Watching the Conservative party self-destruct after 12 years of near-untouchable power while the economy tanks is akin to seeing your racist neighbour’s house flood with sewage. It’s delightful schadenfreude – until you realise that stink is heading straight for you. If there is one positive to the Tory party conference this week, it is that these people have been at least temporarily contained. A kind of Alcatraz for Eton alumni. I would say “how much damage can they do?” locked in a conference hall in Birmingham; but based on the last few days, this group would see that less as a question and more as an active challenge.
Enter the levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, who kicked off conference by touting a new age of austerity in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Britain had, Clarke said, been in a “fool’s paradise” for too long with a “very large welfare state”, which must come as news to the people queueing in the utopia of their local food bank. Early figures suggest public services will see cuts of up to £18bn a year, while benefits are being lined up for real-term cuts.
Pulling money from the poorest to further enrich the wealthy is the sort of agenda so cliched in its evil that by all rights it should be delivered by a minister twiddling a tiny moustache. With even Tory backbenchers feeling an urge to do the right thing and dissent, the chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, took to Twitter just hours before his speech on Monday with a screen-grabbed U-turn on the 45p rate of tax, like a reality TV star apologising via the Notes app for inappropriate touching in the villa.
Unfortunately for him, the other contestants seemed as though they may have been drinking as they broke ranks, creating the kind of unhinged chaos in which you find yourself listening to Nadine Dorries and thinking, “good point”. It was all very last days of Rome, albeit with less dignity.
The only thing the Tory party could seemingly unite around was the need to find a scapegoat. The education minister, Andrea Jenkyns, targeted (entirely made up) “Harry Potter degrees”. GCSE ethics experiment Suella Braverman announced it would be “my dream” to get migration flights to Rwanda by Christmas, channelling Mariah Carey’s less popular B-side All I Want for Christmas (Is to Deport Torture Victims). As one cabinet source told the Daily Mail of impending revolt: “The trouble is, there are so many bastards in the party.” Quite.
Not that any of this bothered Truss, whose keynote speech had the air of a coma patient who had woken up with scarce memory of the last fortnight. Any economic crisis was caused by Putin and Covid, she implored. Her government would keep an “iron grip” on the public finances. Even Greenpeace protesters couldn’t jar her back to reality. The speech was 35 minutes short, though you couldn’t say it felt it. The only thing longer than Truss’s cadence is the current wait for an ambulance.
Tellingly, the “sensibles” of the Conservative party were missing from the audience, like rats fleeing the proverbial. When Boris Johnson is being referred to as “the sensible” era of Tory governance, it certainly gives a perspective on the depths of the particular barrel we are now scraping.
One notable absentee was Rishi Sunak, who has reportedly stayed in his constituency in Yorkshire, presumably unable to travel to conference on account of physically laughing too hard. As one Sunak ally reportedly put it: the former leadership candidate wished to “give Truss all the space she needs to own the moment”.
If there is one group currently suffering more than the select Tories who warned about Truss, it is those who supported her. As one Tory MP who voted for Truss lamented to the Times: “We’ve ended up with a perfect storm of problems.” If only there had been some sort of warning any of this was going to happen. Much like the MPs who supported Johnson only to feign surprise when he turned out to be a liar, there is something remarkable about seeing MPs who backed Truss in the leadership campaign one month ago now claiming shock at her shortcomings. A woman whose sole qualification for the post appeared to be “looks a bit like Margaret Thatcher when sitting in a tank”.
The truth is, of course, Tory MPs supported Truss not because they didn’t realise what she would do, but because they did. Just like their cheerleaders in the rightwing press, it suited them to get tax cuts for their own class and chums in the City and they cared nothing for the consequences – until they were found out. If recent polling is to be believed, “consequences” for Tory MPs may finally be on the way, specifically in the form of a ballot count at 3am in a cold school hall. It could not happen to a more deserving group. The question, though, is just how much more harm they can inflict on the country in the meantime. That isn’t a challenge – more an omen.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
