'Ten years to save the... what?' - If this is the future of Conservatism then the future looks bleak
A slight detour from regular proceedings to talk about Liz Truss and PopCons
Any attempt on the part of Liz Truss to turn back the clock with the hopes that she could rehabilitate her floundering political career was always going to be interesting.
Back in January when Truss announced the launch of a new faction within the Conservatives, many commentators mocked the irony that somebody like Truss - who is famously unpopular - would form a group calling itself the ‘Popular Conservatives’.
Or ‘PopCon’ for short.
People forget, however, when they mock Truss, that among a certain demographic of low tax, regulation shredding Tories, Truss is extremely popular, and her limited time as Prime Minister, in their view, was simply misunderstood.
It was something we saw at the Conservative Party conference last year, for example, when Truss launched her previous vehicle the Conservative Growth Group.
Chaos and Dysfunction: Scenes from what was quite possibly the last Conservative Party conference
One of the hallmarks of the Conservative Party conference in 2022 was that almost everybody who despised Liz Truss, still traumatised in the aftermath of her Autumn fiscal event, had the good decency to stay away. Not Grant Shapps, of course. Shapps bought a new phone for the event - a Samsung Galaxy Fold 4, at the time retailing at around £1,700 - that he used to collate a spreadsheet consisting of the names of hundreds of MPs who had doubts surrounding Truss’ leadership. Within the first day of the conference alone he had reportedly amassed 6,000 “data points”, 237 individual conversations with MPs, and had attended 57 coffee meetings.
Truss gave a speech to a packed fringe event back in October that was filled with people curious to hear what she had to say.
On one hand, there were those who couldn't wait to hear her justification for trying to ruin the British economy.
On the other, those who egged her on while she did it - MPs, supporters, her Tufton Street paymasters from the questionably-funded IEA or the Legatum Institute, that sought to carve the British economy into one of their own image.
To this day, Truss’ backers and Truss herself, remain unapologetic. They take the Scooby Do villain approach that Truss would have gotten away with it had it not been for the pesky Treasury orthodoxy and anti-growth coalition, represented worst of all by the OBR or the Bank of England.