We know now that it’s Rish! Sunak and the exclamation mark of ambition and the play-doh Thatcher Liz - if you don’t like these principles I have others - Truss who are the final two candidates in the contest to become the next worst Conservative Prime Minister in living memory, although the word Conservative is probably superfluous in that sentence. The two are now trying to out-right wing plonker each other in a ballot of Conservative party members. May the Gods help us all. Truss has vowed to send more asylum seekers to Africa, a promise that would not have looked out of place on a National Front leaflet in the 1970s. Not to be outdone, Sunak promises to incarcerate those who haven’t yet been palmed off on some third world dictatorship in prison ships, presumably so that their foreign feet will not defile Britain’s hallowed soil.
Truss using the Daily Mail in order to promise to send more migrants to Africa sums up this vile Tory party. There is no sense of social responsibility, no integrity. Compassion and empathy are seen as weakness. All there is a cruel and callous bigotry masquerading as governance in order to appeal to the profound insecurities of bitter right wing elderly white men who hanker for the 1950s when they could still tell themselves that Britain was a global power.
It ought to be obvious by now that a system which allows the members of a wildly unrepresentative political party to choose the Prime Minister is a system which is not only grossly undemocratic, but a system guaranteed to deliver an individual who is unfit for the highest office. However this is now the third time in six years that the Conservatives have subjected us to this farce and it has become normalised to the extent that the fact that it is an insult to democracy no longer warrants a mention in a British media which is too busy wetting its collective knickers about the respective candidates’ promises on tax cuts or their novel ways of being cruel to migrants and asylum seekers.
We can assume that those who are committed enough to the Conservatives to actually join the party are unrepresentative of wider public opinion. Across the UK as a whole, Conservative party members are disproportionately white, middle class, resident in the south of England, Brexit supporting, male, and elderly. These are the people who are going to choose the next Prime Minister.
Opinion polls of Conservative party members suggest that Truss will win. She’ll win in part because of the recent queues at Dover. No one in Britain from the media to the government to the opposition is allowed to name the real reason for those queues. It’s Brexit. We all know it’s Brexit, but it has taken a French minister to point out the obvious. The British media are only too keen to collude with the Tories and blame the French, the holiday rush, anything but the obvious. Before the Tory hard Brexit, cars were just waved through border control, but now thanks to Brexit everyone’s passport has to be stamped. Truss or Sunak won’t admit it’s because of Brexit and they certainly won’t do anything about it. Instead they will just cynically blame the French for doing what they themselves insisted had to be done.
Unfortunately the small and unrepresentative group of people who have the power to choose our next prime minister will look at those snaking lines of traffic and their Anglo-British nationalist cognitive dissonance will lead them to double down and blame the EU for castigating plucky little Britain for taking back control. They will see the traffic jams as an unjust punishment. In order to guard their feverish dreams of cake and sunlit uplands they will elect Truss, the self proclaimed champion of the Brexit myth, the defender of Johnson’s legacy.
When the Anglo-British nationalists voted to end freedom of movement, it was the freedom of movement of Poles and other foreigners that they had in mind, not their own. When they decided that they wanted to take control of the border it was the UK border they thought about, not realising or caring that the point of a border is that there are two independent sovereign states on either side of it, while the mountain of luggage piles even higher at Heathrow because there are no longer EU citizens to employ as baggage handlers. Now the Brexiters are learning the hard way that Brexit means that France has taken back control of its side of the border. Truss and Sunak both collude in the comforting delusions of Anglo-British nationalism, but it’s Truss who has successfully positioned herself as the true heir to their deposed champion Johnson in the eyes of most Conservative members.
Truss shares many of Johnson’s worst characteristics, the boorishness, the contempt for democracy and accountability, the lying, the naked ambition, and the chameleon like willingness to change her, ahem let’s call them beliefs, in order to appeal to whichever constituency can further her career. What she lacks is Johnson’s upper class twit shtick and the patrician showmanship and Etonian charisma which to my eyes are unfathomably appealing to a section of the electorate in England. Truss is so robotic in her delivery that she makes Theresa May seem warm and personable. She is easily the favourite amongst the Conservative party membership, despite warnings that she is incompetent and ineffectual, with her sole talent being her ability to take credit for the achievements of others. Dominic Cummings refers to her as the hand grenade because she destroys everything she comes into contact with.
Truss concedes that she may not be the most slickly presented, but insists that with her “what you see is what you get,” which is a bit of a worry because what we are seeing is an incompetent opportunistic and unprincipled idiot who mirrors Thatcher. What we are going to get is whatever promises her power, and that will consist of pandering to the far right Anglo-British nationalist frothers of the Tories’ European Research Group. To say the outlook is grim is an understatement.
Meanwhile Johnson openly boasts that he will be back in Number 10. Cummings speculates that Johnson is backing Truss because she will quickly crash and burn as Prime Minister, allowing him the opportunity to make a comeback. Johnson doesn’t care about the havoc she will wreak in the meantime. As I said earlier, may the Gods help us all. Be afraid, be very afraid.
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