'If the Tory Party was a person, it would be locked up for its own safety'
Imagine the worst idea you ever had - the one that led to a painful and costly divorce, multiple fractures, a persistent intimate rash - and then picture yourself doing it again.
Everyone you know would shout "WHAT, NO, SIT ON HIM, DAVE". Whether it's remarrying a velociraptor, jumping off a 20ft wall drunk a second time, or thinking you can cancel out herpes by catching syphilis, repeating your worst idea - even considering it - is a clear and unambiguous sign of madness.
And yet today Liz Truss will be the most popular draw at the Tory Party conference. The things she says will set the tone for policy discussions. The Prime Minister will be asked to respond. And Truss will be all over the papers in the same way as a pile-up on the M62, only without a single crumb of sympathy for those caught in the mangled wreckage.
Liz Truss is the most spectacularly dim, damaging and unsuccessful Prime Minister the Tories have been cursed with in their entire history. There is nothing she has ever said or done that has made any damned sense. If they are listening to her with anything other than horror, then they are either all in need of pills, or have necked too much Special-K already.
"Have you got any? I could do with some" (PA)But the enormous queues that formed for Liz's 'growth rally' are not even the worst of it.
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The Chancellor had to fly to Manchester because of the train strikes the Chancellor refuses to resolve, and was praised for proving the HS2 high-speed rail line wasn't needed - the same HS2 that's cost us £70bn already, thanks to their indecisions.
There are so few people in attendance that the massive conference hall has been shut down, with a small press area repurposed for speeches, and STILL the Defence Secretary couldn't fill it when discussing the war in Ukraine.
The Health Secretary has been giving virtual reality tours of 40 new hospitals that haven't been built, the Transport Secretary says closing railway ticket offices will help passengers who can't buy tickets, and Far Right conspiracies have overtaken the Conservatives to such an extent that MP Danny Kruger declared at one event that a "world government" was being created by an anti-democratic cabal to protect us from the next pandemic.
Nurse! The Tories are out of bed again!A survey shows the Conservative Party membership still think Boris Johnson - a man who achieved not a single thing of note, whose every infrastructure idea was bunk and whose every promise was reneged on before it was even uttered - is the best PM they ever had. That's like me saying Andy Coulson is the finest journalist ever to wash up in Fleet Street. It's like the BBC putting up Jimmy Savile's picture in the canteen. It's LUNACY.
Into this maelstrom of madness trips Rishi Sunak, a man who has been foreshortened in every possible way. PM without an election, without a future, without any ideas and without the ability to grasp what has not previously been inputted, he looks at the issues of his day - climate change, war, economic stagnation and public services potholed by 13 years of mismanagement - and the best thing he can come up with is a refusal to speculate on how he'll fix it.
When Rishi is asked if he can win the general election, his mouth says "of course!" while his eyes scream for a mercy killing. He must be crossing off the calendar until he can go and live in California and make pots of lovely cash. And we'll not have long to wait to find out why he wanted the job in the first place, and what tiny financial regulation he has tweaked that will enrich him and his family even further.
Because if he didn't have some cruel and Machiavellian reason to take over No10, then the only motivation can be that he wanted the most powerful and important job in the country at a time of deep national crisis without a single idea of how to fix anything. That's like your house being on fire, and the fire engine turns up, and someone dressed as a firefighter gets out, and you say "thank goodness! Can you put the fire out?" And the reply is "no mate, I'm a window cleaner".
And what's worse, he DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A SPONGE.
If this were just a death-spiral we could watch from afar it would be funny. With an entire country sucked into the screaming vortex along with Mogg, Dorries and the sort of people booked to go on GB News, the Conservative Party's inability to even look for reality, never mind grasp it, is why there are no solutions and no thought being put into what comes next. Lunatics live in the moment, repeat the same actions obsessively, gaze inside and not out of the window. That's who you've got running the country - the entire supporting cast of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, without Jack Nicholson to give them a good shake.
And this affects the next government too. Because this lot are so bonkers, the next lot has less reason to work harder or offer better. Keir Starmer's Labour is virtually guaranteed a win without a clear promise on free school meals, on HS2, on NHS waiting lists or benefits. Faced with a patient rather than an opponent, Starmer does not need to be radical, firm, or definitive. And that makes for bad governments, poor legislation, and worse outcomes.
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When it enters Opposition, the Tory Party will be utterly unable to oppose, riven by extremist factions and in as much of a mess, if not more, than when Corbynism divided the Labour party. Some might cheer a decade in the wilderness for the cruellest politicians we've seen in a lifetime, but it'll also mean a decade of flabby thinking across the political spectrum, and we'll be reliant on a few backbenchers who've held onto their sanity and a majority to make the government have any second thoughts at all.
Love them or loathe them, when the Tories descend into madness we all lose out in the long run. Our best hope is they find the right care, from kind and thoughtful people, to make a recovery. If they can't climb back out of the rabbit hole they're currently gibbering into, someone should lock the Tories in a padded cell, for their safety and ours.
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