Gareth Roberts

As Liz Truss prepares to leave Downing Street after 47 days in power, the PM’s reputation is in tatters. Seeing out the reigning monarch after seventy years, spooking the financial markets like a distant hyena terrifies a family of meerkats, and, incredibly, tanking the Tories’ poll rating to its lowest ever level at the same time as paying everybody’s gas bill. But listen, Liz. I wouldn’t worry. Because it doesn’t take very long before people start pining for and eulogising former prime ministers that drove them potty when they actually were in office. Just this weekend gone, singer Tanita Tikaram sent a much-liked tweet saying she would like Gordon Brown back.

The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out. The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It was now impossible to foresee what was going to happen next, let alone any further down the line. You can see where I’m going with this. Who will be prime minister at the end of the week? What brave new policies, set in stone days ago, will be forgotten like waking dreams?

‘Grow the pie’. Somebody thought ‘grow the pie’ was The Thing, that ‘grow the pie’ was it. That this knockout phrase would silence the army of doubters and bring millions of voters back on side. They were proud of ‘grow the pie’. They thought ‘grow the pie’ was a great idea that people can really relate to and get behind. The same kind of person who thought reviving The Generation Game with Mel and Sue, or that Crown paint advert with the dead-eyed cult singing about ‘Hannah and Dave’ were notions of genius. Grow the pie – biff bang pow, now what’s your comeback to that, eh? Did they test it out on anyone else before Liz Truss’s speech at Tory party conference?

Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring with a regularity that’s disturbing to those of us who can remember the prelapsarian age when we were the only people who gave a stuff about politics and that we were considered odd because of it. The marked outlandishness of British party politics has been evident since that day in September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party.

Recent sad events have seen everybody behaving exactly as you would expect. There’s nothing wrong about that. A certain continuity of conduct is reassuring, a truism that the late Queen herself exemplified better than anyone. Her job was to be regal. Similarly, it’s the job of chippy academics to spill their thoughts, of the New York Times to froth at length, and, of course, of mad actors to be mad. It might be argued that the job of an actor is to act, but such an objection belongs to a vanished world and certainly does not apply to the actors who have moved beyond simply saying other people’s words for a living. We were blessed by two fine examples this week.

The Conservative party leadership contest (sometimes referred to as a ‘race’, which is pushing it) is nearing its end. It’ll be hard getting used to the world without it. We’re all such different people now, 900 years on. At least we’ll always have the misty water-coloured memories. One thing that both candidates agree on is that things have come to a pretty pass, and something, possibly even lots of somethings, must be done, and done urgently. This has been very strange to behold, as if the Tories have just woken up in a parallel universe where some other mysterious and nefarious political party has been in power for the last 12 years.

We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist.

When I was 11, I was a pompous little git, but was I also a playground prophet? It first dawned on me that I was one lunchtime in the late 1970s as I looked around at my peers. There they were shouting, swearing and hitting each other. Were we, I wondered, the clueless inheritors of a system we wouldn’t be able to take the reins of successfully? A system that we hadn’t been raised with the discipline to appreciate, or even to understand? Were we doomed to decline? The years since – and the current state of Britain – suggest I was right.

Has Justin Welby met his match in Sandi Toksvig? The entertainer has sent an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, complaining about his attempts to compromise with African bishops and avoid a showdown at the Lambeth Conference on the issue of same-sex marriage. The gist of it is: ‘Even though I don’t believe in God, I’m rarely going to attend my local church again’. This letter, and the swift reply to it from Justin Welby, tell us quite a lot about the relative standing of the CofE and what we are now supposed to call, as Sandi does, ‘LGBTQ+ people’. St Sandi’s letter to the Cantabrians is a masterpiece of faux-chummy passive-aggression, gratingly twee and self-satisfied.

Barring a disaster — given her record, that’s not impossible — Liz Truss will soon be the prime minister. She didn’t slip up in last night’s debate. She even surprised observers by showing mental dexterity when being needled by Rishi Sunak. Nevertheless, the adjective most often used to describe her – I’ve seen it in nearly everything I’ve read about her in the last few weeks – is wooden. But is Liz making woodenness her selling point? The loud clap last night after she admitted she lacked presentation skills suggests that she is. We’re all given a demeanour, and for all the spin doctors and image makers we might employ to buff us up, they can only work with what they’re given.

As I write this, the first day of the heatwave has just dawned. FEAR COMES THE SUN is the Daily Mail headline, while the Mirror has plumped for BLOWTORCH BRITAIN. The Telegraph maybe laments that its house style eschews the use of capital letters for ‘Heatwave meltdown brings Britain to a halt’. At the same time, there is a counterwave of people scoffing sceptically at all this heated alarm. The meme of a cheerful-looking sun with ‘I survived the summer of 1976’ is doing the rounds across social media, and there are a few contrary souls in public life saying that a spot of sun never did them any harm, with occasional accusations of the Met Office politically pandering to the climate change lobby.

There’s a scent in the air around the Tory leadership contest. It is the whiff of desperation. The aroma of provincial ballrooms when the lights go up at midnight; or of the last few seconds before a firing on The Apprentice when a contestant butts in with ‘Can I just say...’ and Lord Sugar snaps: ‘I’ve heard enough from you.’ First to set the tone was Rishi Sunak, coached not to blink or move his eyes, which some PR adviser obviously still thinks makes a person look agreeable and approachable, and not like a double glazing salesman who must get this commission from a confused elderly lady or starve.

In a speech last night to the Institute of Public Policy Research, Angela Rayner revealed that, ‘the reporters for Hansard have a bit of a nightmare sometimes transcribing the way I speak in parliament into their house style. But I don’t compromise on it, because it’s who I am.’ It is, admittedly, refreshing to hear a Labour voice in parliament not adopt the condescending, explaining-very-slowly-to-the-back-of-the-class tone exemplified by Emily Thornberry, or the sorrowful, never-been-so-appalled-by-sheer-Tory-heartlessness-in-all-my-life bleat most notably employed by Ed Miliband. And Rayner has certainly conducted herself with considerably more aplomb at the dispatch box than her party leader, who has the voice of an expiring corncrake.