Arse, I think the first job has to be to try to understand what people triangulated in order to vote for this government, because 43% of the electorate did.
This brand of conservatism has to be close enough to what traditional conservative voters recognise and value (and that's valid, I hope we will agree), while also appealing to enough traditional labour voters outside the big metropolitan areas (and yes, I appreciate that there was some very clever game theory stuff going on there, with many of those dropping labour for Brexit Party and getting conservative instead, but they will have known that was the risk in fptp and will have calculated that they were willing to let the conservative candidate slip through rather than vote labour).
Is it really really really so very different from conservative government flavours we've had before? I am not seeing a fundamental difference yet.
This is a long winded way of saying: there are honourable and valid reasons for voting for any party. We all do the balancing act of liking X policy, being willing to tolerate y, but z is a deal breaker.
Do you think the current conservative government is a genuine threat to democracy? At the moment I'm seeing it the other way round - Lindsay Hoyle (not part of the government but absolutely key to its operation of course) is significantly cleaning up parliament after bercow ran rough shod over convention. Recalibrating the relationship between parliament and the judiciary is also important (because that was significantly shifted in the last few years, breaking convention established over I don't know, 300 years or so?). And honouring the Brexit vote was crucial to restoring faith in democracy. It's really rubbish for over half the electorate to vote for something and then watch the establishment spend 3.5 years trying to wriggle out of enacting it - it's just rude!! I suspect the stuff with the media may be part of the same recalibration, though I don't yet understand what selective briefings is supposed to achieve. There has to be something in it that can be interpreted as honourable and reasonable, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. I haven't worked that bit out yet.
I don't think Cummings is malicious, necessarily. I mean, what's the evidence that he's more malicious than mandelson or Campbell were? (did Cameron and May not have Rasputin advisors in the same way, or were they more subtle about it, or less effective?) I mean, if we accept that it's valid to be conservative or Conservative (which I think we should), then is Cummings trying to do something that undermines the conservatism that the country just voted for? If so, there's a problem. But if the criticism is that he's furthering a conservative agenda then I can't accept that, because a conservative agenda is what more people just voted for than voted for anything else.
Sorry for length of post.