“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”, the psychologist Abraham Maslow once famously commented.
This tendency to fall back on the same tired old solutions, regardless of how many times they might fail, is becoming an endemic problem within the Conservative Party.
Faced with the prospect of potential electoral wipeout, Rishi Sunak and his MPs are simply resorting to the same tactics that got them into their current mess in the first place..
Whether it’s their attempts to start a culture war with Labour on immigration, just as figures show the Government have presided over record numbers coming into the country, or the constant focus on tax cuts, just as ministers raise them to a postwar high, everything Sunak and his party is doing seems almost deliberately designed to make their current situation worse.
Here’s why, rather than bring his party back from the death, the Prime Minister’s strategy is merely hammering the nails even further into its coffin.