Tom Harwood: The phrase 'a week is a long time in politics' needs updating. It feels like every hour is a long time in politics

Tom Harwood: The phrase 'a week is a long time in politics' needs updating. It feels like every hour is a long time in politics
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Tom Harwood

By Tom Harwood


Published: 20/01/2022

- 15:16

Updated: 20/01/2022

- 15:20

The rollercoaster fortunes of this Prime Minister have felt in entirely different places at any given moment.

ordI think that famous phrase "a week is a long time in politics" really needs updating. At the moment it feels like every hour is a long time in politics.

The rollercoaster fortunes of this Prime Minister have felt in entirely different places at any given moment.


On Monday he was safe this week.

By Tuesday evening he looked like a gonner.

By Wednesday afternoon he was a whole load safer.

And today his Number 10 operation looks under threat, although his personal position may just survive.

The twists and turns of this tale in the space of hours and days will fill many future books. Yet a consensus appears to be developing around on saving grace, one moment that may have turned the tide.

A deus ex machina that halted the letters and reunited the Tory Party.

Its name is Christian Wakeford.

Labour's announcement of this defection was a theatrical masterstroke, one that upended the day, but also one that potentially backfired.

Nothing united the Parliamentary Conservative Party behind Boris Johnson like it. The sudden realisation who the real enemy was, where the real threat lay.

This was a crystallising moment in the eyes of some potential rebels. The realisation that they had become a party tearing chunks out of itself.

Over drinks in a garden.

As one MP told me yesterday, it seemed as if Tories took a step back and asked themselves "what are we doing?"

Potentially Boris has a lot to thank Mr Wakeford for.

One less letter, a greater sense of party unity, and a by election dodged - as Labour decide to take the cue from the democracy dodgers at Change UK, rather than real democrats like Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, who both resigned their seats when defecting, to win them anew for their new party.

It's a sad moment for our politics that that noble tradition initiated by those Cameron era defectors has been thoroughly put to bed just as it was beginning.

A sad moment for our politics perhaps but a short term relief for Boris as no doubt Bury South would swing deeply red judging by the current state of the polls.

Not that mid term by-elections have ever been particularly predictive of general election outcomes, especially general election outcomes that are the best part of three years away.

Why is Labour avoiding this free hit? Potentially long term thinking.

Re-establishing the tradition of calling a by-election upon defection as a rule would potentially put off any further defectors. Not that many further defectors seem all that likely.

I have to say last night I spoke to a number of Tory MPs, some of whom were genuinely shaken by the loss of their colleague.

Some close to Wakeford spent Monday evening drinking with him, in what we now know was the same day Wakeford secretly met with Starmer.

It was the best kept secret in Westminster, and since its explosive revelation it has shocked, saddened, and strengthened the resolve of those Tories who, had seen themselves as close to their former party colleague.

If we have seen that rollercoaster of fortunes and emotions in just over one day, heaven knows what next week has in store.

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