Parliament’s new tribe

Politics is such a fickle game that it’s perfectly acceptable to believe six impossible things before breakfast without ever having to apologise for being so wrong. Remember, for instance, when everyone was predicting that the dead cert increased majority for Theresa May would lead to the creation of a new party? Perhaps, like everyone else who has since gone on to predict another series of impossible things with equal confidence, it’s easier for us to forget those old certainties. No one talks about a new party any more. The facts have changed, so we’ve changed our minds too.

There aren’t the same conditions for that proposed new party about which Tony Blair and other grandees kept dropping loud, clanging hints. Labour hasn’t been annihilated, or indeed particularly humiliated. Anyone talking openly about setting up such a party looks stuck in the past — even if that past was only really a couple of months ago.

The fact remains, though, that there is a large group of MPs in Parliament who don’t feel quite at home in their present parties. They’re almost ‘citizens of nowhere’, politically. And they believe that they represent a large number of voters who don’t feel at home with the current stances of those parties on the biggest political issue of our time, Brexit. They aren’t holding meetings to discuss a new party. But they are forming a new political tribe that could become pretty powerful pretty quickly.

The leading lights in this centrist, anti-hard Brexit political tribe still confess privately that they long for a new party. ‘No one is really talking about it at the moment, much to my enormous disappointment,’ says one senior MP who held talks before the election about a new party.