LAST week, being finally the possessor of a parliamentary press pass after a 10-month wait for approval — high-five to whoever at MI5 manages my account — I attended Prime Minister’s Questions in person for the first time in 39 years.

First question up was from Tory Michael Fabricant, who used the opportunity to wax strong on the merits of Margaret Thatcher to wild cheers from the Conservative benches.

It was like time had stood still from 1984. Clearly, the Tories still have mummy issues.

But there also was their crisis in full view. It is barely conceivable that a Morning Star reporter in 2063 will have to listen to Tory MPs cheering Rishi Sunak’s memory to the echo.

In the best of all possible futures, there won’t be any Tory MPs by 2063. Or even 2025.

The Tories themselves seem to be straining every sinew to that end. Keir Starmer barely has to lift a finger, which is as well since if Lord Peter Mandelson does not gift him a finger-raising manual for Xmas, then all digits will remain unraised.

The Napoleonic principle of never interrupting your enemy while (s)he is making a mistake enjoins a prolonged silence on the Tories’ opponents these days. One error piles upon another, leaving Starmer able to focus on what he does best — nothing.

Sunak is now on the third or fourth relaunch of his short prime ministerial career. Mr Technocrat calming us all down became the caped crusader for change challenging the consensus of the last 30 years, which mainly involved cancelling a half-built railway line.

Then there was the pivot back to grown-up government — welcome, Lord Cameron — before losing his marbles with the Greek Prime Minister a week later in a rush of culture war blood to the head.

Now he is staking everything on being able to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, a policy he originally regarded as bonkers apparently. So far, £290 million has been sent to Rwanda, but not a single refugee.

Why pick battles you cannot win? To the extent that there is any answer to the issue of migration, which for many people is not an issue at all anyway, it starts with ending wars of aggression, tackling climate change and curbing global inequality.

And it ends with globally socialised production superseding unequal exchange and the coerced transfer of value.

You’re right, that does not sound like a Tory Party manifesto. So instead, Conservative leaders make like King Canute — his courtiers, to be precise — and demand that the tide suspend its movements the better to establish their majesty.

It is a plan that involves everyone getting wet. Suella Braverman’s “dream” of planes taking off for Kigali crammed with the destitute — no, I wouldn’t want to be her shrink — was struck down by the judges around the same time the putative Mussolini was herself given more time to spend with her boozed-up street sympathisers.

Sunak’s tweaked mark two version is built largely around a unilateral declaration that Rwanda is “safe,” the sort of pronouncement that would have appealed to the Canutists. Its main result so far has been to galvanise immigration minister Robert Jenrick into resigning on the grounds that the plan wasn’t illegal enough.

You need to know two things only about Jenrick. He tried to cut a cosy planning deal with erstwhile media baron Richard Desmond in breach of the law, and he ordered the painting over of cartoon murals in a refugee welcome centre for children lest they make the place seem too friendly.

So, sleazy and cruel. No wonder he is being talked up as the next Tory leader. If not him, then perhaps Nigel Farage?

The master of two-pints-and-a-packet-of-prejudice populism will return from his lucrative jungle sojourn to find himself newly empowered by Sunak’s dismal and futile focus on “stopping the boats.” His own vessel, presently branded Reform UK, has fresh wind in its sails, a development which in the short term may doom an additional phalanx of Conservative MPs.

But this seasonal pantomime masks a deeper truth. The last 13 years have been an utter disaster.

Not just for the working class — that stricture could apply to all periods of Conservative government from Lord Liverpool’s administration on. No, it is also a term of office which has given Conservatives themselves almost nothing to be proud of.

Brexit was achieved against the leadership of their own party. Then there has been austerity which even for Tories is not an object in itself but a means to ends, like tax cuts, which have never yet hove into view.

The Covid pandemic was handled, as the inquiry into it is revealing, with a squalid mixture of incompetence and corruption. Levelling up remains a myth, its attainments are sighted less frequently than Bigfoot.

Boris Johnson reduced government to a burlesque of buffoonery while Liz Truss, a character who seems ever more sinister in the rear-view mirror, proved only that the ghost of Hayek retains the power to spook even those markets he idolised. Never love so unrequited.

So a party which traditionally prided itself on upholding respectability and disdaining fanaticism has experimented with leaders disreputable and swivel-eyed, and the results have been — let’s say — discouraging.

Sunak now almost visibly yearns to be reunited with his money in California. He may soon get his wish. There could be yet another Tory leadership election — the Gadarene swine seems to be massing for another charge — but the cliff edge awaits anyway.

No wonder they still cheer Thatcher then. She made a wasteland, but it was their wasteland, with rivers of gold flowing through it for those with fishing rights.

Now the rivers are full of — well, we all know what they are full of. Tory rule has left us short of much over the last 13 years, but never metaphors.

Violins out for the billionaires

The crisis is getting serious. This from FT Wealth: “Last year was the first time since the 2008 global financial crisis in which the rich saw their asset portfolios decline, at least in real terms.”

Billionaires are 2.6 per cent worse off since 2022 in real terms apparently. One could say that now they know how it has felt for working families for the last 15 years. But they really don’t.

The ‘special relationship’ slithers on

David Lammy hopes we are all as stupid as him. At the weekend Labour’s shadow foreign secretary proclaimed that the party would not accept any forced displacement of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and that it would ban violent West Bank settlers from entering Britain.

This was an obvious attempt to look balanced after the unending crisis in Labour over Keir Starmer’s backing for Israeli war crimes and refusal to support a Gaza ceasefire.

However, it escaped no-one’s notice that Lammy’s two demands are positions that had already been made public by the Biden administration in Washington.

As ever, Labour plods doggedly in the footsteps of the US. Lammy is learning that if you’re not the lead huskie the view never changes.

Since Labour is obsessing about saving money when in office, it could start economising by replacing the Foreign Secretary with an app that simply superimposes the union flag on US State Department press releases.