.png)
3 hours ago
8
Liz Truss has given us all so much in recent years. A mini-budget. A laugh a minute 49 days in office. A new monarch, after the queen decided enough was enough and died two days after Liz began her Airbnb stay in Downing Street. And now she has given us one thing more. She has imported the US Conservative Political Action Conference to the UK.
And like all things Liz, it’s predictably a bit shit. In the US, CPAC is a full glitz Trump fest where all the champions of the far right go to strut their stuff and sell their merch. In Liz’s hands, it’s an altogether more drab affair with little interest from the audience. A going through the motions by C-list speakers who are well past their sell-by dates and have been saying the same things for years. Everyone would have had more fun and more surprises if the conference had been AI generated. There again, with Liz you can never be too sure.
The venue was the InterContinental hotel – or rather a room in the InterContinental – next to the O2 in south-east London. An odd choice of location as most of the speakers had previously described London as a no-go zone, full of murdering and thieving foreigners. Perhaps we should be saluting them for their bravery. Mind you, everyone appeared to have made it to the hotel without having their phones stolen or their throats slit. I guess they just got lucky. I haven’t dared to leave my house in years.
There were about 500 seats laid out in the auditorium as the conference began. Less than 200 were occupied. So maybe there had been a few casualties on the journey in. There again, there were at least 19 people watching on the live YouTube stream. So swings and roundabouts. The American chair, Mike Schlapp, made the introductions. We were all doing God’s work, he insisted. Which was odd as the God I was told about in school preached a gospel of loving thy neighbour. Mike, though,appeared to be very picky about which of his neighbours he chose to love.
Mike also took a pop at the UK for being a failing country with failing prime ministers. Liz Truss, who also identified as a chair, didn’t appear to notice what had sounded like a pointed dig at her. It left you wondering if she is so damaged she has even forgotten her own time as prime minister. A massive mental block caused by profound PTSD. She isn’t the only one. Mind you, it is quite possible she imagines herself to still be in office. Two later speakers both referred to her as if she was still the prime minister. Perhaps that’s what Liz’s carers had recommended they say. Or we could just be in an alternate reality. CPAC certainly felt that way.
The first main speaker was Toby Young. A choice of opener that was clearly intended to lower expectations for everything that followed. Because if Toby is one of your star turns, then you might as well pack up and go home. Toby introduced himself as the general secretary of the Free Speech Union. A sentence steeped in irony. Because, much to the country’s disappointment, nobody has ever stopped Toby from talking about anything. If only he had been. It’s his wife and kids I feel sorry for. Having to listen to him bore for Britain, day in, day out. But Toby didn’t want to talk about free speech. He would rather talk about how, though he believes in climate change, he doesn’t believe in it very much. A bad move with this crowd, as climate denial is a central CPAC belief.
Next up was the Tory shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith. Quite what Kemi Badenoch was thinking by allowing a member of the shadow cabinet to share a platform with some of the far-right headbangers due to speak over the next few days, is anyone’s guess. I know she wants the Tories to appear less Lib Dem and more deranged, but there have to be limits. Andy treated the event as if he was at a slightly risque fringe meeting at the Tory conference and had come and gone before anyone had really noticed he was there. The very faintest ripple of applause, mainly for leaving the stage.
Matt Goodwin was introduced as a celebrated academic when failed would have been a more accurate adjective. Now reinvented as a hard-right rent-a-gob who will say and do anything for attention. The manchild of our times. Still, he was clearly a favourite of the tens of people in the auditorium.
He gave them civilisational erasure. He talked about his best friend Lucy Connolly, who had been jailed for inciting people to set fire to refugee hotels. Matt clearly hasn’t got the memo that it’s a good thing that people who make death threats against his Reform boss, Nigel Farage, are being arrested. Free speech has its limits. He insisted that the Gorton and Denton byelection had been rigged. Not that voters had hated him on sight. Not least because it saved time that way.
It was all downhill from there for the rest of the morning. We had a panel discussion with David Starkey who has turned into a sad stopped clock. Unable to understand why the world has left him behind. Then we got two blokes, Mike and Steve, who were like two pub bores that had been in an overnight lock-in. Everything was the fault of the deep state. HS2? The deep state. England losing to Argentina? The deep state. One for the conspiracy theorists in the crowd.
The morning ended with Iain Duncan Smith realising he had made a huge mistake in agreeing to talk and trying to get out while he was still young enough. Then a little more Liz as she unveiled her latest venture, the Atlantic Strategy Institute, which will achieve nothing but make her feel a little bit less useless. It was a long afternoon that stretched ahead. On Friday, we will get Nigel, providing he can be sure he’s being paid enough.Truly a conference for the ages.
