Could it be true?
“Yes, it’s me. Or it’s you, I should say. I’m writing to you from July 2044, twenty years on from the day you voted Reform.” There is one day to go until the general election, and Tory leafletting is getting… weird. In Havant, a Tory stronghold, CCHQ has sent letters to constituents in official-looking envelopes written as if they’re from the constituents themselves: except 20 years into the future. The future selves warn their 2024 counterparts that they’ve been living with a Labour “supermajority for the last two decades”. A dystopian hellscape where “16 year-olds were given the vote… EU citizens too… and prisoners and immigrants.” What’s interesting about the letter, apart from its time-travelling shenanigans, is its implicit admittance of Tory defeat. “You wanted to give the Tories a kicking, and I wasn’t alone,” the future selves write. “None of us wanted to see them back in again. But I didn’t want to see them almost wiped out for good.” As the recipient of the letter wrote on X: “They’re absolutely shitting themselves.”
Alexi Mostrous is Tortoise's Investigations Editor.
