It's high time Labour abandoned their idea that they are the "goodies ...

One of my five-year-old son’s favourite films is called “Bad Guys”.

It’s essentially Ocean’s Eleven for kids, but in this animated version the “ever so cool” thieving crew, led by the big bad Wolf, are throughout the film making their way, via various capers, to finding being “good” is far more rewarding in life.

It’s a morality tale through the requisitely simplistic prism of baddies and goodies, but children instinctively get it. When I was a boy, Sunday morning was for Church. Not surprising really in my household, as my dad was a Vicar.

Clearly, he didn’t restrict instilling a sense of right and wrong in his children just to an hour or so on one day of the week – the worst thing you can tell clergy is that they are lucky to only work one day a week – but in Church we’d see him trying to promote a sense of right and wrong in his congregation.

The problem I have had ever since I became an adult, and while trying to hold to that moral compass I was taught, is that too often the opponents of Conservatives seem to genuinely believe a default dogma that if you are a Conservative, you have actively chosen to be the bad guys.

It both insults and infuriates. I suspect it might for you too.

I’m unafraid of any backlash from my more thoughtful Labour supporting friends. I think I’d go so far as to say they also believe it’s a weakness in their cause. They also know it’s a foundational view they find hard to shake off. They know it’s a bit ingrained, in the same way they know I believe in freedom, the family and my country’s potential.

They can just about cope that I don’t believe ‘capitalism’ is a dirty word or that I am not minded to worship the State as the solution to everything. But get into crunchy policy areas, and I can see the question floating on the edge of their minds.

“I just don’t get how you can think that. You seem decent.”

In the past it was mildly amusing. People who wore badges saying “never kissed a Tory” who knew full well I knew they had. Unsophisticated adolescent conversations that involved lines like:

“But you strike me as a kind and good person Giles, how, just how, can you defend being a Tory?”

I’m ashamed to say at times in my youth I hid the latter because – who doesn’t want to be seen as a “good guy” and at the time it was just socially easier. However, after the whole left leaning commentariat tried their “at last the grown-ups are back” in July – let’s actually grow up.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”  (1 Corinthians 13:11)

For too many of our opponents here did not endeth the lesson.

I get the feeling in recent months a cold realisation has descended on members of the Labour Government. Apart from seemingly not ready for the complexity and pressures of Government and not giving the impression they know what to do now they are in, this idea that they are the ‘good guys’ on the political landscape has been shredded.

I think they honestly believed, or perhaps convinced themselves – as they had convinced some of the public – that Conservative failures to deliver in government was down to the myth ‘good people’ wisely tried to stop us. They thought upon entering Whitehall’s departments in July all sorts of barriers to the things they believed to be right and good would magically vanish, and thus – all would be well – and the country healed.

This is just ridiculous. It’s a childish ambition from wannabe grown-ups.

Labour painted so many of our values as inherently, and in their view, transparently, bad that they failed to address the practical merits of our policies and ignored the very real drawbacks of abandoning them. When and where they have abandoned them, they have done so on an emotional basis, not practical ones. Never let the facts get in the way of performative political outrage – or a good slogan.

“We will not raise taxes on working people” sounds good, but turns out to be really hollow, which I’d say was bad, especially for those people who work, who will now see their taxes rise.

This problem of an arms race of moral superiority extended to the desperate defence of Labour’s ‘Taylor Swift period’. The early era of free clothing, spectacles, the flat, the tickets, all of this was in their view ‘Tory desperation’. Their foundation argument was essentially: good people don’t do any of this stuff with bad intent. We are good people; therefore, you should brush it aside because we would never do something intentionally bad. Only Tories do bad things.

Some Conservatives did do bad things, it’s true, let’s admit it. But for the left it’s worse when Tories do it. The eye rolling exasperation displayed by some Labour MPs in studios (they know who they are) at being criticised for frankly rank hypocrisy was nauseating.

Funnily enough it didn’t come from the hard left, who frankly seem to really hate Starmer, whereas Conservatives just disagree with him.

However, I’m not sparing them either. These are the people who felt St Jeremy Corbyn was so very good, such a good hearted socialist, that he could not even be accused of taking bad positions and siding with bad people – and some of those people he sided with really are bad, whatever moral compass you have. I’ve even seen current Labour MPs argue at times that whatever they’ve said can’t be racist because Labour people aren’t racist. That’s logical phooey.

I’ve been pleased both Conservative leadership candidates want to reconnect the wider party with Conservative core values. To be unashamed of them and ready to go out and spread the message. I almost wrote “the good word”, but I’m not writing a sermon.

Conservatives should avoid this childish prism of goodies and baddies. I don’t want a Conservative party to find a Tory religion. Broad or narrow I’m not sure it should even be described as a Church.

Tories should just be comfortable with what they believe in and ready to defend that from simplistic and often ill-informed attacks. Both Rob Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch believe in that, and the other candidates that stood in the race said much the same.

Feel good about yourselves, because you should – you aren’t the bad guys your opponents pretend. They want pantomime villains because it’s media chaff to throw when their going gets tough.

You are normal, you just have different views to your opponents. Every party has its bad apples, but they aren’t defined by the colour of their rosette. If everyone who wants to see the Conservatives recover and get back into government can hold onto that idea, then that would be – really – in any sense – good.