Daily Mail readers are an upstanding, sober lot but occasionally you may have overdone it on the sherry trifle and woken to regrets.
How long do you feel the effects? A few hours? A day? Usually no more than that, unless you twisted an ankle or smacked nose-first into a lamp post.
The likely headache facing Right-wing voters after next week’s General Election could last much longer. For at least the next five years you may, on opening the eyelids of a morning, grip your head in two despairing hands and ask: ‘Dear heavens, what daft urge made me do that?’
The drinking analogy comes to mind because one cause of the likely five-year doldrums will be that beery fellow Nigel Farage.
Certain virtuous souls consider Mr Farage the spoor of the devil. I am not one of them. As the Mail’s sketch writer I have got to watch him a little over the years and he is good company, particularly in a pub garden after one of his rallies.
Nigel Farage meeting supporters as he launched his electoral candidacy at Clacton Pier on June 4
Mr Farage holding a pint outside the White Hart pub in Weeley Heath, Clacton earlier this month
Voters will take to the polls on July 4 to make their decision about who will lead the country for the next five years. Polls so far have predicted a Labour landslide (File image)
As we have again seen in the last month, Mr Farage is a vigorous electioneer. He campaigns with a nicotine-stained laugh and blazered swagger that his technocratic rivals have been pathetically unable to match. Unlike them, he seems to like the electorate, though possibly not as much as he loves himself. Heavens above, I may even have voted Farage myself in the past.
His Reform party’s policies may be flimsy and barely discussed, save for that cowardly position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (about which he is now so sensitive that he has employed libel lawyers Carter-Ruck, first resort of many an oligarch). So be it.
Voters flirting with Reform do not seem wildly interested in policy detail or even, given our first-past-the-post election system, a real chance of sending their candidates to Westminster. For Farage fans, Thursday’s ballot is more about making a yelp of protest.
That is partly understandable. Covid and the Kremlin-created energy crisis caused economic disarray across the world in the past four years. Britain has done better than the EU, worse than the United States. Lockdown was almost communist in its deprivations.
Government attempts to protect citizens from oil price rises were also pure Leftism, which only further weakened Western economies.
Who doesn’t feel depressed about the last few years and angry with those — I’m afraid they include you, Boris — who imposed those authoritarian social-distancing constraints?
But consider the likely consequences of a Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer. It’s quite a list.
Higher taxes; smaller pensions; less defence spending; higher immigration; a return to the drab orbit of Brussels; more trans rights and taking the knee; more ‘chest-feeding’ in maternity hospitals; public sector trade unions extracting inflationary pay rises; faster race towards Net Zero.
Despite Farage’s popularity among his own supporters, his campaign has been dogged by shocking revelations. Mr Farage pictured at a meeting in Boston while on the election campaign trail
The Channel 4 News investigation revealed Andrew Parker, said to be a Reform canvasser, advocating for Channel migrants to be shot by Army recruits
Bigger class sizes in schools; appeasement of Hamas; Ulez road tolls across the country; regiments of Harriet Harman clones in quangos and mini Brenda Hales in the House of Lords; and a parliamentary supermajority for a Labour leader who is a constipated, blinky stodge, as remorselessly socialist as the factory-pressed sausage meat they used to serve at East German hotel breakfast buffets.
With the exception of the wurst, which might find favour with Reform’s more Putinesque supporters, it is hard to imagine those policy outcomes appealing to patriotic, small-state Farage-istes.
Yet those could be the consequences of the Right-wing vote being split. It is a tragic paradox that the more ferociously Mr Farage’s fans dislike the Left, the more they will bring about the Left’s triumph.
What a disaster it was that Rishi Sunak and Mr Farage did not reach an electoral pact. Pride and egomaniacal vengefulness prevented anything like that happening.
In Red Wall seats, the Tories should have stood aside for Reform, while Mr Farage should have repeated his 2019 self-sacrifice and done the same this time in shires constituencies.
As it is, Conservative voices such as Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Penny Mordaunt and James Cleverly could fall because a few thousand voters drift to Reform. A parliament without The Mogg would be a duller, poorer place. And Reform might not win a single seat.
The last time the Right-wing vote was this divided was in 1997. Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum party gained 810,000 votes and helped destroy John Major’s Tories.
Psephologists disagree about the precise impact of Goldsmith’s party, for it may have helped the Lib Dems as much as Labour, but this much is fact: Tony Blair’s 179-seat majority in 1997 was achieved with fewer votes (13.5 million) than Major received (14.1 million) when winning a majority of just 21 in the 1992 election.
Rishi Sunak pictured at a visit to Holy Trinity Rosehill CE Primary School in Teesside while on the campaign trail
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaking at Vale Inn in Macclesfield last month
The last time the Right-wing vote was so divided was in 1997 when Tony Blair stormed to victory with a Labour landslide (pictured)
The idea Blair was the People’s Prince is a myth. And Jimmy Goldsmith’s protest party lacked anyone remotely as lively as Nigel Farage. Next week Reform could trawl millions of votes. No wonder Sir Keir has been looking so blasé in recent days. No party leader has ever deserved a landslide less.
For Farage admirers, some of the grottiest things about modern Britain flow from those New Labour years. Looser immigration rules, political-activist judges, the Human Rights Act, the decline in pensions and expansion of the client welfare state are all attributable to the Blair/Brown era. Heaven knows what our poor country might look like after 13 years of Starmer and his deputy Angela ‘Tory scum’ Rayner.
Yet the Starmer-ites will, I think, struggle to equal New Labour’s long run in office. Their looming success (if we believe the opinion polls) is not down to philosophy or culture and it is not matched elsewhere in the world, where democracies are heading rightwards.
