First to maneuver was the flat Liz Truss. A completely ineffective politician. And memory. An ideologue without ideas. Primitive artificial intelligence based on Margaret Thatcher’s child model. With a question mark over intelligence. So much so, it’s hard to know if she’s really that dim or if there’s a cunning plan to destroy the Conservative party from within. She has positioned herself as Boris’s successor, but seems to spend most of her time tearing down the government’s economic record. Control, alternative, delete. Liz is barely able to speak in basic sentences. Her language is staccato. Incoherent. Even she doesn’t seem to understand what she’s saying. Her most recent statement was that she was going to buy lots of new tanks and increase defense spending to 3% of GDP. All this while reducing taxes. Truss seems to believe that you don’t have to pay for anything you want. Or just saying something, makes it so. Elsewhere, Penny Mordaunt was trying to kick-start her faltering campaign by promising to raise the standard of the north. You might have thought that many “red wall” MPs would have heard this before. Still, it doesn’t hurt to make a promise. Even if you’re not going to deliver. Promises are cheap in every election. He also said he would build more houses. She didn’t seem surprised that no one in government had thought of this for the past 12 years. Mordaunt’s campaign was dealt a blow when Tobias ‘Cat Killer’ Ellwood withdrew the whip for not voting with the government in Monday night’s confidence vote. Ellwood had a decent enough explanation, namely that he was stuck in Moldova and couldn’t get home in time, even though he somehow planned to fly back for further meetings. But Boris Johnson wasn’t buying it. There is no love lost between the Cat Killer and The Convict. To be fair, Boris knows a thing or two about thin excuses. As Foreign Secretary, he fled to Afghanistan to avoid a vote on runway three at Heathrow. Either way, that was one less vote for Penny. The bar for a successor to The Convict really is that low. Just tell the truth a little more often and try not to be corrupt Ready4Rish! – totally normal dude! – he just sent out a press release saying he had heard there was a place called Scotland and he was going to make sure it remained part of the union. He knew this because he had commissioned a poll which had surprisingly found him to be the person most likely to beat Keir Starmer. Who wasn’t prepared to give the SNP a second referendum anyway. But we are at the stage of the leadership campaign where any non story will do. On LBC, Matt Hancock filled in for James O’Brien. Traffic accident radio. Listener after listener called in to say how useless Door Matt was. And all Hancock could do was agree. With the nod. It’s radio, Matt. Not that Hancock was bothered. The man is not ashamed. His purpose in life is to humble himself. It’s just a race to see who will do the humiliation. Matt or everyone else. The main purpose of his three-hour reception was to attract what attention he could. Mostly negative. Even when he was abused, he would gleefully talk about how much he adored Rish! He seemed to think his endorsement was a game changer. It will be a terrible shock when he is not offered a cabinet post. However, he always has Gina. She is truly the luckiest woman alive. Across the road from parliament at the Policy Exchange there were faint flickers of life from David Frost and Michael Gove. If not very coherent thinking. The event was titled What Do We Want from the Next Prime Minister and Frosty couldn’t seem to decide between Johnson and Truss. Part of him has yet to accept that the Tories chose to remove the Convict. Like Johnson himself. He spent most of his last cabinet reciting a delusional list of non-achievements to almost silent colleagues. Frost is almost the equal of The Convict as a fantasist. He talks about the need to preserve the purity of Brexit, without acknowledging that he was largely responsible for the bogus deal with Northern Ireland. Instead, he blames everyone around him for agreeing to the deal he negotiated. Gove wasn’t much better. He simply said that he supports Kemi Badenoch. His main reason was that she disagreed with him on almost everything. Which should have made me a candidate for the Tory leadership because I disagree with him on almost everything. It didn’t seem to occur to either of them that the reason there was an election was because the Tories were slow to realize that the Convict was a completely dishonest narcissistic sociopath. The bar for his successor really is that low. Just tell the truth a little more often, try not to be corrupt and pay attention to details. But even that seemed beyond most candidates. There is simply a collective sense of denial at the top of the Conservative Party – something that Frost and Gove were only too happy to indulge in, completely trashing the achievements of the governments they served. It was a total exercise for purists. Down in the committee corridor, the other Tory MPs stepped away from the air con to take part in the fourth round of voting. Tom Tugendhat’s crew hit the crowd, while Gavin Williamson, desperate to be seen as a kingmaker, waited almost until the poll closed. At 15:00 Graham Brady announced the results. Badenoch was out. Just as everyone expected. Truss was the big winner and looked set to make it to the bottom two with Rish!. The Tories must have a death wish. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST
