A Remainiac
But some good points too...
If Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister, we will have to invent new words to describe the scale of her failures
NEWSLETTER (£)The fact that Truss has made it this far, let alone that she looks like winning, is decisive evidence that the Conservative Party has completely lost its mind
July 20, 2022 By Ian Dunt
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/if-liz-trus ... es-1752018
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Hello, good afternoon – sorry this one is a little late, we held it back for the ending of the Tory leadership process. And thank God we did. It allowed me to write it with my life flashing before my eyes, suddenly seeing that long dark tunnel and voices beckoning me to join them.
Yes, that’s right – it’s Sunak vs Truss, the uninspiring versus the unintelligible, the tiresome versus the deranged. What a time to be alive. Still, it’s cool. Everything will be fine. It’s not like we’re living in an era of suffocated living standards set against a backdrop of pronounced geopolitical instability and an existential climate crisis. Then we’d really be *.
This week’s column is below – it is a scream of despair mingled with hollow mortified laughter. And underneath there’s some recommendations for what to distract yourself with this week, because by Christ you’ll need it.
This is not a drill
You’re not dreaming. It’s not a hallucination. This is all really happening. As things stand, Liz Truss looks set to become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. A politician whose chief accomplishment is to have a psychological breakdown about cheese is primed to secure the highest position of authority in British public life.
Truss beat out Penny Mordaunt this afternoon in the final stage of the Tory parliamentary party’s death-match voting ritual, leaving just her and Rishi Sunak to spend the summer seducing party members.
That alone is an extraordinary fact, the kind of thing that makes you wonder if we’ve slipped into some sort of alternate horror-comedy version of reality. She’s been utterly hopeless throughout: intellectually bereft, presentationally dismal, without a single clear idea for how she would improve the country apart from a handful of economic contributions which sounded like they’d been written in crayon while she howled at the moon.
Truss is poised to enter No 10
That is the correct objective assessment of her performance and the one shared by the public – because of course it is. No one with a functioning critical capacity could come to a different conclusion. She came last in an Opinium poll following the Channel 4 TV debate, winning just six per cent of the vote. She managed to valiantly struggle up to second worst in the ITV debate, with 15 per cent to Kemi Badenoch’s 12 per cent.
And yet, here she is, selected by MPs as one of the two final candidates. And from that position she seems likely to win. The latest YouGov survey of Tory members shows Sunak loses to Truss by 54 per cent to 35 per cent. The assumption right now must be that Truss is poised to enter No 10.
Even Sunak, who to his credit does at least have a passing relationship with empirical reality, should be nowhere near this stage. In any previous post-war administration, he would have been considered a genial if unremarkable junior minister. He’d have been the guy the secretary of state allowed to answer a question in Parliament if they didn’t feel like it, or sent out for media interviews when they were away on summer holidays.
The Conservative Party has completely lost its mind
Now, he is the A-class powerhouse performer surrounded by amateurs. And that is not because of an improvement in him. It is because of a sustained deterioration in the performance of the party around him. A sinking tide lowers all ships, but it can make even those with large holes in them look sea-worthy if you don’t inspect them too closely.
The fact that Truss has made it this far, let alone that she looks like winning, is decisive evidence that the Conservative Party has completely lost its mind. It started with Brexit, which unleashed all the latent millennialist Europhobia in the party membership and gave it the whip-hand over the parliamentary party. It was given a visceral boost by Johnson and his election result. Now it has reached its logical end point.
They are elevating someone who demonstrably does not have the capacity to be leader, specifically because they’re confident she won’t challenge their dogmas. And that is the precise moment a party goes mad – when it puts its ideological and emotional needs above the compromises needed to win. Usually, it’s Labour that does this. Now, it’s the Tories. She is their Jeremy Corbyn.
What to expect next
What will she do? First, she will continue with all the worst elements of Johnson’s administration: the moral mutilation of the Rwanda policy, the constitutional vandalism of the Northern Ireland Protocol policy, the needless isolationism of the attacks on Europe, the clear indications of an assault on the European Convention of Human Rights.
She will also, if she is true to her word, splash out on countless tax cuts and thereby actively stoke inflation. In some cases, it’ll help with the cost of living. But if that was the incentive, the assistance would be targeted through benefits or at those on low incomes. The key beneficiaries of Truss’s proposals, on the other hand, are those earning over £100,000 a year. Someone earning £140,000 would save more money than someone earning £20,000 – a frankly insane proposition and yet one she is currently making.
All of this is run-of-the-mill leadership-contest idiocy. But in one eye-opening area, Truss broke from the ranks. She told the Sunday Telegraph that the Government should “look again” at the Bank of England’s mandate “to make sure it is tough enough on inflation”.
This suggests – it’s so vague that suggestion is all we can aspire to – that she intends to undermine the independence of the Bank put in place by Gordon Brown and left well alone by every chancellor and prime minister since. The reason they left it alone is because it worked. If someone with no economic literacy comes along and starts tearing up the economy’s institutional framework during a series of procyclical tax cuts, we are going to be in a very scary place indeed.
You’ll be able to hear the corks popping at Labour headquarters from the Outer Hebrides if Truss secures the leader. She will be the weakest candidate put in charge of the Conservative Party in living memory. Her inadequacies are so vast and all-encompassing that no thesaurus will do them justice. We will have to invent new words to describe the full extent of her failures. Watching her try to lead the country will be like asking a hamster to invent a space programme.
But for the UK, it’ll be a disaster on an epic scale. At exactly the moment when people most need help, the Conservatives seem set on electing someone who has no idea how to do so, nor any capacity to deliver it if she did. We’re all in a lot of trouble. The car is veering off the road and the driver has gone completely mad.
What to Watch This Week: Cannon Arm and the Arcade Quest
This beautiful Danish documentary, about a bunch of middle aged nerds in Denmark trying to play the arcade game Gyruss for 100 hours straight, just came out to rent on streaming services. It contains delights beyond my ability to fully describe. Two long shots – one of a man eating a banana and another of him doing a wee outside – are quite literally some of the best things I’ve seen on screen this year. Another, in which he has a haircut while he speculates absent-mindedly about quantum fields, seemed to almost transcend cinema.
But the nicest thing about this film is how supportive the nerds are towards each other. They don’t really have the ability to speak about their feelings, but they express their love for one another through their actions. Eccentric, affirming and utterly joyous.
What to Listen to This Week: The Rest is Politics
This podcast, with Alastair Campbell and former cabinet minister Rory Stewart, is always worth listening to, but this week they’ve got Keir Starmer on and… well, that guy has eaten his Weetabix. He is also, and I for one was rather surprised by this, on very sweary form, managing to fit more “*” into one minute than anything I write in this newsletter. Worth your time.
What to Read This Weekend: Maurice, by E. M. Forster
I’m a Forster fanboy, so let’s get that out the way first. If I had to write a list of my five favourite books, he’d use up two slots, and this isn’t even one of them. He is, simply put, the finest literary writer in the English language and, just as importantly, one of the kindest and most humane. Forster makes you a better person.
Maurice, the closest he got to an autobiographical novel, is one of his weakest works, but it is more admirable than its detractors give it credit for. It is yearning, and delicate, and full of unbridled indignation at English hypocrisy. “He stared at the ceiling with wrinkled mouth and eyes, understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven.”
I think we can all empathise with that this week.
