All dressed up and no place to go. By lunchtime there were a few hundred people at a loose end inside the Birmingham conference centre. Workmen were still putting the finishing touches to the exhibit stands. There was no rush. Most Tories have wisely decided to give this year’s conference a swerve. No point in depressing yourself unduly. Better to put your feet up at home.
Then, for those who had made the effort, there was precious little to do. Whether it was just to contain the damage or a realisation there was little demand, the schedule for the main hall has been limited to just two hours a day. In the graveyard slot of 4-6pm. And even that feels too long.
But you can trust Michael Gove to fill a vacuum. The disruptor-in-chief never knowingly misses an opportunity to make mischief, and this year is appearing at 12 different fringe events. His goal is simple. To say over and over again that Liz Truss is bonkers. Coming from him. That she has no mandate for the 45p tax rate. That unfunded tax cuts for the rich are immoral. That he would happily vote down any parts of the budget he didn’t like. And the implication was there were plenty more like him.
In the same fringe meeting, Jake Berry – the latest occupant of the chairman of the Tory party non-job – merely said Gove and others would lose the whip and that if people really wanted to deal with the energy crisis they should earn more. Charming.
There were plenty of spare seats as events finally started in the main hall. After Penny Mordaunt had made herself cry with a rather cliched and prosaic tribute to the Queen, it was left to Berry and regional mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen to not mention the economy and to talk about the importance of levelling up. Guys, you were supposed to have thought about this stuff three years ago.
It took Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker to interrupt the snoozefest. He apologised to Ireland and the EU for previously not taking their concerns seriously. The UK government was signalling a thaw in its Brexit negotiations. Who would have had money on ERG hard man Baker being the peacemaker? It was certainly a first. The first time any Brexiter had ever said sorry for Brexit. Keep them coming.
One person who did seem to be living her best life was Liz Truss herself. Though God knows why. Maybe she’s thrilled to have discovered she’s even more unpopular than she hoped. That could be one for her and her therapist. Anyway, with interest rates rocketing, opinion polls tanking and the Tory party flatlining, you’d have thought the last thing the prime minister would have wanted was to look chipper for the party conference and negotiate the traditional leader’s interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on the Sunday politics TV show.
Think again. Truss came out all smirks blazing. She has no natural affect, so her artificial stupidity must have been preset to happy. Her speech and mannerisms were still more robotic than human, but she was determinedly upbeat throughout. To manage to be upbeat and catatonic at the same time is quite the achievement. Look on the bright side. Everyone might be feeling broke and insecure, but at least she was having a good time. She’s a gas. But she’s inert. Radon Liz.
“We would be in serious trouble if I’d done nothing,” Truss insisted, when Kuenssberg asked her about her disastrous unfunded tax cuts. Radon Liz’s capacity for grasping the wrong end of any stick that’s put in front of her is one of her few obvious talents. Er … it’s because you did something that we’re up shit creek, everyone shouted. If you’d left tax alone and just stuck to energy, the markets wouldn’t have crashed and you could have saved the Bank of England from making a £65bn bailout.
Trying to get any information out of Truss is hard work. Even going back to basics – “Your name is … ?” – doesn’t yield much. But she would just about admit that she could have done more to prepare people for her mini-budget. Like mentioning at some point during the summer’s leadership campaign that she was batshit crazy enough to borrow to pay for tax cuts for the most well-off.
The thing with Radon Liz is that she is so exquisitely dim, she imagines herself to be a one-off genius. Not just six steps ahead of the rest of the country, but often six steps ahead of herself. And certainly far ahead of the financial markets, who had been unable to comprehend the fiscal brilliance of unfunded tax cuts.
Stop to analyse for a moment and almost everything she said was nonsense. Verifiably wrong. She didn’t even seem to recognise anything was amiss with her cognitive functions when she blatantly contradicted herself in the same sentence. Try this one: “We’re cutting public services to increase spending on public services.” At best, this suggests that the big plan is to kill off a generation of people on benefits – pour encourager les autres – so that at some unspecified point in the future a Tory government may decide to help the less well-off again.
On and on she went. The 45p tax rate cut had been nothing to do with her; it was all Kamikwasi Kwarteng’s idea. The first she had heard of it was in the Commons. But she couldn’t be arsed to change it. Budgets are done in a confidential way and the chancellor had only consulted on a need-to-know basis. Like his hedge-fund mates who had a vested interest in shorting the pound. And no, she wasn’t going to let anyone see the OBR report any time soon, because she didn’t want to put them to any extra work.
The interview ended with Radon Liz sampling John Cage’s 4’33 when Kuenssberg asked how many people had voted for her idiocy. Though, to be fair, it could just be that her batteries were dying. “What do you mean by that?” Truss eventually asked. Computer said no. She hadn’t a clue. Sometimes it’s a mystery to her how she became prime minister. There again, it’s increasingly a mystery to the rest of us. It’s now a fact we’d all be far better off without her.
