It’s difficult to remember a time when both the Tories and Labour were simultaneously imploding. Normally one party’s difficulties are a godsend for the other.

But UK politics is fracturing and the established order with it.

“The Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left,” MP Danny Kruger said earlier this month after defecting to Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK.

The East Wiltshire politician, a lifelong Tory activist, campaigner and formerly David Cameron’s chief speech writer, was the first sitting MP in the current parliament to defect to the Reform party.

Kruger’s party shot, delivered with a gleeful Farage looking on, was self-serving and vitriolic – politics is a blood sport – but for many it was accurate read on the current Tory malaise.

After a decade of infighting, several disastrous spells in government and a revolving door leadership (they’ve had six leaders in 10 years), the party looks worn out.

A recent YouGov poll put the party that has dominated British politics for the last 100 years in fourth place behind Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats with just 16 per cent of the popular vote, its lowest vote share with YouGov.

History buffs and psephologists have begun to speculate on whether the Tories might now be on the same trajectory as the Liberal Party was in the 1920s.

The party of Lloyd George and Henry Asquith was riven by factional infighting and defections (several related to the Irish question) and went on to be evicted from its half of the political spectrum by a resurgent Labour Party whose vote had been amplified by the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which enfranchised the working class.

The UK’s first-past-the-post voting system has for more than a century blocked the emergence of new political forces while giving the Labour/Tory duopoly an ironclad grip on power, but a populist backlash over immigration appears to have brought the country to a tipping point.

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Out of the 1,641 seats available in the country’s recent local elections, Reform UK came away with 677, just over 41 per cent.

The average share of the vote for both Labour and the Tories across the 1,282 wards fell to a record combined low of 36.8 per cent. Before that it had never been lower than 50 per cent combined.

The Christian Democrat/Socialist binary that held sway in Europe for much of the 20th century has been smashed to pieces by two decades of mass migration and accelerating inequality, the defining socio-economic trends of the era.

The ruling parties in Italy and France were only formed in 2012 and 2016 respectively, making them parvenus in political terms, but also reflective of the current fluidity.

Tribalism has engulfed European conservatism and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party appears to be next on the chopping block.

Brexit has played a major role, fracturing the party’s core demographic.

“In prioritising the more working-class voters in the north and midlands, the Tories, in essence, sacked the other half of its electoral coalition,” Financial Times political commentator Robert Shrimsley wrote recently.

“They scorned the major cities, graduates and much of the well-heeled south. But that Leave-voting demographic is more drawn to Faragist politics.”

Badenoch has failed to match Farage on immigration and fails to distinguish her party’s position on immigration from that of Reform’s.

That her party failed to keep a lid on illegal immigration when in power for the last 10 years doesn’t help.

In a bid to halt this trend, she has pivoted to focusing more on the UK’s ailing economy where Labour is seen as weak and where Reform is seen to lack credibility.

Former party bigwig James Cleverly’s return to the shadow cabinet reflects this gear change.

Badenoch attributed her party’s wipeout performance in the general election to its having “talked right, but governed left”, the sort of maxim that appeals to the party’s traditional base.

But her vision of a low-tax, less-regulated Britain is the sort of jaded Thatcherism that every Tory leader articulates.

It cuts no ice with voters inflamed by mass immigration and illegal Channel crossings as the opinion polls consistently indicate.

Badenoch‘s main party rival, Robert Jenrick, seems intent on pushing the party further right to chase Reform, a shift that will further alienate its young, professional class base. He also seems to be openly plotting against her.

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Like the Liberal Party of the 1920s, both wings of the Conservative Party now seem on mutually exclusive tracks. They would probably have split by now but for the UK’s idiosyncratic electoral system.

What started as a Eurosceptic schism during the John Major era in the 1990s has grown into a compound fracture on immigration.

Former prime minister David Cameron’s attempt to seal fissure through 2016’s Brexit referendum only succeeded in blowing it wide open.

Boris Johnson and Liz Truss maxed out this dynamic and left office in a hail of recrimination from which the party has not recovered and may not recover.

Badenoch looks paralysed by her predicament.

A large fish kill in the Blackwater river in Cork cannot be explained, the final report on the incident has concluded.

Some potent substance killed 32,000-42,000 fish – mostly prized salmon and trout – last month but multiple agencies involved in the investigation cannot say what it was.

Seven days may have passed between the incident that led to the kill and the first tests of possible sources.

The report by the agencies says the substance likely entered the river as early as August 5th and dead fish were spotted on August 9th but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) only became aware of the situation on August 12th. That date was the first day the EPA took samples from discharge flows from industries near the river and its tributaries.

The subsequent investigation also involved Inland Fisheries Ireland, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Cork County Council, Uisce Éireann, the Marine Institute, the Departments of Environment and Agriculture and the HSE.

Their joint report says dozens of industrial and commercial sites were inspected, multiple samples of water, fish and other river creatures were taken and 900 potentially damaging substances were tested for, but no conclusive results emerged.

“Despite the significant investigation by members of the inter-agency group, the pollutant or the source, that caused the fish mortalities has not been identified,” they said.

The most they could determine was an approximate time and location of the original incident.

“It may be concluded that a waterborne irritant likely entered the river Blackwater around 5/6 August, around 72 hours before the first mortalities were observed on 9 August 2025,” the report states.

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This likely happened “at an unidentified point most likely upstream of the uppermost limit of Inland Fisheries Ireland observed mortalities (main channel between Gortmore and upstream of Roskeen Bridge 13 August)”.

However, it “dissipated quickly rendering it undetectable in water samples and fish tissue samples”.

Most of the dead fish were found around Mallow but dead and injured fish were found from Banteer, 22km upstream of Mallow, to Castletownroche, 17km downstream.

Anglers reported distressing scenes of dead and dying fish with multiple marks and lesions, swollen eyes and damage to their gills.

While the investigation identified no pollution source, the report says North Cork Creameries, the largest licensed facility near where the fish kill occurred, will continue to be closely monitored by the EPA after it found recent breaches of its licence.

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The report confirmed “non-compliances were detected in the wastewater treatment plant discharge from North Cork Creameries in the June to August period and were serious and entirely unacceptable”.

The licence breaches arose primarily due to a lack of organised management or control of wastewater treatment plant activities at the co-op, which discharges in the Allow, a tributary of the Blackwater.

The EPA also found “a lack of appropriate expertise to resolve significant operational issues, a failure to appropriately generate, manage, maintain and use critical data sets to inform corrective actions and a disregard for licence requirements and licence limits”.

“These compliance issues have not yet been fully resolved by the licensee, and the EPA is rigorously pursuing the enforcement of the licence breaches arising as a matter of priority and urgency, in line with its compliance and enforcement policy,” it added.

In April this year North Cork Creameries was convicted on eight counts for exceeding ammonia and nitrogen levels and fined €11,000 in a case brought by the EPA.

Minister of State with responsibility for fisheries Timmy Dooley said the investigation had been “exhaustive” and the findings provided reassurance that the incident was “a short-lived event, with no evidence of ongoing pollution risks”.