The Precarious Monarchy

The statements from Liz Truss and Keir Starmer about the Queen's death sum up establishment feeling about her. For the new Prime Minister, "Queen Elizabeth II was the rock on which modern Britain was built." For the Leader of the Opposition, "Above the clashes of politics, she stood not for what the nation fought over, but what it agreed upon. As Britain changed rapidly around her, this dedication became the still point of our turning world." Variations on a theme. The Queen was constant and forever, and her end was unimaginable because very few people now living were adults when she ascended the throne. For both party leaders, their statements were well pitched because their sentiments are shared by millions of people.

Two days' worth of coverage bears this out as journos hang around Buckingham Palace doing their vox pops. For most, she was distant but close. The Queen enjoyed a luxurious life removed from the lives of those who looked up to her, but that she stared out of the television screens, newspapers, and the occasional photo portrait hanging on the wall meant her presence was felt. And even though the Queen abided by saying and doing nothing apart from the endless round of official engagements, all the while the palace commanded the most sophisticated spinners - aided by the popular media's fawning deference - to weave a narrative of duty, conscientiousness, and loyalty about her person. Even The Crown, the Netflix drama deemed scandalous by self-appointed Royal guardians, reinforces the message. And these impressions stuck even more over the last year. We've watched the Queen become more frail as she carried on her responsibilities even after the passing of Philip. For millions of people, this is what service and dedication looks like.

Which then presents something of an anomaly. Go back 18 months, and there is arguably less state-mandated disruption than was the case following the Duke of Edinburgh's passing. There's certainly more absurdity, with everything from catalogue shops, gay porn websites, and McDonald's self-service counters paying tribute to the Queen. Think They Live, but with every screen and paper carrying Elizabeth II's image. But there are also more avenues of escape. In April 2021 the BBC cleared everything and cancelled programming. In September 2022, BBC1 and ITV1 are wall-to-wall official mourning but everything else is running almost normally. Yours truly was able to enjoy Haddaway, Take That, and Kim Wilde on the Top of the Pops 1993 reruns as scheduled. This is in marked difference to the response to the death of Princess Diana 25 years ago. Granted, her death was sudden and unexpected, but all five terrestrial channels were stuffed full of Diana coverage and tributes for over a fortnight. There was no streaming, and the internet at this point covered fewer than nine per cent of households. There was no escape via the usual means of escapism.

From the state's point of view, the death of the reigning monarch is a bigger deal. Effectively, its official corporate personality and person changes over night and with it the official pomp and apparatuses of spectacle have to be tweaked. Seldom used constitutional gears grind into action, and well rehearsed rituals get underway. But in 2022 it comes with a dollop of uncertainty. Perhaps one of the reasons why broadcast media are more restrained than 18 months ago is because of the backlash it provoked. Complaints to the BBC over the cancellation of programming was a rude reminder to the establishment that there are a lot of people out there who don't share any enthusiasm for the Royals as people and the monarchy as an institution - even it shocks them even more because the indifferent are never reflected in the coverage. Perhaps somewhere, someone has learned imposing grief is not a good idea when popular trust in state institutions is low. That said, the mass cancellation of football matches, festivals, and Southwark recycling centre's open day aren't going to help.

But the other consideration is the growing republican or, to be more precise, anti-monarchical sentiment - something that became even more evident during the Platinum jubilee celebrations. Polling puts republican views at an all-time high. Still miles behind monarchical support, but with an institution accustomed to thinking about its stability in terms of decades and centuries the trend should give royalists some pause. Because the relations that secured the monarchy in the post-war period have corroded, with many communities giving way to privatised individuation, a more atomised population requires more direct messaging to try and induce desired behaviours. Hence the enforced mourning and the multiplication of the Queen's image and the rote repeat of hard work, service, faith, duty. Because it clearly works as millions back the monarchy the solution to winning over the doubters and the haters is double down and ideologically bludgeon its real and imagined opponents.

