Nice work if you can get it. Boris Johnson has just returned from holiday. Not that it would much matter if he had stayed in Slovenia. Because it’s not as if he’s doing much at home. Thank god we’re not in a cost of living crisis with fuel bills now set to top £4,200. Then we really might be up shit creek while the paddle watched Netflix. Most prime ministers might have done things rather differently. Seen out their last few weeks in office at No 10 with dignity and go on vacation in September. To protect their legacy if nothing else. But the Convict sees things through the prism of his own narcissism. His legacy has always been about his own self-gratification. So he takes his pleasures where and when he feels like it. He wants it. He takes it. He won’t pay the price. That’s for Lords Brownlow and Bamford: bank-rollers in chief to Team Johnson. And right now the Convict can’t be bothered to do anything. Not even a photo op. So we’re left with a half-asleep government. Drifting pointlessly around in decreasing circles. The Sargasso regime. No one is even pretending to be in charge. Too difficult. Too hot. Though arguably an improvement on what we might have had if even Nadhim Zahawi had been awake. And in place of responsible adults, the UK has been blessed with the tedium of the Tory leadership psychodrama. Hard to believe we still have the best part of a month of it to go. Far worse that we will have to live through it. Where is the induced coma when you need it? It’s almost as if the country is being gaslit by the Tories. That we are being presented with two possible leaders, both of whom are completely unreliable narrators of their own campaigns. In the blue corner we have Liz Truss. One day she says something, the next day she denies saying it.
First we had Radon Liz insisting that people who lived in the north should be paid less. Then she said that she had been misinterpreted. Even though she had been quoted from her own press release. For someone who claims to be straight-talking she sure does get frequently misunderstood. As with the handouts she wasn’t going to give. But now will. Or may not. Or may. You decide. She hasn’t a clue. She’ll just say anything. The tabula rasa. She hasn’t even yet worked out that tax cuts don’t benefit the 40% of people who don’t pay tax. Then, in the other blue corner, we have Rishi Sunak. Rish! is also completely hopeless. As the long shot in a two-horse race, he’ll also say any old nonsense on the offchance it goes down well with the Tory members. So his answer to levelling up is to funnel money from deprived areas to Tunbridge Wells. Er … And he’ll fund more help for people struggling with the cost of living by finding £15bn of efficiency savings that everyone else hadn’t noticed. Sadly for us, there are more hustings at which the same old – and some new – lies will be told. Starting on Tuesday night at Darlington, the only red wall location on this farewell tour. The host for the evening, TalkTV’s Tom Newton Dunn, tried to break the ice with a gag. The Tories seem to have a leadership contest every three years: so maybe everyone would be all back at another hustings in 2025. This was a little too close to the knuckle and almost no one laughed. It was also wildly optimistic. At this rate we could be back sooner. Then came Sunak. “Woo hoo,” he whooped. He even clapped himself. This was Rish! at his slickest. Much like the sales manager giving the keynote speech at the annual conference when he knows the entire audience is just waiting for the free bar. There was a bit of establishing his northern credentials – tough for a boy from Southampton via Winchester – and then it was just the same pitch everyone had heard time and again before. A bit on woke culture. A bit on hard work and patriotism as if they were a Conservative preserve and then a stretch on the perils of inflation. It’s going to come as a hell of a shock to him when he discovers he was chancellor for most of the last two and a half years. Come the questions, he also stuck to the script. There is almost nothing he hasn’t yet been asked so most of his answers came fully formed. There was no limit to the efficiency savings he could make, so all state aid would come without any borrowing. It was just a wonder he had been so inefficient in government. Nor was he embarrassed by his wealth. He just wanted to make every member of the audience a billionaire. Truss was altogether more wooden. The inert Radon Liz. Even though she too basically gave the same opening spiel as at all the other hustings, she managed to sound as if she was reading from a script for the first time. Though she did commit to making the UK free of the ECHR. She didn’t explain how she was going to square this with maintaining the Good Friday agreement. She ended by bigging up agriculture. It was a wonder she didn’t spontaneously say “cheese”. Her attitude to the questions was more defensive than Rish!’s. She seemed to think Newton Dunn was some kind of leftwing plant. She wasn’t going to get locked into a discussion of commie economics on handouts. Tax cuts would grow the economy and that was that. And being tough on Russia would reduce fuel prices. She didn’t care if people couldn’t pay their energy bills. Well, not today anyway. She might change her mind in the future. But that was her prerogative. Finally Newton Dunn wound things up and put everyone out of their misery. Two hours of our lives we will never get back again. Until Thursday when the exercise in futility kicks off again. It’s democracy, Jim. But not as we know it.