There is little public appetite for Labour’s policies, for the nasal knight himself or for his underwhelming frontbenchers. The predominant motive on campaign doorsteps appears to be weariness with the Conservative leadership — plus that partygoer instinct to go on a bender with naughty Nigel.
Democratically, this has been a dreadful election campaign. Although Mr Farage has gone gallivanting round the nation, Mr Sunak and Sir Keir have crouched in sterile bubbles. Security concerns may be partly to blame, particularly after the recent assassination attempt on the prime minister of Slovakia, but politics calls for bravery.
Both Mr Sunak and Sir Keir have had few raw encounters with the public. Sir Keir has met voters so infrequently that one of his anecdotes, about having tea with a lesbian couple in the Midlands, is now months old. Yet he robotically repeats it as if it happened last week.
Compare this antiseptic campaigning to that of past party leaders such as Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, Margaret Thatcher and Alex Salmond. They relished a street walkabout or a marketplace visit where they could shake hands, buy some fudge (it was always fudge), tickle a baby’s dimples and sell electors their ideas. Today’s ruling class has literally lost touch with the nation.
The Lib Dems’ Sir Ed Davey tried briefly to turn himself into a comedy figure by falling off a paddle board and whizzing down a water slide. This was a blatant attempt to offset his disgraceful failings in the Post Office-Horizon scandal.
The ‘idiot Ed’ gambit may have worked a little. In politics you make your luck.
Sir Keir has the excuse that he is sufficiently ahead in the polls not to need to bother meeting the great unwashed but Mr Sunak has nothing to lose. He may have rescued our economy but, TV debates aside, he has been a dud on the stump.
Right-wing truths have been little promoted, even though Mr Sunak’s manifesto (thanks not least to pressure from Reform) is a pretty decent document.
The Tories tried to bang the anti-tax drum but were blown off course by short-term rows about D-Day and bets on the date of the election. Serious arguments about defence, welfare reform, public sector pay and reduction of the civil service have gone ignored. And why has no Conservative stood up for the legislative delivery of Brexit? The Left claims Brexit is a failure. No it isn’t.
We are free of that godawful EU, alleluia. No one would have dared tell Eamon de Valera in 1935 or Robert Mugabe in 1985; ‘Mate, I bet you’re regretting gaining your independence.’
Yet that is the attitude of arrogant Remainers and their friends across the Channel.
And so, it seems, we are being sucked back into a retro gloop of bigger officialdom, smaller enterprise, higher tax and collectivist coercion. It’s going to be 1974 all over again, but with wooden Rachel Reeves instead of bushy-eyebrowed Denis Healey.
How should Right-wing voters react to any Starmer landslide? Losers’ consent is a key principle in democracy. We must not, please, have any echo of the riots on Washington DC’s Capitol Hill when Donald Trump left office. Nor must Right-wingers behave in the acidic manner with which establishment snoots treated the Leave vote of 2016. However, the mirror principle of losers’ consent is clarity in campaigning.
A political party may only legitimately claim a mandate if it has been open about its proposals. Sir Keir and Ms Reeves have been irresponsibly opaque about their Budget plans. If they raid pensions and whack small-business owners and families with taxes that were not disclosed before election day, losers’ consent will cease to be a duty.
For the self-made, the aspirational, for pensioners and home-owners and women who don’t want a trans man staring at them in their changing rooms, the next few years look grim.
Will inheritance tax become more punitive? Will there be a new levy on shares? Capital gains tax on homes? Will business asset disposal relief be scrapped?
Will farmers no longer be able to pass land to the next generation without paying the tax authorities? If so, they will flog their fields to developers and our food independence will worsen.
Labour’s lack of honesty about these and other matters is irresponsible. How far will Sir Keir, whose obstructive Europhilia from 2016 to 2019 made a Brexit deal impossible, entangle us again with Brussels? He will not say.
How much does he understand even those few policies he has unveiled? Asked about the 20 per cent rise in independent school fees that will follow his imposition of VAT on education, he said this week that ‘the schools won’t have to pass on that cost to parents’. Eh? Most schools trying to swallow their VAT costs would go bust in a term.
Sir Keir thinks private school maths teachers will move to state schools. Some might but plenty of others will set up as private tutors. Society will be the poorer. If the schools policy is naked class-war dogma, the same applies to Labour talk of taxing ‘unearned income’.
By that they mean any money that is not directly linked to active toil. Income from shares, pensions, savings deposits, money from selling a dead parent’s home and from alimony can all be classed ‘unearned income’ and Labour’s boot boys want to tax it.
There is, of course, another vast sector of ‘unearned income’, namely the benefits system, but you will never hear a Starmerite criticise that, even though the welfare bill has spiralled out of control since Covid.
The economy likely to be handed over to Labour next week is in better shape than Left-wingers (and their accomplice Nigel Farage) would have you believe; yet the facts of life will soon assert themselves.
Tax rises will hit growth. Rushing to Net Zero will wreck our car industry. Scrapping the Rwanda policy and returning to open borders will boost immigration.
If the Supreme Court repeats baffling decisions such as the one it just made on oil and gas investment, our economy will be weakened and we will be only more in hock to the Saudis and other energy producers, including that man Putin.
If Farage supporters really want to influence our country’s destiny, they should join the Conservative party in the next six days to ensure they have a say in the election of any new Tory leader.
Instead they seem hellbound on hitting the bottle with the Pied Piper of Clacton. They are going to paint the town, and the country, red. Prepare for one humdinger of a hangover.
