The Tories’ secret weapon is their ruthlessness.” The first time I ever heard that expression was during the dramatic last few days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, when her MPs and even her own cabinet colleagues swooped in for the kill.
Their logic was simple and deadly: We want to win the next election, Thatcher cannot win it for us, therefore she will have to be replaced with someone who can.
Politics is often like that, a separation of facts into two columns: benefits versus disadvantages. Chose your priority, and if it is more important than everything else, then everything else can be sacrificed to achieve it. More accountancy than principle.
Which might explain why such an approach turns most Labour people’s blood cold.
Politics, they imagine, should be about emotion and history and tradition and respect and solidarity. For the absence of doubt, this is a party that, in its 117-year...