The Top Ten Tories of All Time

The Conservative Party gets a bad rap these days, and that’s fair, because it seems to us that they have fucked a lot of things up. In fact, it wouldn't be unfair to say that they have basically completely fucked up everything they’ve turned their hands to over the last decade.

Other than dismantling the country, they’re also just unlikable creatures, like mean old cats clawing at your hand when you try to pet them. Completely removed from the realities of life, they bumble around speaking in posh tongues about nothing in particular, doing basically nothing, and when it all comes tumbling down they take no blame for it, and carry on doing nothing. They are impressively easy to hate.

But some Tories are cool, just like some murderous gangsters are cool. Think of it as like how you and your lame partner like Walter White or Dexter from TVs Dexter, or whatever. Sure, they're bad guys, but with redeeming qualities.

It’s time to definitively round up the best Tories of all time and, just for one day, show some appreciation for some of the worst geezers and gals around.

Winston Churchill was England’s wokest bae for a very long time, probably about 74 years. The people absolutely could not get enough of the chain smoking alcoholic war time prime minster, so much so they put him on the money and he was voted the Greatest Briton on a, frankly bizarre, BBC show that also featured Robbie Williams sandwiched between vaccinations pioneer Edward Jenner and amorphous stoic supreme The Unknown Soldier.

In recent times, however, Churchill has fallen into disrepute because of his advocacy of using poison gas in war, worsening the Bengali famine and blaming "rabbit"-like reproduction for it, sending soldiers into Tonypandy during the miners strike (Tories absolutely hate miners, a classic rivalry) and generally just being a total shit about everything involving people at risk.

That said, he did smash the Hun, a situation that needed a psychotic hunchback freak much more that it needed a little mimsy milksop pussyclart like Neville Chamberlain, so for that reason he sits at the back of this list honouring a mention. Let it be known, however: he’s a very naughty boy.

Your boy Craig "Crazy Paving" David is a very under-the-radar Tory, but a Tory nonetheless, offering "Fill Me In" up as a Tory campaign song in 2010. In an interview with Huck last year, when asked if he was indeed a Tory, he responded: “Listen, you can easily get boxed into the duality: are you Jeremy Corbyn? Are you Theresa May? My thing is, if you feel passionate then I’m definitely down with people who say get out and vote, get out and vote."

It’s a fantastically non-committal answer that could have come from the hissing mouth of any modern serpentine MP. It’s also the sort of thing you say when someone’s stuck a Dictaphone in your face just as you’re about to drop a big wet Tory vote into the ballot box.

We love UK garage, but we cannot “stan” someone who we think isn’t true to themselves, which is why Cra-Dave is so low down on the list.

Kate Bush recently released a statement refuting her Toryship, which had been a rumour swirling around her since the 1980s. The statement was in response to her saying she thinks Theresa May is a top lad, describing the haunted premier as "very sensible".

"Again, with no response from me to the latest resurfacing of this article, it could make it seem like I am a Tory supporter, which I want to make clear I am not," she said in the statement.

If you ask me, any reclusive millionaire who only deigns to appear from the shadow of their platinum bidet to endorse the woman responsible for the hostile environment policy is almost certainly a Tory. But This Woman’s Work brings a tear to my eye when I listen to it half-cut before taking an ill-advised melatonin for the world’s deepest sleep.

Michael Portillo got so heavily cucked by the New Labour general election victory of 1997 that his very brain snapped and he got extremely into trains. He was at one point very much the boy wonder of Thatcherite Tory government, but his seat loss to Stephen Twigg – who doesn’t have a TV show – did nothing for his confidence in the party, and after 2005 he sort of just fucked off.

Since then he has garnered a reputation as a nice fluffy sod who wears garish blazers and bangs on about intercontinental railways on telly, which is nice easy viewing when eating your dinner out of your lap. However, he did work for BAE Systems and voted for the invasion of Iraq, so almost certainly gets a heady kick out of bombing faraway lands from the sky.

Jodie Marsh, unlike basically everyone else on this list, is very hard to dislike. The FHM relic-cum-bodybuilder has been put through the wringer by every newspaper, magazine and production company in the country, which makes her, we think, Britain’s Queen of the Lowbrow. She’s into all the shit stuff: tattoos, reality TV, glamour modelling, having a column in Zoo magazine – the works. She’s seemingly even a gifted troll, upsetting fellow “professional agony aunts” (heh) by saying “I haven't exactly got a degree in psychology but I just love sex, don't I?”

