Tory co-chairman Nigel Huddleston has been taking on the gritty morning round. On the Today Programme he was asked if there would be local or national co-operation with Reform:
“I can’t see why we’d do that. At the end of the day, Reform’s golden strategy is the destruction of the Conservative Party and they don’t share many of the core values and principles that we hold… We’ve done deals in the past on a council level where it’s to implement Conservative policies and Conservative principles. The key thing here is we want to make sure that we get Conservative values, Conservative policies and Conservative principles introduced.”
Nigel wouldn’t give a straight answer when asked if Tories would be allowed to work with Reform to implement DOGE-style units locally: “Basically I welcome the fact that Farage is trying to adopt Conservative principles… you also need to go into deals with people who you can trust.“ Not the clearest message to councillors…
After weeks of contradictory messaging from Kemi the Tory leader said on Sunday that she was open to local coalitions: “At a local level, it’s different… there might be no overall control.. what I’ve said to our councillors is you have to do what is right for our local area… they have to look at who they are going into coalition with… a lot of the people who are in Reform now are defected Conservative councillors so they probably worked with some of those people before – this is why I say they need to make that decision themselves.” Hands washed…
The clear implication is to work with former Tory councillors. A mess…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”