For the last eight years, official politics has been on a roller coaster. Certainties and eternal truths were found to be nothing of the sort. Because Charles III takes up the throne without the same support or affection enjoyed by his mother, that adds to the worry that change could descend quickly here and, as if taken by a thief in the night, the institution's legitimacy vanishes in the blink of an eye. The passing of the Queen marks something. Not the end of a second glorious Elizabethan age, but the entering of a new period: one in which no amount official days of mourning can hide that with her gone, it has to meet the uncertainties ahead without its most stalwart and respected advocate.

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Come to The World Transformed

24th-27th September, 2022. Liverpool. Four days of discussion and debate. The World Transformed.

If you look at the programme, at 1pm on the Saturday in the Black-E Theatre you'll find me putting all those long hours of Tory leadership contest viewing to good use: a session on our new and beloved Prime Minister, Liz Truss.

This will be more of an interview with some discussion format rather than a lecture with PowerPoint - I do enough of them in the day job! Front and centre are going to be the class politics of her energy bill freeze, what else is going on with her political strategy, the internal problems she's courting, the Tories' chances of winning in 2024, and (undoubtedly) whether Labour have her measure or not. Should be fun if leftist Tory watching is your game. And there are, of course, loads of other events on. Each one of them guaranteed to be more interesting than anything official put on by Labour or the establishment outfits that lubricate its fringes.

You can grab your tickets from here. Hope to see you in Liverpool!

The Artless Politics of Liz Truss's Cabinet

As I write, Liz Truss is appointing a parade of horrors to her cabinet. Suella Braverman replaces Priti Patel at the Home Office. Dominic Raab is out and Therese Coffey is in as Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary. Nadhim Zahawi's tenure as chancellor is over as Kwasi Kwarteng swoops in, and James Cleverly takes on the Foreign Secretary brief. More jobs will be doled out in the coming days. But what's more interesting is who's out. Raab, obviously. Grant Shapps's stupid strikes plan couldn't save his neck. Johnson loyalist Steve Barclay is out, defector-from-camp-Sunak George Eustice found his turncoatery rewarded with the sack. Patel wasn't invited back, and Michael Gove - gleefully chucked by Johnson - remains a brooding menace on the backbenches. Naturally, Rish! Sunak didn't make the cut.

In the main, the defenestrated and dejected have greeted their sidelining with official politesse. Barclay wished the new Prime Minister "every success for the future" and Shapps will concentrate on being a "strong independent voice". Or should that be voices? Someone who didn't get the chummy air kisses message was Jonny Mercer. After getting fired from his bag carrying for veterans job, Mercer said he'd be concentrating on his family in a letter that read like a resignation without actually saying the magic words 'I resign'. An unwelcome inconvenience from the kind of Tory Truss could easily have kept on side. Another emerging issue is Northern Ireland. That is, no one wants it. Truss has hawked it to her fallen rival, Penny Mordaunt, but she's said no and landed Leader of the House instead. Sajid Javid is a negative too - a man accustomed to saying yes to almost anything. As no one's biting her hand off for it, that suggests her authority isn't what it might be.

And that is indeed the case. She didn't get more than half of the MPs, and won the lowest share of the shrinking membership of any Tory leader, sharing with Iain Duncan Smith the distinction of not winning the backing of an absolute majority of party members. All this could change, depending on what her energy price announcement on Thursday is going to be and whether the public buy it. But the persistent and frequently circulating rumours that immediate relief is paid for by larger bills over the next couple of decades are more likely to meet begrudging acceptance than the appreciation Sunak's Covid support schemes received. Even if everything goes swell and she's cheered to the rafters, appointing a cabinet of satraps, lackeys, and the BNP adjacent is a foolhardy gambit.

