In a period when political developments cascade down at unprecedented speed, there is now a whispered question, could the government fall at the end of the Queen’s Speech debate? On the face of it, the answer is no, because the DUP will prop it up. But those cold political maths ignore two new elements. The split in both the Cabinet and the Tory backbenches between hard and soft Brexit, which is now so pronounced that the Chancellor is openly declaring a position at variance from the government. And the gathering surge of public anger and national shame over this terrible fire.
The first suggests a government in something not far short of chaos on its core policies. The second is that the death by burning alive of perhaps 100 innocent men women and children in a public housing block is revealing many threads to guilt, but the most damning leads back to Whitehall and this Tory government, in power since 2010. Because when all is said and done there will be two prime causes; inadequate regulation of refurbishment standards and too little money available to do the job to the highest safety standards.
The signs are already there. It is thought that the DUP are playing hard ball. But if you listen very carefully to what they are saying about not being interested in the Queen’s Speech and the fact that they have still not agreed final terms, it looks more to me as if they are walking to a safe distance from a government which has become toxic. They fear, and remember they are perhaps the most intuitive politicians in these islands, that when the reckoning comes, any small party in association with the Toxic Tories will become toxic too.
This is not a prediction, but it is a sharing of thoughts with loyal readers. I may have overworked the analysis and got it wrong.But there is a very real possibility that when the vote comes at the end of the Queen’s Speech debate, no smaller party dare support a toxic government and a prime minister whose poll ratings are already as low as Corbyn’s before he began his meteoric rise. He could be Prime minister sooner than we thought.