Title: The Party of Davos is the biggest loser in Britain’s election | The Economist
Headings: The Party of Davos is the biggest loser in Britain’s election
Bagehot
The Party of Davos is the biggest loser in Britain’s election
The long climb back

Content: The purge spread to the Conservative Party this year with the election of Boris Johnson as leader, who expelled 21 senior Tories for disloyalty over Europe. Davosites such as Rupert Harrison, a protégé of Mr Osborne, have been weeded from the Conservative candidates list. The Davosites have made several ill-starred attempts to regroup. They briefly supported the idea of a “government of national unity”, only to see the idea fizzle. They invested high hopes in a second referendum, but the “people’s vote” movement collapsed in turmoil when Roland Rudd, the PR entrepreneur who helps to fund it, tried to sack two of its leaders and staff responded by walking out. Exasperated Davosites are now backing the Lib Dems, but so far the polls are moving against them. There is no doubt that the Davosites deserve much of what has been hurled at them. They overpromised and underdelivered. Gordon Brown boasted that Britain had abolished the cycle of boom-and-bust under his leadership, only to see the global economy plunged into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Mr Blair championed the war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that toppling a dictator might bring democracy to the Middle East.