The Conservative Party’s distracted, out-of-touch election campaign is failing already

Editorial: It is sometimes said that nations get the politicians they deserve. If so, Britain must be receiving a visit from some unusually cruel spirit of karma

The Conservative election campaign of 2019 deserves to go down in history if only for the fact that it is the first that had to be relaunched before it was actually launched. It takes a peculiar talent for misadventure to engineer such a political outcome, even in these confused times.

For anyone under the misapprehension that the Cummings-Johnson Conservative Party is some kind of ruthlessly efficient machine pumping out exciting ideas, recent events should serve as a sobering corrective.

The Tories, in other words, are perfectly capable of inflicting more damage upon themselves than the official opposition. It has sometimes been said that Boris Johnson is his own worst enemy; it turns out that many of his colleagues are equally self-lethal.