I don't know if Truss has read Thatcher's Downing Street Years. If she has, nothing has gone in. Her celebrated predecessor counselled that a cabinet has to balance the trends and factions in the party to best manage parliamentary discipline. Truss is acting as if she entered Downing Street on a litter. Even Boris Johnson at the height of his powers appointed a top team that was relatively balanced and reflected a spectrum of Brexity opinion. Truss has noted who her support was and is rewarding them to the exclusion of all else, meaning when things get sticky those backbench big beasts are going to get tricky. She has not given them a stake in the government's success, so what incentives do they have? Stay quiet for the sake of party unity? Electoral expediency? Or, if a lucrative outside opportunity knocks, what's going to stop them from causing a painful by-election? Vibes?

Liz Truss is a political clod hopper. She gaffes like Johnson, but without his faux bumbling to cover for it. And her cabinet appointees don't just show she doesn't understand politics, she has a poor handle on the party. In the now infamous Laura Kuenssberg interview last Sunday, she said she didn't like to predict the future. Perhaps not, but one doesn't need a scrying pool to see the world of pain she's striding towards.

Overestimating Liz Truss

At the first Parliamentary Labour Party meeting of the new term, this evening Keir Starmer said told MPs that one should not underestimate Liz Truss. "She is a talented politician", he said, "who has got to the top through hard work and determination. She is nobody’s fool and she will do whatever it takes to keep them in power." One should never underestimate a Tory Prime Minister, but at the same time it ill behoves a Labour leader to talk them up for that is the path to over caution and paralysis. And like many a Labour MP, Starmer misrecognises low Tory cunning for talent and nous.

Having an accurate read on Truss's character matters because exploiting her weaknesses are key to driving the political agenda from opposition. Since Starmer became leader, he's struck lucky on this three times: free school dinners, an excess profits levy on oil and gas firms, and latterly the energy price freeze. On the first of these, the Tories were deaf to the mood (and arguably, Labour were only trailing public opinion), on the second Labour bounced Rish! Sunak into adopting a variation of their policy, and with the freeze Truss thought it smart politics to keep mum and let Labour own the issue.

I will give Starmer this. His "do not underestimate" warning is the right one ahead of Truss's energy price announcement. Thanks to the briefings across the press today, it appears she's also down for an energy price freeze. Albeit not one funded by energy companies - remember the indecently intimate relations between fossil fuel interests and the Tories - but funded by bill payers. Despite, apparently, getting rejected by Truss on its first presentation the plan drawn up and backed by energy companies themselves is back on the table. That is the government gives energy companies a £100bn loan to freeze prices, which is then paid back by levies on energy bills over 10-20 years. Company profits are protected, a price freeze is achieved until the Spring, it goes away as an immediate, all-consuming issue, and the size of the bail out makes Labour and similar opposition schemes look paltry. This is what Truss would be hoping for with the eye-watering sum being so big that it will simply stun and stump onlooking punters.

On the face of it, such a scheme should be easy to oppose. Why should people reeling under the cost of living crisis pay back energy company debt? Unless Labour carefully pitches its critique as a subsidy for oil and gas profits, it could come across as carping - something Starmer fell into when he tempered his critique of the Tories' Covid strategy by not contesting their framing and policy responses to the crisis. This way Truss could seize back the initiative after spending the summer on the back foot - so Starmer had better be prepared (and, shock horror, it appears a populist-looking rejoinder is ready to go).

That said, this is a hypothetical at the moment and we have to deal with what we know. And that is Truss enters Number 10 as an unpopular and politically compromised figure. Having won 57% of the 141,735 votes cast, this is not just the worst result received by an incoming Tory leader since the members' ballot was introduced by William Hague's reforms, with Iain Duncan Smith she is one of two Tory leaders not to win an absolute majority of the membership altogether. Except to IDS's 48%, she did worse with 47%. Like IDS she takes office without the explicit backing of most Tory MPs. 'Won't say' was the winner among parliamentary Tories this Summer. This means her room to move is tightly circumscribed. The £100bn loan scheme, if it comes forward, might be too much for some to stomach; especially if she immediately couples this with the promised tax cuts. For anyone with Thatcherite instincts, this is fiscal incontinence and loud grumbling could easily derail her plans. This could be headed off if Truss invited the Sunak/old establishment wing of the party into government, but if the leaks are to be believed the cabinet will be filled with right wingers and supine careerists. The spectrum of opinion in the parliamentary party might not be that broad, but a government of the farthest of the party's far right does not suggest happy times are ahead.

