Run the country? They can't even run a campaign.

[noblegiraffe]

I can't get my head around quite just how bad the Conservative campaign has been so far, and we're only a few days in. We had the optics of the drowned-rat announcement, the visit to the Titanic, the planting of Tory councillors in the crowd to ask friendly questions.

Then the disastrous tossing off of the random national service announcement without any sort of serious thought about it leading to cabinet ministers like Steve Baker publicly questioning the strategy.

And now I'm reading that they're trying to dub Starmer "Sleepy Keir" taking a line from Donald Trump about an octogenarian. No one thinks Starmer is old, especially not Tory voters.

How on earth can we have five and a half more weeks of this? I'm not sure I can cope with all the cringing.

I mean, we knew they were shit at running the country, but I dunno, I kind of expected more competence than this. My mistake, clearly.

I find that a much more important part of Government is having decent people who have some interest in the country.

@JassyRadlett

"But surely the bigger the majority of newer MPs, the less powerful a (very depleted) left of the party is? The new intake will be much more Starmerite in character. And the problems of the last Conservative administrations came because their right wing was too numerous within the party."

You are absolutely right in terms of numbers and voting power so that the Starmer Gov will still be able vote through legislation.

The problem is that the disgruntled minority are very vocal and the media will focus far more on discontent and rebellion than they will on normal business. Even in the previous Conservative Governments the actual number of anti EU rebels was quite small. But the problem was they were very vocal, got alot of publicity and the Conservative majority was smaller than Starmer will be getting

They were very much aided by a sympathetic press, though - and as you say a much smaller majority have the ERG disproportionate power.

Starmer won't have the same environment - the right wing press aren't suddenly going to take up far left positions; the pressure will keep coming from the right and tbh Starmer is more likely to benefit with the vast majority of the media from being "tough on the left".