Movin' on down

Johnson didn't set the controls on the plane so that it would crash into a cliff face. He was much too busy squandering political capital to think about steering. 

Truss picks up the plane when its front view is all of that rapidly approaching cliff face. A new leader so new political capital? Not this time. Walking on stage to Heather Small singing the M People anthem - "Moving on up" - shame no one vetted the lyrics.

"You’ve done me wrong, your time is up

You took a sip from the devil’s cup

You broke my heart, there’s no way back

Move right out of here, baby, go on pack your bags"

Insta-squander. She lives in a bubble of unselfawareness. Her attempt to unite her party has become, instead, one to ignite her party. Crash, Crash, Crash.

She talks about growth yet is now 38 points behind Labour in national polls. A highlight of her speech was the interruption by Greenpeace, which gave her a chance to adlib over the perfectly valid point raised by Greenpeace that nobody voted for her ideas. 

t was telling that she chose to aim at an “anti-growth coalition” whose members include a nameless elite who “taxi from North London town houses to the BBC studio". She looked pleased with herself to pull this off although it's all London-speak, no doubt been prepped by a speech writer. It also sailed clumsily close to the 'elite from North London' - a phrase usually eschewed nowadays.

The subverters are lining up: 'worst (conference) since the 1970s', 'It feels like we've already lost', (accusations of) 'organising a coup', 'get a grip', no mandate to reverse the 2019 manifesto (Gove), 'if we don't want to deliver on the deal, we need a fresh mandate' (Dorries). And I have;t even got around to Mordant, Shapps or the dislikable Rees-Mogg.

Still, she can recover discipline wth hard line tactics, credit piracy and blame avoidance. 50 MPs of the 357 Conservative MPs backed her in the first round. She can tell the rest they must back her or they are sacked, or at least tarnished with reputation damaging innuendo. Some would call it cutting her way to glory. Some one should tell her it doesn't work. 

Let us consider:

• a cost of living crisis
• stretched public services
• interest rate rises
• a big jump in mortgage payments
• escalating cost of fuel
• the market's fiscal uncertainty
• decline of the GBP
• losses on the stock market

These are not the traditional signs of growth. Although maybe she wants to start from a low place?