PM needs a Ben Stokes, says Nigel Hastilow

He told a meeting of business people in Birmingham the other day that the Tories will lose because the British people play cricket.

It means that, from time to time, we decide to let the other side have a bat instead of watching them rush round the field trying to catch out the team scoring all the runs.

It’s surprising a prominent MP would express such opinions in public, though admittedly the meeting was semi-private, in that there were no reporters there. But it’s obvious his audience wouldn’t keep it to themselves.

With the Conservatives heading to boring old Manchester for their party conference, the last thing they need is prophets of doom in their midst.

After all, in theory they have almost five years to complete Brexit, choose a new leader and then fight another General Election.

By 2022, Jeremy Corbyn will be 73, which is a pretty ripe age to embark on your first term as Prime Minister.

But the election could come a lot sooner than that. As they go home from their own conference in Brighton, Labour’s leaders are pretty confident.

They really do seem to think they will be forming the next Government sooner rather than later. That’s why John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, keeps talking about all the preparations they are making for their first weeks in power.

A Corbyn Government within months is certainly a possibility even though it would be the most left-wing, not to say spendthrift, administration in history.

The sums really do not add up and never will. Labour will spend billions on watered-down student grant pledges and nationalisation of the rail, water and energy industries.

Scrapping private finance schemes will be financed through Government bonds. That is to say, they would take away investors’ real money and swap it for pieces of paper which would immediately become worthless junk bonds.

It couldn’t be done any other way, not in a country already up to our necks in Government debt – but nobody seems to be interested in sound, sensible finances any more.

Taxes will increase as well, obviously, but that money would be needed to meet all Labour’s other spending pledges.

Yet Labour is on a roll. The sensible, moderate politicians who once seemed to be in charge of the party are all marginalised or throwing in the towel because the party has been taken over by hard-left Momentum activists.

The loonies are ruthless in hounding out anybody who disagrees with their extreme views and yet, so far, the party has not lost its mass appeal, especially to young voters.

This is partly explained by the same Tory MP who thinks his party will lose the election. He points out that today’s young adults are the first generation in decades who expect to be worse off than their parents.

Those ‘baby-boomer’ parents born between 1945 and 1965 have, as Harold Macmillan once said, ‘never had it so good’ – decent jobs, good houses, rising standards of living, generous pensions.

Their kids have zero-hour contracts, pay extortionate rents for tiny places, are saddled with student debt and can’t afford to save for a pension.

It’s not surprising they think there has to be a better way. Especially as they are also the generation most upset by the result of the Brexit referendum.

Labour is supposedly in favour of leaving the EU but the Corbynites have ditched the idea in favour of making life as difficult as possible for Theresa May’s Government to negotiate an end to our servitude to Brussels.

It’s a reasonable stance for an Opposition party to take even if the biggest Brexit votes were generally recorded in Labour-held constituencies.

And it makes the Tories’ task of getting safely out of the EU that much harder.

If they can’t stick together, they will certainly fall apart. Yet the Cabinet is not, whatever Boris Johnson says, ‘a nest of singing birds’ – it’s more like a nest of vipers.

They are reserving their venom for each other rather than directing it towards a Labour Party which, in any normal era, would be dismissed out of hand as too extreme to come anywhere close to the corridors of power.

The Tories are as divided over Europe today as they have ever been. There are plenty of politicians who pay lip-service to the referendum result but will do everything they can to thwart the will of the people.

Mrs May’s Florence speech has already postponed Brexit until 2021 and, as her Government becomes more and more unstable, her chances surviving long enough to see it all through get worse.

It is hard to imagine how her party can negotiate a successful Brexit and at the same time extend its appeal at Jeremy Corbyn’s expense.

Mrs May’s a cricket fan – she needs to channel her inner Ben Stokes but unfortunately she’s stuck with Geoffrey Boycott.