Looking ahead to the Conservative Party conference with 'Inaction Man' at the helm

Like the dying days of the Soviet Union where nothing works, everybody hates each other, and those drunk enough to remain will be expected to clap as though everything is fine

In several weeks’ time, the Conservatives are going to be holding their next conference - and very possibly their last as the party in government. 

One thing they’ll be looking to avoid is the calamity of utter despair that dominated the previous years’ conference where the entire debauched scene featured MPs - those who bothered to turn up, at least - launching full-scale revolts, speaking ‘dreamily’ and ‘obsessively’ over migration policy that seems, a year later, like a quest to find Cibola and the Seven Cities of Gold, or being found wandering drunkenly around the corridors of various conference facilities screaming “we’re fucked!” tearily into the carpet. 

The conference wasn’t quite the scene where Willard approaches the Kurtz compound in Apocalypse Now - limbless bodies hanging from the trees, native children covered in warpaint, smoke, Dennis Hopper running face first into the camera lens off his gourd on cocaine screaming about minefields while quoting T.S Eliot, while your ship’s navigator is chuntering about mango sauce recipes.

But it was close. Really close.

That’s when the Conservative Party’s nightmare trip into the Heart of Britain’s Darkness probably should have ended altogether, or at the very least just shortly afterwards. Probably. It didn’t, remarkably. It has continued on in some form, somehow, some way, ever since.

It was Liz Truss in charge at that point, of course. After Truss, it became Rishi Sunak’s turn to pilot the boat, and that's where we are today. Destination still unknown.