It’s an odd time in British politics. The Conservative Party has a massive majority in the House of Commons, which gives it the ability to push through just about any bill that doesn’t offend too many of its own MPs, and guess what: it’s falling apart. It’s a riveting spectator sport, but sooner or later some new government will come in and it’ll have to clean up after them. I don’t envy them that.

Where shall we start?

 

Let’s start with Liz Truss

Truss is Britain’s all-time champion, record-holding, shortest-term-serving prime minister, and if that isn’t enough glory for one person, in that very short time she also managed to crash the economy. That last bit happened in a fit of hubris. 

Hubris? It’s a disease politicians get that makes them think willpower is enough to transform the unworkable into the workable. It comes from the Greek and originally meant “Liz! No! Don’t cut the red wire.”

She went ahead and cut the red wire. You knew she would.

 

While she was in office,, 13% of Tory voters switched to the Labour Party and she went from a net favorability rating of +41 among Conservative voters to a -30.

Stop nickering. Not everyone can do that.

Toward the end of her brief tenure, a newspaper ran a live feed of a head of iceberg lettuce to see which one would last longer, Liz or Lettuce. Lettuce, rather famously, outlasted her. I’d love to organize a demonstration against her. I don’t much care about the reason, I just want to be part of a group of people standing around quietly, respectfully, and visibly with lettuce leaves on our heads. Everyone will know what we mean.

Anyway, Liz is back in the headlines with what’s being widely called a memoir of her time in office (she says it’s not but who listens to her?), called Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room. 

How’s it selling? It’s been outsold by an air fryer cookbook. In its crucial first week, it sold 2,228 copies even though it got a huge amount of free publicity. You can find political memoirs that’ve done worse, so she’s not setting any head-of-lettuce-style records here, but those aren’t impressive sales. She was paid an advance of £1,512, indicating that her publisher didn’t think it had a hot property on its hands.

But forget sales. Let’s talk about content. Truss was in office for 49 days and the book runs to 320 pages (with or without an index and footnotes; I’m not sure), so she’s given us a bit more than 6 pages per day. Including weekends. Among other things, she tells us that 1) when she inherited the PM’s Downing Street apartment from Boris Johnson, she also inherited fleas from (presumably) Johnson’s dog, and 2) the queen died a few days after Truss took office. Despair wasn’t listed as the official cause of death but it would be reckless to rule it out as a contributing factor. 

That filled less than a single page, so I’m sure she has other things to say too. In fact, I know she does, because the book includes a quote widely circulated in antisemitic conspiracy circles, which incorrectly has the long-dead and Jewish banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild wanting to control a nation’s money. An unnamed source “close to Ms Truss” explained that it was all okay, though, because she didn’t mean anything by it. 

It’s particularly British to say something isn’t racist or whatever-ist because the person who said it didn’t mean it to be. I have yet to convince a single soul that their (or someone else’s) intentions are beside the point.

The close-to-Truss source explained that “numerous online sources have stated that [the quote] was attributed to Rothschild, so she simply attributed it thus. Clearly nothing more was meant of it.”

Will that little fuckup lead Truss to wonder if she’s hanging out in the wrong circles and reading some unreliable, not to mention unsavory, sources? I doubt it. If she doesn’t mean or recognize it to be antisemitic, it must not be.

The phrase If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas does come to mind.  

Her publisher has promised to cut the quote from future editions. 

Will there be any future editions? Your guess is as good as mine.

*

To be clear: the logic that something is only antisemitic if you mean it to be antisemitic does not apply if you attend a march against genocide in Gaza. 

 

Is Truss typical of the party?

Not at all. The rest of the party outlasted the lettuce. Once you get past that, though, she might have gotten her antisemitic fleas from sources closer to home than Johnson’s dog. It turns out that several Conservative Party politicians, staff members, and activists have been running Facebook groups–a whole network of them–that are filled with misinformation, Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacism, conspiracy theories, and threats. The people running the groups weren’t public about their role. It took a Greenpeace investigative unit to dig out the connection.

Senior Tories have posted on the sites and seven Tory MPs are members.

The groups’ rules ban hate speech etc. etc., but posts that violate the rules weren’t taken down and the people who posted them weren’t banned.

The party has said it will review its “processes and policies.” It may or may not invest in flea powder. I’m not putting any bets on that.

 

What else is happening?

Chris Philip, Britain’s policing minister (no, I didn’t know we had one either) appeared on  the BBC’s show Question Time and discovered that Rwanda isn’t the same country as the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The question leading to this revelation wasn’t a gotcha question. Rwanda’s central to the only thing our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, believes is important: deporting refugees to Rwanda if they arrive in Britain the wrong way. 

What’s the right way? Sorry, we don’t have many left, but that seldom makes its way into the discussion. 

