To be perfectly honest, this whole affair is inexcusable. It is a pitiful reflection on the Conservative Parliamentary Party at every level and reflects really badly, obviously, on the government of the day. It’s a shambles and a disgrace. Utterly appalling. I’m livid.
In a week when you could have thrown a stick into the House of Commons lobby and hit a panicking Tory MP sweating bullets about their vanishing majority, the stone-cold fury of Sir Charles Walker, a former vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee, made him stand out like Jacob Rees-Mogg in the 21st Century.
His howl of righteous rage at his party’s “talentless people” who had risked their country for their careers was a very small glimmer of light in another dismal, demeaning week for both our politicians and the fools asked to vote for them on the assumption of a minimum level of intelligence and competence.
It is that sheer ineptitude of Liz Truss and her ministers that remains most vivid after the 44 short but gruelling days she spent in office, if never in charge. Her wonderland economics of unfunded tax cuts triggering unprecedented growth were bad enough but the sheer cack-handed, tin-eared, bish-bosh incompetence of their announcement and attempted execution was, almost, beyond belief.
And that was before the Cabinet Room’s Oxbridge brains trust turned Wednesday’s vote on fracking into a needless car crash that managed to move the dial from rolling chaos to imminent catastrophe.
The libertarian economic foolishness of Truss has been a guiding light for the most swivel-eyed right-wingers on the back-benches for years – the same hard-of-thinking mob who forced our great escape from Europe – and it would be nice to think they will now take a moment to wonder if they have rolled the country to hell in a handcart for no reason but their own ideological idiocy. Fat chance.
Nothing is ever their fault. If only Brexit had been done properly, if only Truss and her hapless chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had communicated their plans better, if only their hats weren’t made of tin foil…
Despite the absolute rubbling of their think-tank theories after collision with reality, they have not stopped and they will never stop. We are now expected to believe they will unite behind one candidate for the good of the country. Unity? Rats in a sack show more common purpose.
The truth of it is that, whoever the Conservatives install in Downing Street now, there are no grown-ups left in the room. They do not know what to do and they do not know how to do it. When reeling, punch-drunk MPs are describing Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps as political “big beasts” with a straight face, when Boris Johnson is being described as the serious candidate for serious times, the game’s a bogey, the jig is up.
Of course, most of these MPs will not vote for an election at the point of a pitchfork so we will be stuck with them unless – until – the wheels come off irrevocably but, whenever that vote comes, this debacle will not be forgotten, this rabble cannot be forgiven.
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