Editor’s Note: Luke McGee is a senior producer at CNN based in London.
The race to become Britain’s next Prime Minister has taken a turn for the surreal, as a popular TV presenter best known for interviewing minor celebrities and dispensing lifestyle advice became involved in a public spat with one of the candidates.
Lorraine Kelly, a mainstay of British morning television who combines a sunny outlook with plain-speaking Scottish patter, delivered an unusually pointed series of barbs over two days, directed at one of the outsiders in the 10-strong field to succeed Theresa May as leader of the governing Conservative Party.
The spectacle began on Monday when viewers of ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” saw Kelly’s decidedly lukewarm reaction to an interview with Esther McVey, a hard-Brexiteer who, before becoming a Member of Parliament, was an anchor on a previous incarnation of the same show. After a day of social media comment, “Good Morning Britain” host Piers Morgan brought it up on Tuesday, in a live tease for Kelly’s subsequent show, the eponymous “Lorraine.”
“Yesterday, Piers, I’ll be honest with you, I just got sick to the back teeth of the whole toxic political atmosphere,” Kelly replied.
Then Kelly took aim at McVey’s poor voting record on equality issues. “I strongly disagree with her on LGBT rights, I just thought, I’ve had enough of this, we’ve had two-and-a-half years of going round in circles and not sorting Brexit out, and now we’ve got a state in Britain where people are at each other’s throats, and it’s got to stop.”
While no one would suggest that Kelly is the voice of the nation, it’s a fair point. Brexit is at a standstill. The European Union is clear that the deal struck by May last year is the only one the UK will get, and that negotiations on how the UK leaves the EU will not be reopened.
However, since May announced her decision to stand down as leader of the governing Conservative party and the nation, those jockeying to take her place seem to have conveniently forgotten this fact. They are instead promising tweaked Brexit deals – alongside other wild and uncosted policies – that appear to have little grounding in reality.
The Conservative party has for decades held its record of sensible economic management as its chief advantage over the main opposition Labour party. This should be especially true right now, as Labour – once the party of centrist icon Tony Blair – is currently led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn.
Instead, the Conservative party – arguably the group of people most responsible for Britain’s Brexit paralysis – is effectively playing chicken with the nation’s finances by creating an unprecedented level of uncertainty. It’s all very strange.
Public polling is throwing up all sorts of weird results at the moment. At last month’s EU elections, neither main political party finished in first or second place. Those spots were taken by the Brexit party, who support a clean break from the EU, and the Liberal Democrats, who want to stop the whole thing and stay in the EU.
Brexit has created an odd atmosphere among a public that was in 2016 effectively split down the middle by a binary vote. This is what Kelly was talking about.
However, it isn’t the public that gets to select the next Prime Minister. That honor falls to the 160,000 Conservative party members – roughly 0.25% of the country.
So, the destiny of a country that is facing its largest political crisis since the end of the Second World War is in the hands of political activists from one political party.
It’s little wonder so many in the UK, like Lorraine Kelly, are sick of the whole thing.
