It was the doggiest of dog days. Almost nothing stirred in the 40C Westminster heat. Only the criminally insane and Tory MPs showed their faces. Though it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two. First on manoeuvres was the flatlining Liz Truss. A politician totally without effect. And memory. An ideologue without ideas. Primitive AI modelled on a child’s model of Margaret Thatcher. With a question mark over the intelligence. So much so, it’s hard to know if she really is that dim or if there’s a cunning plan to destroy the Conservative party from within. She’s positioned herself as the continuity Boris candidate but seems to spend most of her time trashing the government’s economic record. Control, alt, delete. Liz is barely capable of speaking in basic sentences. Her language is staccato. Incoherent. Even she doesn’t seem to understand what she is saying. Her newest pronouncement was that she was going to buy lots of new tanks and increase defence spending to 3% of GDP. All this while cutting taxes. Truss seems to think you don’t have to pay for anything you want. Or just by saying something, she makes it so. Elsewhere, Penny Mordaunt was trying to kickstart her faltering campaign by promising to level up the north. You may have thought that many “red wall” MPs would have heard that one before. Still, it doesn’t do any harm to promise. Even if you’re not going to deliver. Promises are cheap in any election. She also said she would build more houses. She didn’t seem surprised that no one in government had thought of that over the past 12 years. Mordaunt’s campaign took a hit when Tobias “Cat Killer” Ellwood had the whip withdrawn for not voting with the government on Monday night’s confidence vote. Ellwood had a decent enough explanation, namely that he was stuck in Moldova and couldn’t get home in time, even though he had been somehow planning to fly back for further meetings. But Boris Johnson wasn’t buying that. There’s no love lost between Cat Killer and The Convict. To be fair, Boris knows a thing or two about thin excuses. As foreign secretary, he fled to Afghanistan to avoid a vote on the third runway at Heathrow. In any case, that was one fewer vote for Penny.
Ready4Rish! – totally normal bloke! – merely sent out a press release saying he had heard there was a place called Scotland and he was going to make sure it stayed part of the union. He knew this because he had commissioned an opinion poll that had surprisingly found he was the person most likely to beat Keir Starmer. Who wasn’t about to give the SNP a second referendum anyway. But we’re at the stage of the leadership campaign where any non-story will do. Over on LBC, Matt Hancock was filling in for James O’Brien. Car crash radio. Listener after listener phoned in to say how useless Door Matt was. And all Hancock could do was agree. By nodding. It’s radio, Matt. Not that Hancock was bothered. The man has no shame. His purpose in life is to be humiliated. It’s just a race to see who is going to do the humiliating. Matt or everyone else. The main purpose of his three-hour slot was to get any attention he could. Mostly negative. Even as he was abused, he happily burbled on about how much he adored Rish! He seemed to think that his endorsement was a gamechanger. It’s going to come as a dreadful shock when he’s not offered a cabinet job. Still, he’s always got Gina. She really is the luckiest woman alive. Across the road from parliament at the Policy Exchange there were faint flickers of life from David Frost and Michael Gove. If not of much coherent thought. The event was entitled What Do We Want from the Next Prime Minister and Frosty couldn’t seem to make up his mind between Johnson and Truss. Part of him is yet to accept that the Tories have chosen to remove The Convict. As is Johnson himself. He spent most of his last cabinet reciting a delusional list of non-achievements to near-silent colleagues. Frost is almost The Convict’s equal as a fantasist. He talks of the need to retain the purity of Brexit, with no recognition that he was in large part responsible for the fudged Northern Ireland deal. Rather, he blames everyone around him for agreeing to the deal he himself negotiated. Gove was not much better. He just said he was backing Kemi Badenoch. His main reason was that she disagreed with him on almost everything. Which should have made me a contender for the Tory leadership because I disagree with him on almost everything. It didn’t seem to have occurred to either man that the reason there was an election taking place was because the Tories had belatedly realised The Convict was a totally dishonest narcissistic sociopath. The bar for his successor really is that low. Just tell the truth a bit more often, try not to be corrupt and pay attention to the details. But even that looked beyond most of the candidates. There’s just a collective sense of denial at the top of the Conservative party – something Frost and Gove were only too happy to indulge by completely rubbishing the achievements of the governments in which they had served. It was an exercise in total dissociation for the purists. Down on committee corridor, the other Tory MPs were hauling themselves away from the air con to take part in the fourth round of voting. Tom Tugendhat’s crew arrived mob handed while Gavin Williamson, desperate to be thought of as a king-maker, waited almost until the ballot had closed. At 3pm on Tuesday Graham Brady announced the results. Badenoch was out. Just as everyone expected. Truss was the big winner and looked set to make it to the last two with Rish! The Tories must have a death wish.