Britain Stands Alone

Despite the late Head Boy's having taken them on a wonderful journey away from the mainstream conservative bloc and into bed with a bunch of climate-change deniers, Holocaust minimisers and just-plain-thugs, it seems that Conservative MEPs have somehow acquired a taste for bad company. The British Conservative and Democratic Unionist Party was the only sort-of-governing gang of right-wing cranks in western Europe to vote against a motion in the European Parliament censuring the antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-democratic government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, with which the Tumbledown Tessie administration self-evidently does not have absolutely everything in common. The head of the Muslim Council of Britain accused the Conservatives of seeking support for their Brexit plans, but the party's armed camp in Strasbourg denied this; which seems plausible enough given that the Conservatives have shown no sign of having any Brexit plans. Clearly, then, the vote was a gesture of genuine fellow-feeling for Orbán, whose election campaign reached lyrical heights to which even Zac Goldsmith has never yet aspired. Here on the mainland, the party contented itself with pointing out that MEPs have their own whipping arrangements, and that Tin-Pot Tessie, champion of minorities up to 48% and sometime saviour of the Windrush generation, was not responsible for the vote; certainly not in the way that Jeremy Corbyn is personally accountable for the collected unbosomings of every social-media troll, ignoramus and crackpot these past three years.