My MP Neil O'Brien is a poster boy for the decline of the Tory mind

My Conservative MP Neil O'Brien's X account is a bin fire. You would never know from it that in a general election less than a year ago his party lost half their vote and two-thirds of their MPs. And his only tweets on the local election have been about an 18-year-old Labour candidate in Burnley.

And there's lots about race, much of it designed to encourage the idea that it's white people who are discriminated against. No wonder he gets lots of like and retweets and follows from blue-tick accounts with even more right-wing views.

Are these even from real people? I smell Russian bot farms. And if they are real people, you can bet they live in the US and not Oadby or Market Harborough.

He wasn't always like this. Back in 2018, I praised a speech he gave to a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference and quoted a generous chunk from a Guardian report of it:

Neil O’Brien, who became MP for Harborough last year, noted that in the 2017 election there was a massive deficit between the Tories and Labour in terms of younger voters, and those from minority ethnic backgrounds. 

At the 2015 election, O’Brien said, the Tories lagged two percentage points behind Labour for voters in their 20s, and by four percentage points for those aged 18-24. Just two years later these deficits had shot up to 26 and 40 points behind. 

The party was also doing increasingly less well among other groups whose numbers were rising, such as those with degrees, people who were unmarried, and those who rented their homes or live in cities, said O’Brien, a former director of the Policy Exchange thinktank. 

"All these different social bases of Conservatism are being eroded," he said. “Either we have to do much better amongst these groups of people, or we’re going to go out of business as a political party.” 

Such structural changes would have an impact, he added: "It’s a bit like a beam that is rotting away, and eventually it snaps."

He was right. But now Neil O'Brien has become the sort of person he used to warn the Conservative Party against.

Tory MP Neil O'Brien praises J.D. Vance's speech

I thought Vance's spech was good - a provocative but thought-provoking prod for us in Europe - 'what are you trying to defend'? https://t.co/fGAXgDR3DE

— Neil O'Brien (@NeilDotObrien) February 15, 2025

Neil O'Brien is my MP - the Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston. On Saturday he shared his thoughts on J.D. Vance's speech in Munich.

I could construct an argument that he has to talk like this to hang on to his shadow ministerial (not shadow cabinet) post. He was at one time close to Kemi Badenoch, but backed Robert Jenrick in last years's Tory leadership contest, and she does not strike me as one to forget a slight in a hurry.

But I'm more inclined to conclude that he now believes this stuff. How the Conservative Party has fallen.

It's quite hard to find the full text of the speech, but RealClear Politics has it.

Leader of Harborough District Council picked as Lib Dem general election candidate

Congratulations to my old friend Phil Knowles, who has been chosen to fight the Harborough, Oadby and Wigston constituency at this year's general election.

Phil is the leader of the Liberal, Labour and Green coalition that took control of Harborough District Council from the Tories last May. 

Last week the council announced a freeze in the amount of council tax it will charge residents in the new financial year.

Phil stood for the neighbouring South Leicestershire constituency at the last general election.

Goodbye to Wilko - a company founded in Leicester

This is the Wilko branch in Market Harborough, which will close on Sunday. I feel sorry for the people here and around the country who are losing their jobs. 

You can be sure the top management that brought the company to this pass will have a more comfortable landing. 

Wilkinson's was originally a Leicester company. In 1930 when James Kemsey Wilkinson and his fiancée Mary Cooper opened a small ironmongers at 151 Charnwood Street in the city.

The opened a second shop in Wigston Magna in 1932 and then a third on the Narborough Road.

Charnwood Street is a lost working-class shopping street in Leicester. A website devoted to it explains where it ran:

Charnwood Street in Leicester - popularly known as 'Charny' - was built in the early 1870s and demolished in 1970 when the area was redeveloped. It ran from Kent Street to Spinney Hill Road to the east of the city centre, parallel with Humberstone Road.

If you browse the website you will see that it was mourned by many.

When Charnwood Street was razed, Wilkinson's had 28 stores across the country. At some point their original shop had moved a few doors to no. 159.

The photo below shows shops in Charnwood Street empty and awaiting demolition. It comes from the University of Leicester's Vanished Leicester collection.

Copyright © Dennis Calow

Harborough's Neil O'Brien stars in the Guardian's Commons sketch

This morning Labour's Angela Rayner asked an urgent question to the minister for the cabinet office on the procurement of personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic.

But it wasn't that minister who came to the Commons to answer it: it was a junior minister from the Department of Health and Social Care, Harborough's own Neil O'Brien.

Why he got the gig I don't know, but John Crace in the Guardian suggests:

His schoolboy error had been to answer his phone.

And boy does Crace have fun with him:

So it was a queasy-looking O’Brien who turned up for the UQ. A man who looked as if he had spent the previous couple of hours throwing up rather than trying to prepare some answers.

Having watched his performance on Commons TV (it starts at 10:37:16) I can confirm that this is unfair, but only a little. O'Brien is not an commanding  performer at the despatch box.

And the government's performance on procuring PPI isn't impressive either. If it had cut corners to secure supply from established providers of PPE, that would have been entirely understandable. 

But contracts were given to people with no record in the field, some of them with worrying political connections, and much of what it bought turned out to be unusable.

There are many questions to be answered here and O'Brien gave convincing ones to few of them.

Harborough less affected by boundary changes than expected

HFM News has the news about the Boundary Commission's final proposals for Leicestershire. The idea of a radical redrawing of boundaries within the county has been dropped, with the result that the Harborough constituency will keep its spine of Oadby, Wigston, Kibworth and Market Harborough.

As the trend has been at many boundary views now, the proposals would mean more villages will be moved into other constituencies. 

Fleckney, Saddington, Husbands Bosworth and the Kilworths would move into the South Leicestershire constituency, while villages in the north of the District, along with Hallaton and Melbourne, would become part of a new Rutland and Stamford constituency.

I'm happy to see this. The original proposal was that the Harborough constituency would have the same boundaries as the Harborough local government district. But that is a swathe of rural Leicestershire with few transport links.

Keeping the traditional Harborough constituency much as it is will also encourage the Liberal Democrats. In 2005 we came within 4000 votes of winning here, and these boundary changes look favourable to us.

All we have to do now is return the Labour Party to third place and establish ourselves the clear challengers once more,

You can read the final proposals for Leicestershire and make your comments on the county council website.