The China hawks were out in force last night. Over at the Walkers of Whitehall tavern, it was the turn of Alicia Kearns to charm the Onward think tank. To a packed audience, the Rutland and Melton MP was hailed as ‘the youngest select committee chair, the first female Foreign Affairs committee chair and the first speaker to finish our bar tab in under thirty minutes.’
And just down the road at the WPI Strategy’s annual party in Smith Square, it was up to Kearns’ predecessor Tom Tugendhat to address assembled journalists, think tankers and various other Westminster creatures. The security minister was clearly in a boisterous mood, remarking how his longtime campaign to rid London of ‘dirty money’ had picked up support since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February this year.
TT declined the opportunity to speculate on today’s Autumn Statement as Liz Truss’s mini-Budget shows how some MPs only ‘know the measures when the Chancellor turns up and speaks.’ However, having heralded the end of the ‘unreal era’ in Western thinking, Tugendhat concluded with an, er, somewhat optimistic note when he told the crowd:
I am enormously positive about the Conservative party. I think reality is going to bring home to roost the truth that the Conservative party is the natural party of government for a very good reason… I think we are going to win in two years’ time and I think we are going to win it well.
Will Jeremy Hunt’s ‘Scrooge’ statement today make such a victory more or less likely?
Comments