The other problem is Liz Truss herself. The campaign has had its share of unforced errors and stupidities. With everyone praising her work ethic, what she's actually done while burning the midnight oil has received less scrutiny. Lest we forget, her diligence as Environment secretary meant declaring war on solar panels on farm land and loosening the rules to allow the water companies to dump sewerage into the rivers - a story you might have heard about this summer. At the Treasury she spent more time poring over her social media analytics and asking officials their times tables than on economic policy, and likewise as Foreign Secretary she embarrassed herself in front of her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, by saying she would never recognise their sovereignty over the Rostov and Voronezh regions. Regions that have been part of Russia since the 15th and 16th centuries. But she stood up to Putin, so none of this matters, especially as it afforded nicely choreographed selfie opportunities. Being Prime Minister doesn't mean she becomes a heavyweight over night, nor that the irresistible tic of sticking her foot in her mouth will be cured. To mangle her victory statement, she campaigned as Liz Truss and will govern as Liz Truss.

Whatever happens, whether Truss is able to move decisively and neuter the energy bill issue or not, another leadership election between now and 2024 is unlikely, so we're stuck with her. It's going to be a long couple of years.

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Conservative Party Membership since 2001

Conservative Party membership figures are not easy to come by. Unlike the other mainstream parties that periodically announce theirs (Labour, for instance, regularly does this), the Tories do not. This is partly a matter of practicalities - until relatively recently, there wasn't even a definition of what a party member was, let alone a centralised database of who's in and who isn't - but also of political pride. Tory party membership has been in decline for a very long time. Peaking at around 2.7 million in the early 1950s, the current party membership stands at just 6.4% of this. Therefore, significantly trailing its main opponent has been a source of some embarrassment.

Because of this, there are only three useful sources for party member figures. The first are Conservative Party HQ press releases, which are incredibly rare. The last one on this topic was issued in 2013. Then there are occasional updates from the Tory Party chair. But both of these sources are subject to fudging, massage, and spin - as the two figures below suggest. The nearest we have to reliable data are reports from the party on leadership elections and internal referenda. In 2019, for instance, the party reported votes for the contending candidates, spoiled ballot papers, and turnout figures. In 2022, for the first time, the 1922 Committee Chair Graham Brady announced the membership eligible to vote. I.e. One has to be a member for three months before a contest to get a vote in internal elections. Therefore the figure below will be short of the actual tally, but what that is is anyone's guess. It also means all the other figures given in internal votes are not the actual memberships at those points in time, but they are the nearest we have.

Here are the membership figures for the Tory party in the 21st century as reported by these three sources.

2001: 325,059 (leadership election)

2005: 254,928 (leadership election)

2006: 245,865 (Built to Last members' referendum)

2013: 134,000 (CCHQ announcement)

July 2019: 180,000 (Tory chair announcement)

September 2019: 159,402 (leadership election)

October 2019: 191,000 (Tory chair announcement)

2022 172,437: (leadership election)

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New Left Media September 2022

The number of new left media start ups appear to have died down lately. I hope it's because the opportunities for poltiical activity have opened up and not that people are having to devote more time to work to meet the cost of living. Not that we'll need to worry for long with Liz Truss riding to our rescue. But in the mean time, here's what I've recently spotted.

1. Enough is Enough (Twitter) (Facebook) (Instagram) (Campaign)

2. The Full English (Twitter) (Podcast)

3. The Peace at Home Podcast (Twitter) (Podcast)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, spin offs of existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

Defending Tory Party Democracy

We've gone through a Tory leadership contest that has been a foregone conclusion since it was whittled down to the final two candidates. Tedious but necessary viewing for Tory watchers and professional commentators, something to dip in and out of for party members themselves, and an unexciting but occasionally noticeable spectacle for everyone else. Occasionally because the awful numbers reported for Liz Truss haven't come out of nowhere. Her dismal prospectus and significant silences have crept into popular consciousness, and they're unimpressed so far.

