Jonathan Gullis's promotion shows just how finished the Tories are

NOTHING says that the Conservative Party are finished as a serious political force than today's news that the MP Jonathan Gullis has been appointed as deputy chairman of the Conservatives, following the defection of the equally execrable Lee Anderson to the even more unpleasantly rabid Reform Party.

As great political choices go, making Gullis deputy party chairman as the Tories gear up for a General Election which most observers believe they are going to lose is rather like necking an entire packet of laxatives an hour before your wedding.

After the defection of Anderson, Tory party managers realised that they had a gobby right-wing working-class ignoramus shaped hole in their line-up, and who better to fill that hole than the cerebral and moral void that is Jonathan Gullis .

A flag-shagging, know-nothing with the intellectual heft of a chewed crayon who once released an official photograph of himself beaming beside a Union flag hanging next to an empty bookcase, a photo which unwittingly revealed the true contempt that the Tories have for knowledge.

Gullis opposes research which might challenge the self-serving British nationalist myth that the British Empire was a force for unalloyed good in the world, dismissing research by the National Maritime Museum into the Royal Navy's links to slavery as “leftwing ideological nonsense”.

READ MORE: Why Unionists were wrong to leap on our interview with Mark Blyth

He has also accused the National Trust of being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the 'woke' agenda”.

Gullis also once suggested at a fringe meeting during the Conservative Party conference that people using the term “white privilege” should be reported to the Home Office as extremists and that teachers found criticising the Conservative Party should be sacked.

The news of Gullis's promotion comes on the same day that it was revealed that the privatised water companies in England dumped raw sewage into the environment for roughly four million hours in 2023.

That's nothing, Jonathan Gullis managed it for 40 million. Conservative MPs have a well-deserved reputation for boorish, braying bad behaviour in the House of Commons and Gullis is one of the worst offenders.

His promotion by a desperate Rishi Sunak is a signal that this kind of behaviour will not only be tolerated by the party hierarchy, it will be rewarded.

It would be bad enough if Gullis was an isolated figure in the Conservative Party, but the obnoxious and dangerously authoritarian views he espouses are now very much mainstream in the Tories.

Former home secretary Suella Braverman has not gone away since she was relegated to the back benches, she still very much has her eye on taking the Conservative leadership after the party's inevitable defeat at the next General Election and is positioning herself as the leading candidate on the party's right, which is pretty far right these days.

Braverman is to be a keynote speaker at the right-wing National Conservatism conference to be held in Belgium next month, where Viktor Orbán, the far-right, deeply corrupt, Putin-loving authoritarian leader of Hungary is also due to speak.

READ MORE: Humza Yousaf responds to VisitScotland plans to close all tourist centres

Last week Orbán congratulated the Russian dictator on being “re-elected” in a rigged election that was neither free nor fair.

Orbán (below) is also close to Donald Trump, America's own disgrace to democracy, and has instituted a series of repressive and anti-democratic laws in Hungary aimed at demonising migrants, minorities and political opponents and cementing his own grasp on power.

This is the playbook that the right of the Conservative Party would like to introduce in the UK.

Last year's National Conservative conference was held in London and featured keynote speeches from Tory MPs Ms Braverman, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and commentator Douglas Murray, a noted proponent of Islamophobia and the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory who accused First Minister Humza Yousaf of having “infiltrated our system”.

In her speech in London, Braverman railed against “experts and elites” and identity politics in her speech.

In a party where politicians proudly pose in front of an empty bookcase, being an expert is a bad thing. Tories like Braverman and Gullis seek an ignorocracy: government by the stupid, for the stupid.

Talking of ignorance, über-Unionist frothathon group, These Islands, which previously boasted right-wing conspiracy theorist Neil Oliver (below) amongst its board members, has come under fire for releasing a selectively edited clip of economics professor Mark Blyth speaking at the recent Scotonomics festival and using it to claim that he had “demolished” the case for Scottish independence.

In the clip, Professor Blyth laid out his arguments against Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a view of economics taken by experts such as Professor Richard Murphy which says that a currency-issuing government can spend through money creation, not taxation.

Blyth is a noted opponent of MMT and in his contribution to the Scotonomics festival he was arguing why he believed MMT was not an appropriate economic strategy for an independent Scotland.

However, the clip released by These Islands stripped out this wider context and gave the misleading impression that Professor Blyth was arguing that an independent Scotland was not economically viable.

A furious Professor Blyth took to social media to complain that his remarks had been “instantly weaponised and turned into a wholesale attack on independence. The Argentina comment is completely taken out of context. This is weaponization."

He added: "This is why I'm done ever talking about Scotland. It's toxic. No one wants any actual discussion of options. You say X and they say you said Y and then spend time writing corrections. Life's too short. Done."

That's a very fair summary of how the debate on Scottish independence is conducted by Scotland's overwhelmingly anti-independence media and suspiciously well-funded pressure groups like These Islands who enjoy media access that pro-independence groups can only dream of. It's not a debate with these folk, it's adolescent yah boo suckery.