Which is why it may be surprising that not only is Jodie a Tory voter, but is also an appreciator of plane crash survivor Nigel Farage, once labelling him the “cleverest man in politics”. She even briefly dated former Tory councillor for Brentwood, Russell Quirk.

Sadly, Jodie’s is a case of someone quite cool being into very lame Tory shit, like the actual politics and stuff, rather than the vibe of it. This comes to a crashing halt as we enter our top five.

Where do you even begin with an entity like Sol Campbell? The highly decorated former Arsenal and England player may just be the biggest Tory on this entire list, and that is saying something. The thing is: all footballers are Tories. Every last one of them (apart from maybe N’Golo Kante). Sol Campbell, however, takes things up a notch.

The tweed-loving Macclesfield manager is married to interior designer Fiona Barratt, daughter of Sir Lawrie Barratt, the late building tycoon who has been described as "Margaret Thatcher’s favourite builder", and the architect of "tomorrow’s slums" by Labour MP Willie Hamilton.

Sol loves the Tory party so much that he wanted to be the Conservative nominee for Mayor of London in the 2016 election, which he was sadly not chosen for.

Sol Campbell fucking lives and breathes this shit. He hates mansion tax, he votes Leave, he married into a Thatcherite property dynasty, he goes shooting. On the shoulder of every doubting Tory MP unsure whether they should vote down some important bill to make the world less terrible, there’s Sol, in his red socks, both barrels of a shotgun aimed in their ear, pumping the love of the party, and confidence in their actions, right into their weird little brains.

If Sol Campbell is the aspirational countrified Tory egg that hatched, then bespectacled horse race commentator and apparent arch sexist John McCririck is surely the mother hen.

McCririck is a blustering tornado of Toryism. Modern Conservative behaviour owes perhaps its entire persona to McCririck, a man ostensibly dedicated to the righteous and sensible, but who also calls his long-suffering wife “Booby” and wanders around various TV shows in soiled pants. He’s a man who mistakes loudness for charm, ramblings for wit, tack for taste, purely by virtue of having gone to the same private school as P.G. Wodehouse.

He's a relic of a bygone era, a Victorian circus master, mutton-chops and all. McCririck is the Tory clown we can all take pleasure in.

By far the youngest person on this list, on account of him dying at 23, Ian Curtis is widely, and rightly, beloved as the lead singer of post-punk depression lords Joy Division.

One of the last things he did before taking his own life, however, was, according to the Quietus, get the local Liberal candidate at the time to give him a lift to the polling station so he could smash in a vote for old Maggie Thatcher.

Is your… Love, for Ian Curtis currently being… Torn Apart, right now? Tee-hee!

Steak lover and car fucker Jeremy Clarkson represents a kind of mid-2000s Tory, one who cares more about PC going mad and the ban on fox hunting and congestion charges than he does about killing the poor. It was a mentality more based on crap articles in tabs about not being able to send Christmas cards with pigs on, or whatever, than it was a virulent hatred of the supposed lower classes, though I’m sure that is also present.

Clarkson, much like other national treasure Prince Philip, is a filter-less oddball perhaps more representative of the nation than many of us would like to think. The people love him, and not in the way some deranged creeps love Tommy Robinson; more like how you love your own father, despite all the fucked up shit he says on a near constant basis.

Sometimes being a Tory is the right thing for the right job, that job being "hosting car show for old cunts" and most certainly not "being in government at any given time".

Marco Pierre White is a kind of condensed version of everyone on this list, a Megazord of all Tory archetypes. He has the brutish banter of Clarkson, the derangement of Campbell, the charm of Portillo, the laissez-faire attitude to rudeness of McCririck and the stony resolve of Churchill himself.

MPW, as he sometimes refers to himself, is the best and worst of the Tory ideology. A bootstrap pulling, red wine swilling, multi-millionaire multiple divorcee, who speaks at all times as if he is addressing an army battalion about to throw themselves bravely into oncoming canon fire.

This Oxford Union address, in which he narrates his life like it's a Dickens novel, is perhaps the best way to get to know Marco Pierre White, and is also one of the most hilariously deranged and entertaining things ever committed to film.

He tops this list because his Toryness is so imbued in his makeup, in the blue marrow of his bones, that he transcends petty party politics. He is an iconic conservative, a Michelin-starred maniac of the upper class, of finer things. In another life he would have been the king of this wretched lump, and I would have been a most loyal servant.

@joe_bish