Roll up, roll up – roll up a fat one for the launch of the Popular Conservatives, apparently a new vehicle for “the Trussite wing of the party”. I know what you’re thinking. Wing? WING?! Given everything that happened, surely Liz Truss can’t boast a wing? By rights, the wing it would be most analogous to is the type found floating amid other debris somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, it seems to be holding a launch in central London.
In advance of the event, a spokesperson for Truss said: “Liz remains very popular with the grassroots in the country and always enjoys engaging with them.” A statement that makes me picture Truss lying down on a lawn, burrowing her face in it, and doing her cheese riff to the roots of the grass. Surely a less deranged image than the one where she’s a national treasure.
Anyway, we’ll come to the actual event in a minute. Regrettably, noises off to the production included the former Truss chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announcing this very morning that he would not be standing again at the next election. I see. Someone who went to university with Kwarteng told me of the night he slept on their student house sofa after a party, vomited on it, then simply got up and left in the morning without cleaning it up. In many ways the country now lives on that sofa. Kwarteng leaves our politics poorer than when he found it. Metaphorically, yes – but more importantly, literally. Nevertheless, a sizeable chunk of his allies can still be found honking that the thing with Kwasi is that he’s almost “too clever”.
Liz Truss is too a-lot-of-things. As one pollster put it of her take-all-comers unpopularity score: “It is ironic that Popular Conservatism couldn’t find a more unpopular spokesperson if they actively tried.” Certainly the Popular Conservatives’ take on popularity is the only context in which fellow PopCon Jacob Rees-Mogg could feel like Taylor Swift.
Perhaps the Popular Conservatives are mindful that certain high-profile supporters (Andrea Jenkyns) really put the moron into oxymoron. Either way, they’ve chosen as leader a person that no one normal has ever heard of: Mark Littlewood, former Lib Dem press officer turned libertarian thinktanker turned … whatever this is. Mark’s launch speech repeatedly referred to “Conservativism”. Not actually a word, but perhaps that doesn’t matter.
As for Nigel Farage, he was – how to put this credibly? – present but not involved. The former Ukip/Brexit party leader was keen to stress, with a sledgehammer twinkle, that he’d only be there in his capacity as a GB News journalist, just as he supposedly only attended last October’s Conservative party conference in his capacity as a GB News journalist. I know what he means – simply being a journalist means you can turn up at all the most terrible events for a gawp. I call it a “get into jail free” card, and have used it myself to attend a full set of the times Nigel resigned from leading one or other of his parties. In fact, I note the launch of the PopCons was itself held in one of the many venues in which I have seen Nigel resign.
Even so, let’s just remind ourselves of the full updated CV. Nigel Farage has now been a banker, a politician and a journalist. In order to amass all six infinity stones of the LinkedIn profile, of course, he will need to swell that resume with estate agent, traffic warden and sex offender. But look, if anyone can do it, Nigel can. Underestimate him at your peril, and so on.
In terms of other personnel, PopCon launch speakers included Rees-Mogg (hates the nanny state but still has a nanny) and the woman standing in Chris Grayling’s old seat (huge clown shoes to fill). The audience included David Frost and Priti Patel. Alas, Trussite Simon Clarke had got the hook after what Mark Littlewood called “a lone wolf operation to call for Rishi Sunak to resign”. “We didn’t want that to be a part of the story of our launch,” Littlewood continued. “We’re about ideas, not personnel.”
As for those ideas, the group hail from the party that has been in power for the past 13 years, and for 31 of the past 44 years, but would now like to “reform Britain’s bureaucratic structures to allow Conservative values to flourish”. They have rightly identified that the key question on most British lips is: just when are these people going to catch a break? Can we please get them some sympathetic bureaucracy already? For now, the PopCons officially join the Conservative party’s so-called five families, meaning there are now six families, which doesn’t really work. Then again, none of it really works, does it?
Still, let’s play out with Liz Truss, who, we were told before the event, would be speaking “from the heart” in “a big riff”. A hugely exciting prospect, given how catastrophic even some of Liz’s tightly scripted speeches have been. Comedically speaking, Truss is the ultimate improv player – a bit-terrorist capable of blowing up markets and mortgage bills simply with the words “yes, and …” .
“Please join our organisation, get involved – this is just the beginning,” was her clarion call today. “People don’t want to be unpopular,” ran another gambit. “But the irony is, these policies are popular.” And yet, is that the irony? I can’t help feeling that other ironies are very much available – and that only at this particular auto-satirical stage of public life could someone outlasted by a lettuce be casting the shortest prime ministership ever as her salad days.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
