Liz Truss, a walking mushroom cloud bobbing giddily along while laying waste to whatever is in her path, has launched a new think tank called Popular Conservatism, or ‘PopCon’. PopCon sounds almost fun, doesn’t it? It won’t be, other than in a nuclear hellscape kind of way. But it may well have an effect on Conservative policies and therefore on how the country is run (for this year at least), and therefore on, well, us. Because think tanks can be as powerful as they are mysterious, acting as semi-autonomous body of experts who conduct research and provide advice for political parties. There are a lot of them about. Here’s some of the most notable:
So Liz Truss’s PopCon is being billed not as a think tank but as a “movement” aimed at restoring “democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular conservative policies”. Sounds like someone still has sour grapes. And that someone is bringing along members of her former blink-and-you-missed-it-but-still-have-to-suffer-the-consequences Cabinet, including Jacob Rees-Mogg. Among its aims are to restore trust to politics. Yes, Liz Truss wants to restore trust to politics. Maybe they can all have a good hard think about whether the electorate will buy that one.
