Prepare to be unpopular at London dinner parties, said Liz Truss. She certainly is!
NIGEL Farage was hogging all the attention beforehand, giving interviews to eager reporters. We were at an evangelical hall for the launch of Pop Con, a Tory grassroots ginger group. Terrific policies, mouldy personnel. Their top speaker? Liz Truss.
Farage was mistletoe on the apple tree, flowering on someone else’s bough. Bouncing on his feet, saying ‘frankly’, he claimed that the Tory Party might be about to go down the plughole.
Rishi Sunak hadn’t a hope in Hades. Would nicotined Nigel therefore join and save the Tories? He pursed his lips like a Praed Street tart and tried insisting he was merely there as a GB News journalist. Then he said he was interested in the Pop Conners’ ideas. Then he said anything could happen, although if the election was in November he might be busy in the States. Note to readers: Mr Farage would love to be part of any Trump administration.
Imagine how Brussels would react if Nigel became US Secretary of State. Guy Verhofstadt might eat both his fists, one after the other, like Belgian pork pies.
I arrived expecting madprofessor dandruff, Union Jack waistcoats, wall eyes. This launch was a lot saner than that. There was a disappointing absence of derangement. Yes, we heard sporty barbs against snooty regulators, elitist lawyers, diet nannies, climatechange hypocrites and the Supreme Court – basically, Blairites.
But Mark Littlewood, Pop Con’s organiser, stated from the outset he wasn’t interested in ousting Rishi Sunak before the election. He was gripped by policies, not personalities. Groups only say that when they haven’t any stars.
Mr Littlewood said: ‘We don’t want or need to whip up anger.’ It’s already smouldering, arguably. But when speakers talked of Sir Tony Blair or of Steve Bray, the Stop Brexit man who was outside the venue blasting Ode To Joy at hideous decibels, they were good-humoured. The Right is less acidic than the Left. Mr Littlewood even cited Tony Benn – his line about how we must be able to get rid of our politicians.
With ‘Leftist groupthink’ quangocrats, that was not possible. That, said Mr Littlewood, was why change was essential.
THE hall was packed with Righties, many in their 20s. Behind me sat a mother with an infant. The class vibe – if anyone notices class nowadays – was more Asda than Waitrose. Mayfair club owner Robin Birley was there, as was Lord Howard of Rising, a neighbour of Sandringham, but their poshness was leavened by the larky presence of Andy Wigmore, the Arron Banks henchman with implausibly inky eyebrows. Backbench MPs ranged from Essex’s Priti Patel to the magnificently front-loaded West Yorkshire MP Sir Alec Shelbrooke, thought to be the love child of Ena Sharples and Max Bygraves.
The one group under-represented was special advisers, those club-class schmoozers who hang around Whitehall. The most metropolitan people in the hall were the TV luvvies: Sky’s Beth Rigby in a jacket the colour of an orange Smartie, powder- puffed podcaster Lewis Goodall, plus a Newsnight chap with a boy-band haircut.
Sir Jacob Rees- Mogg did an extempore riff against big- state ninnyism: ‘The age of Davos Man is over.’ And the judges were getting it wrong. Bien pensants will gasp about the separation of powers.
Sir Jacob argued that we never had such a separation. Top judges used to sit in parliament until Blair wrecked that.
The Tory candidate for Epsom spoke. A slow burn. Then Ashfield’s Lee Anderson tore into Net Zero. Energy bills should have an opt-out box for green taxes, he suggested. Ha! If Rishi put that policy in his manifesto, he’d romp home. Mr Anderson noted that he and Sir Jacob had something in common: ‘We were both born on estates, but mine was a housing estate.’
Finally, Ms Truss, accompanied as ever by her food-taster. Tories should be prepared to be unpopular at London dinner parties, she suggested.
She certainly is! She said she was never asked to any these days. ‘Come to mine!’ cried gallant voices. One suspects they would prefer to entertain Nigel.