I’m still heavily sedated after the triumphant return of Liz Truss to the Conservative party conference, less than a calendar year after she caused an unfortunate lab accident involving the entire country. The spectacle is so absolutely mad that it has almost pushed through to the other side and become an impressive tale of resilience that you might use to inspire kids. “See that lady there, she fell off the horse, but she got right back on it like nothing happened.” But no. Sorry, I’m simply not quite there yet. Liz Truss is the human equivalent of honking out a joke about a terrorist attack while they’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble. She is a walking “too soon?”. The only place you should be seeing her this October is as a Halloween costume (foam cheese wedge not included).
Instead, she’s selling out the Last of Us suite at the Tories’ Manchester conference hotel. Hand on heart, I would say Truss’s attempt to reclaim her back catalogue is going slightly less well than Taylor Swift’s. I don’t know if you managed to catch her speech about how to create growth (Liz’s version), but you may have heard that it was a rendition for which conference attendees were queueing up the stairs and down the corridors. This certainly serves as a reminder that the questionably popular should always hold their events in small rooms. Tell you what, if Truss can sell out one night in a single 400-seat regional theatre to non-rubberneckers, then I’ll pretend this is her Eras tour. Until then, we might have to face the fact that being popular within the very odd world of Conservative party conference is the equivalent of having infectious diarrhoea pretty much anywhere else.
