See it from the point of view of the Fearless Four. You’ve already seen off the mighty challenge of Priti Patel and Mel Stride, latter-day Tory titans both, so now you’re through to the Birmingham eliminator.
You’ve disappeared through the wormhole into the mephitic swamp where any intelligent life comes to die. Where only the clinically deranged and terminally deluded are to be found. Where the sanest voice is Michael Fabricant’s rug pleading with its owner to be allowed to go home. Welcome to the Tory party conference.
But this is your big moment. Four days when the Tory party has nothing better to do than to turn its gaze in on itself. Four days when you can take centre stage. When your narcissism can go unchecked. You’ve been dreaming about this for weeks. People actually pretending to be interested in what you have to say.
Just for this week your existential futility is kept in check. In Birmingham, reality is put on hold – that whichever mediocrity becomes the new leader, they will still be an irrelevance. A stopgap at best. The new Michael Howard. The deadbeat’s deadbeat.
You’ve spent the last couple of weeks preparing. Writing speeches. Buying clothes. Or finding someone to buy them for you. Anticipating hostile questions. Killer one-liners. Most importantly, you’ve ratcheted up the madness. It’s almost ancient history since anyone won a Tory leadership conference through moderation. Now you have to be full-on batshit crazy. No idea can ever be too idiotic for the Tory members who have the final say.
Then you make it to conference and find that the maddest possible thing has already been said. Nothing you can say could possibly trump it. And it hasn’t been said by any of the four hopefuls. It’s been said by Boris Johnson in the serialisation of his almost entirely fictional memoir. The one that is written so badly it could have been done by ChatGPT. As ever, Boris has done the least amount of work possible and still he outshines those he has left behind. When it comes to attention-seeking sociopathy, he has no equal.
Desperate for a headline, Johnson declared that he – along with Bear Grylls and Ant Middleton – had intended to invade the Netherlands during the Covid pandemic to steal a lorry load of vaccines which they would then take back to the UK on a submarine. Having first annexed Germany and stormed the European parliament in Brussels. Hell, what was the point of Brexit if we weren’t going to declare war on all our former allies. Keep mainland Europe British. It’s what they want.
Here’s the thing. We all know this is lies. Boris knows it’s lies. But it still gets published because it’s more fun, more interesting than reality. There’s no one else who could get away with this. The only leader the Tories have really liked in the past 10 years has been one that is congenitally unable to tell the truth. Read the other so-called highlights of the serialisation – the Daily Mail have been robbed blind – and the lasting impression is that Johnson regrets nothing. He just wishes he had dared to tell even bigger lies.
Which has left the Fearless Four in something of a quandary. They are boxed in. Nowhere to go. Their madness will only look half-arsed. Too tame for Tories given new hope by the thought of starting a third world war fuelled by Covid dreams. So all the hopefuls could do was go through the motions. They were beaten before they had really got started.
If the answer is Robert Jenrick, then it’s odds on you have been asking the wrong question. But whether the Tories like it or not, Honest Bob is the clear favourite to win the leadership contest. And he was the first out of the blocks on the Sunday morning media round.
He won’t count this as his finest hour. Not just because the former immigration minister can’t point to any career success – failure is no bar to entry in this contest – but because he didn’t really have anything to say. He failed the insanity test by sounding almost normal. He didn’t even back Donald Trump. He hasn’t got the hang of this.
At least the Tories have Kemi Badenoch. Having implied that immigrants should be banned from entry to the UK for not liking Israel, KemiKazi went for broke by insisting that all women who had babies were basically spongers. Only getting pregnant to hoover up maternity pay. Despite the fact that just five years ago she was extolling the benefits of her maternity leave. Sometimes you wonder if, for all her hatred of others, the person she hates the most is herself. The Tories are flirting with danger.
This prompted a small reaction from the other three, all of whom said she had gone too far. Though if Boris had said this – and hell, he’s had enough experience of partners on maternity leave – they would probably have cheered.
Honest Bob tried to up the ante by claiming it was the EHRC that was responsible for small-boat crossings. He still hasn’t worked out that the E in EHRC stands for European. Neither James Cleverly nor Tom Tugendhat really got a word in. Jimmy Dimly tried to claim that having done the job of home and foreign secretary badly qualified him to be a bad leader of the opposition. Tug was just left to hawk his artificial spray tan from his concession stall.
The best news for the Fearless Four is that all this took place inside an echo chamber. Compared with previous years, the conference is a ghost town. The security is to keep people inside the compound, not to stop the unwanted coming in.
The main event of the afternoon was a session entitled: Dispatches from the election campaign. It was hardly a truth and reconciliation committee. More a coming together of the weak and the fallen, trying to console themselves that the public still loved them really. It’s not you, it’s me. The Tories haven’t quite grasped that no one gives a toss what Penny Mordaunt and Daniel Hannan have to say any more. If they ever did.
We also got through a full hour without anyone mentioning Liz Truss, Partygate or Brexit. Reform UK was dismissed in a single aside. It seems the Conservatives have a way to go before the collective synapses interact. The biggest queue of the day was for Rishi Sunak. Here for one day, only to show slides of his summer hols in California. Says it all, really.
Taking the Lead by John Crace (Little, Brown Book Group, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
