Quote of the day 17th March 2026

Giles Dilnot has a great piece on Conservative Home about the need for politicians of all parties to be "more normal."

You can read the whole thing at

 Politics doesn't need saints, or sinners, it needs more 'honest' and 'normal' | Conservative Home

Here are some extracts.

"Starmer is in Downing Street, partly because he repeatedly suggested, he’d be different. Country before party, service before self-service, a new standard in public life across his government. He and a number of his ministers and aides have spent the last 20 months repeatedly trashing that claim. If on this slate alone, he was ‘the change’, he was a change for the worse."

"No, Conservatives can’t remotely pretend to have been squeaky clean in the past, and Reform have been dogged by accusations since they entered Parliament. The Lib Dems have been quietly trying to handle a longstanding issue with a senior member of their party, and Zack Polanski has his – for want of a better phrase – his weird ‘boob thing’.

It takes me back to a line widely picked up in the 2024 conference leadership speech made by my old boss Sir James Cleverly urging the Tories to ‘be more normal’.

If the whole party, indeed all our political parties could take that to heart we might, just might, find that the public didn’t retain quite such an intense distrust of politics as a whole and politicians as a species. Remember when “MPs expenses” was supposed to be the watershed moment?"

The losses the Conservative’s sustained in 2024 were numerically appalling for them, but some of those who lost their seats were loses equivalent to a ‘cleansing‘. A few MPs who were dismissed by the electorate were embroiled, in the brutal words used to me by one party Chairman, “in some pretty dark shit”.

In October last year Kemi Badenoch gave a very sensible response when I asked her about standards for candidates and MPs, and the risks of doing opposition the halo-polishing way Starmer had.

It was partly to highlight, as is her job, that it had massively backfired on him and Labour within a year, but she went on to say:

“You know we want everybody to be working to the highest possible standards… I’m sure once in a while, there’ll be some people who fall short. But what I’m not doing is pretending the Conservative MPs are perfect. We’re not. What we are, are people who recognise that people are flawed, make allowances for that, and we don’t want to be a country where the people who are in there [government] are neither competent nor honest. We’ve got to make sure that we bring honesty and competency through and that’s one of the things that I’m focused on. “

"Every politician, like every individual has flaws. A year ago a number of Conservatives, some no longer Conservatives were more than happy to tell me hers, whilst glossing over their own. No body needs saints or sinners in their ranks, but competent, honest people who are ‘normal’ would be a massive plus.

Ignoring a man’s relationship with a convicted paedophile to give him one of the highest and most important diplomatic position this country can confer, is, I’d suggest, worse than a man who broke his own rules to eat a cake, and was hounded by the party now defending their PM – but in the real world neither is a good look.

Starmer is still on borrowed time, for all his self-congratulation about his own leadership skills and his loud denigration of others’. His premiership is so riddled with holes by now you could market him as a Swiss cheese. He ‘was the future once.’

"It’s the politicians coming forward, the candidates and MPs with a future I’m thinking about.

If we can all find a way to choose candidates and foster MPs who are just a bit more normal to a majority of the electorate, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves a favour.

We’d be doing everyone a favour."