It’s been really unsettling watching Liz Truss hurtle towards Downing Street. The barmy process by which the Conservative Party anoint a new leader revealed her to be the second least-hated candidate among her colleagues.
Not many of them actively wanted her as leader. They just disliked her opponents slightly more than they disliked her.
Personally, I’d have been too humiliated by that outcome to have wanted to carry on. But then, I’m not Liz Truss. Liz Truss doesn’t let the ambivalence of others erode her cast-iron self-belief or derail her rampant ambition. It’s admirable. But also quite scary.
Now she competes with Rishi Sunak to say literally whatever it takes to win over the few thousand party members who will make the final decision on who gets the nuclear codes. Christ.
Not being funny, but Conservative Party members are a self-selecting group of the most awful weirdos in the country. Imagine paying £25 per year to join a party whose very name is a statement of its resistance to change. The mad bastards who actually join up are the sort who are constantly furious about the idea that younger people with different life experiences to their own might ever gain social or political traction.
I’ve always thought calling liberal folk snowflakes is a bit rich coming from the sort of weirdos and wet wipes you see at the Tory party conference. I’ve been to a few of those disturbing seaside get-togethers in a journalistic capacity and have never come across such a bunch of terrified people; the sort who are scared to walk out the front door in the morning because of the imaginary immigrants and transgender single mums who might mug them or offend them with their unfamiliar worldviews. The culture wars have seen saps somehow recast themselves as firebrands. Give me a break.
