As Truss and Kwarteng prepare for their next U-turn, MPs are already pining for the golden era of Johnson and Patel
As part of his latest U-turn, misunderstood genius Kwasi Kwarteng is now going to get the Office for Budget Responsibility to cost his debt plan and publish it this month instead of on 23 November. That’s good. I am going to get Jordan Pickford to save Leonardo Bonucci’s goal in the 67th minute of the Euro 2020 final. In Birmingham, it turns out the government’s massive mini-budget was actually a “before” photo, with ideas yet to reach their final form. Elsewhere in this larval cinematic universe, Liz Truss is still suggesting she isn’t going to raise benefits in line with inflation, which will be the next thing she folds on. There are currently radioactive nuclides with longer half-lives than her policies. We keep hearing Truss “needs a reset”, which sounds like the sort of solution Moscow would have proposed for the Chornobyl reactor shortly after the core had ruptured, destroyed the reactor building and caught fire in the open air.
Anyway: the Tory party conference. An event so cracked that Michael Gove can credibly turn up to it and act like it’s on drugs. Gove is doing more gigs than Ed Sheeran at the Birmingham gathering, but Truss’s cabinet is already nearing the “separate limos” stage of a monster band’s implosion. Be advised this is a conclave that a huge number of Conservative members of parliament found simply too distasteful to attend. Which certainly puts things into perspective. I’m trying to picture a Star Wars spinoff in which the rebel alliance was run by Gove and Grant Shapps, and it’s possible even Disney+ wouldn’t make it. Which, again, certainly puts things into perspective. Priti Patel is now spoken of as some kind of grandee. Which certainly takes perspective, and does something absolutely unmentionable with it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
