The minister for food, Mark Spencer, was on Sky News discussing Liz Truss’s phone and the security breaches that led to its being locked in a government safe, like a lump of uranium. “We all talk on personal phones, don’t we?,” he said. “I ring my wife. Maybe there’s some little man in China listening to the conversation between me and my wife.” I guess what stood out wasn’t the disconnected randomness – yeah, minister, sure, you calling your wife and the former foreign secretary calling her officials to talk about Ukraine, those two things are definitely the same – but that “little man” and the strange immaturity of tone. He is a minister, so why does he sound like a big baby bigot? Is he definitely real? He must be – there he is on the telly, unless the clip is a deep fake – but if you were going to that much trouble, would you start on the minister for food?
Meanwhile, the former Conservative MP for Dorset East Sir Michael Take CBE, was featured on the website of the Daily Mail, sparking outrage with his remarks about sewage dumping in the sea, viz: “This is sewage being sensibly dispersed at St Agnes in Cornwall today. You’ll see the beach is empty so NO ONE is being harmed. This would of course have been stopped by the nit-picking EU.”
A sharper-eyed news source might have double-checked whether that constituency even existed, though fair play, North, West and South Dorset all do, so it’s a mistake any of us could have made, had we cleared the hurdle of that name without wondering whether it was a hilarious play on “taking the mick”. Yet I have an unfamiliar sensation of sympathy with the MailOnline. We are in endgame territory with the Conservative party: it is genuinely hard to distinguish which MP is real and which is a spoof. If you want to know who is an anti-vaxxer and who has just had enough of experts for parodic purposes, it’s getting to the point where you’d have to go back to the pages of Hansard, and a time before the internet.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
