Final thoughts on the University of the West of England demonstration

One more final reflection on the demonstration last night at the meeting at UWE where Jacob Rees-Mogg was speaking.

It is a fairly safe bet that one of the last things the masked demonstrators who burst into the meeting intent on disrupting it and started shouting intended to do was increase the chances of JRM being the next Prime Minister.

But that is exactly what they have done, because his brave and dignified behaviour in a very difficult situation can only have increased the number of people in the Conservative party (and, I suspect, outside it) who would vote for him.

That chance is still not particularly high. If a Conservative leadership election goes all the way through the full process, the leader is elected by a postal ballot of all Conservative party members from a list of two selected by Conservative MPs, and the group of MPs which JRM leads only has about sixty of the 317 Conservative members of the House of Commons.

The betting markets anointing Rees-Mogg as the favourite only confirms me in  that opinion: the potential candidate who is the bookies favourite at the time a contested Conservative leadership election is called never wins.

Nevertheless, however small the chance of "Moggmentum" getting their man to number ten is, it is higher today than it was on Friday morning.

Which only goes to show that bullying and trying to shout down people you disagree with is not only wrong, but ultimately self-defeating.


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