It’s a Conservative Party free-for-all...

If it wasn’t abundantly clear that the contest to replace Theresa May as Leader of the Conservative Party, and probably Prime Minister was underway, events this week have made it utterly obvious. Any sense of discipline appears to have been tossed aside in favour of raw ambition, as this can be the only explanation for the utter inconsistency of statements from senior Government figures.

Gavin Williamson has been talking about offering moral leadership to other nations sharing our values. And, whilst I am sceptical that our recent acts as a nation have given much of a lead, that can’t be helped by Sajid Javid’s response to a few dozen Iranian migrants attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats.

Now it may well be that he is entirely consistent with Conservative Party thinking, but the problem with being in power is that words matter. You have legislative power as a minister and, if you suggest that a refugee who might be claiming asylum status is ineligible despite there being no evidence to consider, you might well be seen to be prejudicing their case. Courts can take a dim view of such things.

It’s also not a good look to be tough on migrants when your parents were migrants. “Pulling up the drawbridge” looks selfish. It’s better to simply express the rules, encourage them to be fairly and efficiently applied, and leave it at that. At this stage, we don’t know what their circumstances are.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt is swearing his love of Singapore as a guide to a positive future for the United Kingdom. I’ll set aside the minor detail that Singapore is a city state rather than a collection of islands off of the coast of Europe, and simply note that it isn’t exactly democratic, has high levels of income inequality and houses 80% of its population in high-rise public housing.

And yes, Singaporeans are freer that citizens of other countries. But those freedoms they do possess are at the cost of freedoms that we in the United Kingdom take for granted - the right to oppose the Government by democratic means without sanction, as a basic example.

Jeremy Hunt appears to be suggesting that relative economic well-being trumps a whole bunch of other rights, which just goes to show how some Conservatives view freedom, i.e. as conditional.

And the problem is that there is, for the time being, no sense that the Government has an agreed agenda on anything relating to the nation’s future. And, given that if they get their way on Brexit, the nation’s future is, to a great extent, up for grabs, that might be troubling.