The rapturous standing ovation at the end of Liz Truss’s conference speech looked straight out of a future Netflix documentary from the cults strand. Outside the sect’s meeting hall, the party is polling an average of 25 (TWENTY-FIVE) points behind Labour. Inside, the people were clapping like they’d just heard a really charismatic argument about why it’s important to marry teenage girls, shun dissenting family members, and build gun turrets round their compound.
Truss’s government is now too weak to implement its maddest plans and too ideological to implement its most sensible. Last night it emerged that the government has blocked a public information campaign to help people save money on energy – and, by extension, to conserve usage in the face of suggestions that rolling blackouts could be in the post for this winter.
Apparently Truss regarded it as too nannying, despite it having been drawn up by her own business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg (a 53-year-old who admittedly still has a nanny). One cabinet minister reportedly said “the public is smarter than you think”. Unfortunately, Liz Truss isn’t. If we do reach the blackout scenario, the failure to plan or use foresight will be blamed on Vladimir Putin.
The Conservatives have been in power for 12 years. In dog years, that’s 304 (and arguably feels longer) – yet you’ll have noticed how every single thing is still someone else’s fault. The government is obsessed with people having to take responsibility for their own lives, but takes none for its own mistakes. Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and the other authors of Britannia Unchained deplore the feckless, the useless and the undeserving.
Yet throwing that absolute hot mess of a party conference this week while the country is
Read more on theguardian.com