lies ahead.

DONALD Trump has now completed his first year in the White House – and it has been 12 months like no other presidential period. As expected, it has been a jolting nerve-wracking ride, full of thrills, spills – and anxiety.

Trump seems adept at falling out in a
big way with some of his most senior aides.

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But one pledge he has blatantly failed to honour is over golf. He sneered at his predecessor Barack Obama for the time he spent on the golf course during his presidency. Trump said he would have 
no time for golf – he would be fully occupied attending to the needs of the American people.

In fact, Trump has spent one day in four playing golf, far more than Obama ever did in his first year. Just imagine if a British Prime Minister had spent that amount of time playing golf on supposedly working days. They would have been verbally lynched in the Commons. Trump should consider himself a lucky man.

TRUST Boris Johnson to come up with a project – however hare-brained or not – which will grab the headlines for days on end. The Foreign Secretary says a bridge should be built across the English Channel to produce further physical
inks between the United Kingdom and France.

Heaven help us! This project, although deemed possible, would run into billions of pounds. Don’t we already spend millions trying to safeguard our shores from an ‘invasion’, including probably many illegal migrants – as well as possible terrorists – from Calais, without making it even easier for these highly determined people?

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If this plan were ever taken seriously – as I admit it one day might, when
and if circumstances change – I 
suspect those so-called economic migrants, who are not really refugees at all, would send a vote of thanks to
Boris for assisting their often illegal passage. Anyway, don’t we already
face more than enough problems and expense in protecting the Channel Tunnel?

Chris Moncrieff is a former political editor of the Press Association.