Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer – that’s a decent rule of thumb. And you wouldn’t imagine it’s any less likely to be true if the person you’re asking is Liz Truss. Last week, at the News Xchange conference in Dublin, RTÉ journalist David McCullagh asked her whether she “could see the funny side” of the Daily Star’s “Lizzie Lettuce” campaign. This was the stunt where a live webcam was pointed at a lettuce to see whether it could outlast Truss’s faltering administration – it turned out it could. The Star got the idea from a quip in the Economist, which is an unexpected piece of media cross-fertilisation.
I would say that is a stupid question to ask Liz Truss. How likely is she to see the funny side? It is a joke that was made entirely at her expense and gained widespread coverage at a very painful point in her life – a weird combined zenith and nadir of her career. If she was capable of chuckling at that joke, she should be sectioned.
But I’m not sure her answer was up to her usual stupid standards. “I don’t think it’s funny, I just think it’s puerile,” she said. I mean, it’s not a clever answer. A clever answer would be: “I don’t think I was the one they were hoping to amuse.” Her implication that funny and puerile are mutually exclusive qualities is unfortunate and betrays both humourlessness and a lack of intellectual rigour. Still, I wouldn’t say it was actively stupid. It was basically accurate: she didn’t think it was funny and it was puerile.
It was also funny, and two of the reasons for that were its puerility and the fact that its target was unamused. It was taking the piss out of her. That would have lost its comic force if she hadn’t minded. Her discomfiture at the irreverence is crucial to the joke. By asking the stupid question and getting a slightly cross answer, all McCullagh was really doing was cracking the joke again.
I don’t know how much the conference attendees paid for the privilege of watching this exchange, but it made the papers on the same day as the news that, at Truss’s last high-profile conference appearance, the Conservative party conference of 2022, which took up nearly 10% of her premiership, journalists were charged a £125 attendance fee. This powerfully recontextualises all the moaning about West End ticket prices. This was no Book of Mormon. Any standing ovations had to be induced by Taser.
That conference was the occasion when Truss, her government already tottering, called out the “anti-growth coalition”, which turned out to include everyone on Earth apart from her and Kwasi Kwarteng. Her closing speech started with a paean of praise to Birmingham: “It’s fantastic to see the cranes across the skyline building new buildings.” I think that phrase might be the worst thing she did as prime minister. “Building new buildings”? Seriously? That got past the first draft? I’d say it sounds like it was written by AI but that would be an incredibly dated remark. There’s no way AI would let such inelegance through. It sounds like what it was: something that was written by an idiot.
She also said of Birmingham “This is what a city with a Tory mayor looks like”, which I think was unfortunate. I’m not sure “Vote Tory if you want the place where you live to look like Birmingham” is the right slogan to shore up the “blue wall”.
It’s an act of sadism to make people pay to hear such drivel. The policy of charging was first introduced last year but the news that it is to be continued for this year’s conference in Manchester has caused consternation in the media. The Foreign Press Association organised an open letter, signed by nearly 300 organisations from more than 60 countries, condemning the decision: “We believe that a fundamental tenet of a free and democratic society is allowing journalists – from all over the world – to freely report on matters of public interest. We have not found any comparable charges in any other country in the world, let alone in any other democracy.”
This is undeniable and shaming. Still, what’s the downside if the press just don’t turn up? The reporting of party conference season is perhaps the bleakest phase in the annual news cycle. The summer is over, the nights are drawing in and the papers are full of photos of politicians standing at podiums in front of vacuous slogans, being applauded to the rafters for platitudinous or divisive remarks. I hate it. Why would anyone be prepared to pay in order to give the Conservatives’ frenzy of self-congratulation wider coverage? Let their conference be a secret, like all their lockdown parties were supposed to be.
The weirdest aspect of this new approach is the implied admission that it’s not in the Conservative party’s interests for its conference to be widely reported. The general public being fully informed of what happens when the Tories all get together and discuss their policies, their ethical standpoint, their aspirations for Britain and the world, is apparently not something that Conservative central office thinks will help their cause.
I reckon they’re right. I always find the sight of the Tory party conference absolutely dreadful. “Who are these arseholes with their horrible ideas and complete absence of self-presentation skills?” is what I always think. But I must say I’m surprised to hear that that’s what the Tories also think themselves. They always seem so self-satisfied. But now it turns out that’s all just empty bluster covering up a deep-seated self-loathing.
Keeping the lowest possible profile seems to be their strategy for winning the next election. Just stay under the radar and hopefully about 40% of those who turn up to vote will put a cross in the Conservatives’ box out of habit, or because it comes alphabetically before their rivals. The lesson of the past couple of years has been learned: they only ever lose votes when they become noticeable.