The policing minister is part of the Home Office, and deporting people is not only the responsibility of the Home Office, it’s been the Home Office’s favorite occupation for years now. So knowing what country they hope to deport people to would seem to be at least vaguely relevant to his job description. 

What happened was that someone in the audience asked if a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo would be deported to Rwanda even though tension between the countries is high and they have a history of violence. The minister explained that he didn’t think anyone from Rwanda would be deported to Rwanda.

Um, no, the audience member said. He wasn’t talking about people from Rwanda.

“Congo is a different country to Rwanda, isn’t it?” asked the sage from the Home Office.

Philip has since explained that the question was rhetorical. And that he had trouble hearing. And that the dog ate his homework.

A Liberal Democrat on the panel summed up the interchange by saying that we don’t have “a serious government.”

 

How are we to understand all this?

At least one major paper has been driven to–well, if not predict the future at least try to understand the present by reading not the prime minister’s tea leaves but his tea mugs. Or as they put it, his teaware.

I’d never heard of teaware before I read the headline, proving that even after 18 years in Britain I’m still American. My spell check program has heard of it and so has Lord Google, who’d be happy to help me part with money in exchange for some, so apparently teaware is a real thing.

The Guardian’s gone back through photos from several of Suank’s public appearances to read the messages on his mugs and noted a union flag cup, a cup with dog pictures, a cup showing a 10, presumably to remind us of his current address, and several company-logo cups when he visited places where people do actual work. 

According to journalist and, um, political mug expert Stephen Bush, getting the mugs into his photos is a way “to signal he is somewhat normal. . . . They’re a good way of being like: ‘Oh yeah, look, I’m a normal guy. I love this country. Look at me drinking from my normal guy cup.’ “

If this sounds somewhat desperate, I have a lettuce in the refrigerator that I’d be happy to lend you.

 

So is the party united?

One reason Sunak’s so fixated on the Rwanda plan is that he suffers from the delusion that putting it into action will placate the right wing of his party, return his party to power at the next election, and keep the antimatter from mixing with the matter-matter, although my reading of the teacups is that nothing short of seppuku would placate them right now. They got a taste of power with the Brexit election think they’re entitled to more.    

I am, sadly, not the right person to comment on the matter-matter and antimatter, although I’m sure it does matter.

A group of MPs on the right of the party apparently want to dump Sunak before the next election and replace him with Penny Mordaunt. They’re probably not the only group hatching a plot, just the one I happened to have a detail or three about. The theory behind the plot is that if she took power, her right-wing initiatives on tax and immigration would win the country’s heart and proving all the polls wrong the Tories would wipe out Labour. 

The plan is apparently called 100 Days to Save Britain, which is faster if less ambitious than taking 10 years to save the West. 

Mordaunt apparently wants no part of it and said speculation about the plot is “codswallop.”

Why isn’t she interested? Because the last person whose hands were on the wheel gets the blame when the ship goes down, and every election-watcher in the country says the ship’s headed straight for the iceberg. Mordaunt would much rather wait for Sunak to sink it, then see if she can’t raise whatever’s left from the seabed.

We’ll leave that metaphor before it takes us down with it. 

Local elections are scheduled for May 2–that’s the future as I write this and the past as you read it–and the Tories are expected to have a disastrous night. And day. And day after that, all of which could shift MPs already plotting against Sunak into high gear. That in turn could trigger Sunak to call a snap election in order to head them off. If he does, he and his party won’t be expected to do well, but it’s one of a series of bad choices he has. If he has any good choices, I can’t see where they’re hidden.

The party’s jitters have only been increased by one of its MPs–a former health minister–defecting to Labour. He’s a doctor and said, “I have to be able to look my NHS colleagues in the eye and my constituents in the eye. And I know that the Conservative government has been failing on the thing I care about most, which is the NHS and its patients.”

He doesn’t plan to run in the next election but hopes to advise Labour on the NHS.

 

One more bit of mayhem and I’ll stop

According to leaked documents, senior Conservative Party officials looked seriously at–in fact, worked on–a plan to hand the party’s membership database to a commercial outfit that would have used it to track members’ locations and send them ads, with the party taking a cut of the sales. It would make the party tens of millions of pounds, they promised.

The idea came from Christen Ager-Hanssen, a Norwegian businessman who went bust in the dotcom bubble and was involved in the collapse of a Swedish newspaper. He went on to work for a cryptocurrency company that was going to be part of the deal. 

What could possibly go wrong?

The party hasn’t said why it abandoned the idea, but it could have had something to do with the cryptocurrency company firing Ager-Hanssen.

 

And from the Department for Studying Life’s Little Ironies . . .

. . . comes this: homelessness activist Stuart Potts was scheduled to talk to  last year’s Conservative Party conference about the problems ex-prisoners face. He wasn’t allowed into the hall because of his criminal record.