All the Difference

In the face of the looming threat from UKIP, Daveybloke has wheeled out the nearest thing the Cabinet has to a human being in order to emphasise the differences between the modern Conservative Party and the Farage Falange. UKIP, for example, has created a "quite ridiculous scare" about Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants; which is something Theresa May would never do, at least provided the Balkan hordes don't bring their cats along. Some UKIP members are "fruitcakes and loonies", whereas the Conservative Party includes all those paragons of sanity who think Ken Clarke is a crypto-Bolshevik quisling for not wanting to abolish Europe. One of UKIP's MEPs was sent to prison, unlike Jonathan Aitken or Jeffrey Archer; others had to give back a lot of money, while no member of the Conservative Party has ever fiddled expenses or taken backhanders in return for stealing public assets. UKIP is just a protest party, and protest parties are dangerous because people vote for them in protest against the political class, who know what ought to be done and need to be left to do their work in peace. Ordinary people, when they get angry about the political class, tend to vote for comedians and confidence tricksters, rather than for statesmen like Boris Johnson or Grant Shapps; which is clearly too bad of them.