Well, what would you have said? You’ve tanked the economy, your government is in meltdown and you’re 30 percentage points behind in the polls. Just think how much worse it could have been had you not had to suspend all government activity for 10 days of national mourning after the Queen’s death. “Sorry” might be a start. Or even, “I resign.”
Liz Truss took a different approach. One with no empathy, no understanding of the occasion. Oblivious to the fact the Tory party conference had morphed from mayhem to abject chaos. Don’t mention the war! Or maybe she was stuck in the denial stage of grief. Unable to accept the reality.
So all she could do was offer an extended highlights reel of the same speech she had delivered to Tory party members during the summer’s leadership hustings. No acknowledgment that things had spiralled out of control. Or that she was in any way responsible. This was safety-first stuff. Damage limitation. Say nothing too controversial. Better still, say next to nothing at all. Just fill the hall with a sound cloud and hope to get out unscathed.
The queues for the hall had started early, but there was plenty of room for everyone. There were almost no MPs left in Birmingham. Most were thrilled to use Wednesday’s rail strikes as an excuse to get away from a toxic political war zone. Scenes like the last chopper out of Saigon.
The Tory party chair, Jake Berry, took to the stage to begin the last rites on a harrowing few days. “What a conference it’s been!” he announced. Even the Tory members couldn’t resist laughing out loud. Berry looked surprised. Shocked even. “You weren’t mean to laugh there,” he said, sounding hurt. It’s one thing to try to ignore a conference that’s been an unmitigated disaster from beginning to end. It’s another to try to spin it as a resounding success. But in JakeWorld that’s what it had been. He never really recovered from that.
Next up was Nadhim Zahawi who appeared – like so many Tories in Birmingham – to be operating in a different space-time continuum. Slipping effortlessly between different time zones. Some in the past, some in the future. He, too, had been having a blast. It had been great to meet so many activists ready to get rid of this dreadful government that had been holding the country back for 12 years and to replace it with another one that would drive it on to the rocks. This Zahawi was not the same Zahawi who had been a minister under Boris Johnson. That one had been a clone from a parallel universe.
There was polite applause as the cabinet filed in – it looked like a Ceaușescu line-up from circa 1989: with a similar career expectancy – and then a video of Truss saying she had always wanted to help the little people with their energy bills was played on the big screens. Which was odd, because most of us could remember her having said people were going to have to suck it up and get better-paid jobs if they wanted to heat their homes this winter, and only changing her mind when it became a political necessity. But perhaps that had been another Liz Truss.
Then the hall lit up and Truss walked to the centre of the stage to M People’s Moving on Up. This earned Radon Liz her first standing ovation. So far so good. She had made it to the lectern without falling over. And none of the scenery had collapsed. A distinct improvement on Theresa May.
The problems started when she tried to speak. She still hasn’t learned the basic rhythms of language. Understood the purpose of punctuation. Sentences collided with one another so that any sense was lost. Her delivery was awkward, trying to escape the monotone by putting the stress on random words. She frequently looked towards the wings as if begging for help and her hands chopped the air as if she was a 1960s TV puppet. If you looked closely, you could see the strings. Mostly she looked nervous. As if she knew she wasn’t cut out for these gigs. She grasped a glass of water in two hands to stop herself spilling it.
Librium Liz then went back to familiar ground. Her backstory. She was the first prime minister to have gone to a comprehensive. She wasn’t. But who cares about details? She knew people who had taken drugs. Leave Michael Gove out of it. People had always tried to stop her from fulfilling her potential. But not nearly hard enough. It had always been obvious she wasn’t the sort of person you would want running a country, but somehow she had made it to the top. The Dunning-Kruger effect has a lot to answer for.
Bizarrely, things looked up for Truss when two Greenpeace activists staged a protest. The audience became protective of their lame-duck leader and started clapping wildly at everything she said. Even when the applause was entirely inappropriate. So Radon Liz ploughed on, underwhelming everything that got in her way by listing everything she didn’t like. People who didn’t like her style should have listened harder to her before. Er … we did. It’s just that we weren’t allowed to vote for her. That pleasure was reserved for the people in the hall.
“I’m for growth, growth, growth,” she declared. Which is exactly what Keir Starmer had said in a speech in the summer. Though maybe he wanted a different type of growth. Or it was a different type of Keir. It’s not just the Tories who can time-slip. Mostly, though, she wanted to declare war on “the anti-growth coalition”. Which seemed to be anyone who had taken a taxi from north London to the BBC. Along with anyone else who thought she was a halfwit. Which is almost everyone in the entire world. Including most of the Tory party. The IMF. The RSPCA. Anyone with a brain. So count me in.
It was all bonkers. But it was good enough in its way. Because mediocrity had been all that had been expected. No one had thought she might actually save her career. That was a fantasy too far. Even for this conference. She stopped mid-sentence. No one knew if she had come to the end or not but they applauded all the same. And as Truss didn’t know if she had finished either, she took their cue and wandered off. As she left, the pound lost 1% of its value and two-year fixed-term mortgage rates hit 6%. It seemed the financial markets were also part of the anti-growth coalition. Who knew?
