While voters worry about prices and bills, the contenders fret about tax and a ‘war on woke’. They’re in a wonderland of their own
On with the Mad Hatter’s tea party, as they all move up a place and Suella Braverman falls out. This leadership race is a strangely unreal world of phantasms. Its candidates inhabit a twilight zone where true belief is all that matters. If Penny Mordaunt seems to steal the scene, her advantage over the rest is that she is the least well known, leaving punters free to invest in her whatever they may hope for.
Here is a “conservative” party that just crashed the country, threatened democratic norms, broke rules and defied the law now behaving as if nothing has happened. None of the leadership candidates dares to mention the unmentionable – the disgrace of a prime minister they selected, knowing all there was to know about his character. Remember how he was once mobbed by MPs and party members grabbing selfies wherever he went? Remember how they cleaved to him, justifying his lies, dishonesty, crony contracts and corrupt favouritism? They’re all in it together, running from the crime scene as if this shame they brought upon their party and parliament never happened.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
