Liz Truss’s ludicrous political comeback was straight out of Mean Girls
Not since that movie’s reboot has a bunch of cliquey, pretentious wannabes so deserved to be panned. Pravina Rudra watches the drama unfold at the launch of Popular Conservatism, the Tories’ latest splinter group
I hear the Popular Conservatives before I see them. Or, rather, the noisy agitators that their high-profile launch event in Westminster has somehow attracted.
From a couple of streets away, I detect the megaphone dulcets of Steve Bray, College Green’s resident protester, blaring out “We all live in a Brexit tragedy” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”. He’s accompanied by a woman wearing a sandwich board, with the faces of Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg superimposed on cut-outs of popcorn kernels: “Pop Con,” it reads, “the Tories are exploding.”
By my reckoning, Popular Conservatism is the sixth group in recent years to have formed within the Tory party – a new addition to the Five Families, along with – deep breath… – the European Research Group, the New Conservatives, the Northern Research Group, the Common Sense Group, and the Conservative Growth Group. Got it?
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