By Graham Vanbergen: The former Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said this
week that the prime minister lost her majority because her policy ideas
“simply didn’t stack up”. “We didn’t need to be here. I think it’s
extremely frustrating. I think we had an unnecessary election and the
world’s worst manifesto from the world’s oldest political party,” he
said. “If we fail to learn the right lessons from the election then we
will find that we never win elections again.” Shapps also rejected the
suggestion the Tories lost their majority because voters had turned
against austerity. How wrong Shapps is on that one!
Grant Shapps is a typical right-wing politician of today’s Britain. A
few years ago Shapps was discovered to have had a second job as a
“multimillion-dollar web marketer” under the pseudonym Michael Green for
at least year after he first became an MP. In a Guardian article
his company “was dissolved after it marketed “scraping” software
TrafficPaymaster – the sale of which, the police said, may have been an
“offence of fraud”.
Karl Turner, Labour’s shadow solicitor general, said at the time:
“It beggars belief that the chairman of the Conservative party went on
live radio and stated three times that he was not doing business as
Michael Green while he was an MP, when new reports and audio show quite
clearly that he did.”
And this was the best the Tories could dig up as party chairman!
Shapps is the embodiment of just about everything wrong in government in
Britain today.