But thanks a bunch John Rentoul for making me defend the indefensible - the Conservative Party membership. In The Indy, he argues Tory party members shouldn't be allowed to choose their leader, and therefore the next Prime Minister. Others on the left have been making similar arguments, saying the replacement of one occupant of Number 10 by another is a matter for a general election. But this is not Rentoul's position: he believes members should have no say whatsoever.

He dresses this up as a long-held position stemming from the change in Labour's rules in 1981 that gave members a vote on determining party leadership. He argues it was a factional move by the Bennites to make it easier for a left wing candidate to get the top job - because it could not possibly be a means by which the party better reflects the aspirations of its support base. He then goes on to moan about Ed Miliband's decision to sweep away the electoral college in favour of one member, one vote. Assorted right wingers naively believed it would encourage a mass of ordinary people to join and choose leaders on the basis of the centrist politics they believed were the default commonsense of the British public. We know what happened next. Therefore, MPs should determine who gets the top job.

Undemocratic? Actually, Rentoul says giving members a vote fundamentally departs from parliamentary democracy. He points to the constitutional principle that the Prime Minister is the one who commands the confidence of the Commons. I.e. Who has a majority. Giving members a say dilutes this principle, allowing the opposition to make mischief about the number of MPs sitting behind them who do (or don't) back them - problems Iain Duncan Smith and Jeremy Corbyn encountered when their respective memberships backed them, but the parliamentary parties did not. This isn't to say members don't have a role, conceding that Tony Benn was right about mandatory reselection - a position few making similar arguments to Rentoul would keep with.

I disagree. This argument is about process and rarefied principles that, ultimately, defends an elitist approach to politics. On the contrary, all political parties - yes, even the Tories - should be democratic and as participatory as possible. First, there's the assumption MPs know more and have better judgement than party members about who's best to lead. This does make some sense. They inhabit the Westminster system and live and die by the rules of the game. They know about the demands and pressures of the job, what the stakes at play are, and how to play to the parliamentary gallery. As constituency representatives they occupy a privileged bird's eye position to know what's happening in their patch, and their surgeries are often parades of misery (which makes a mockery of claims that Tories (particularly) are unaware of the consequences of their policies). However, that doesn't mean they're in touch - seeing isn't experiencing, and the rarefied world of politics, its privileges, and its salaries become, for a lot of MPs, a block on empathising and understanding. As the wretched careers of many left wingers turned right wingers in Labour shows.

Tory party members are not representative of the public at large. They're older, whiter, maler, straighter, more retired and more propertied than the electorate. They have peculiar peccadilloes, such as making speed limits advisory and the awful policies Truss and Rish! Sunak pandered to and encouraged. And yet, as oddball as they are, when all is said and done they're more representative and closer to "ordinary people" than MPs. They are not insulated by official politics, no matter how much they assume the parliamentary party's point of view, and are mostly subject to the same cost of living pressures as everyone else. The Don't Pay UK campaign, for example, got a very sympathetic hearing among Tory activists on Conservative Home before it reached mainstream attention. These pressures have reflected in the constant questioning of both candidates about their plans to deal with the energy crisis, but the hustings format (as opposed to the earlier debates) have allowed them, and Truss in particular, to side step detailed answers.

In mainstream political science, parties are linkage devices. They are a medium transmitting preferences from a given constituency to a cosseted party elite. From Labour's point of view, more party democracy allows for a better performance of linkage. It is a means for aligning the party, its policy generation process, and its elites with what's happening in every day life. Despite the reams of the Labour right's self-interested drivel, the Labour Party membership is probably the most representative party out of all this country's mainstream parties, save perhaps the SNP. More democracy are the best conditions for left wing, working class politics to flourish inside the party. But more democracy in the Tory party also suits the labour movement. Not because it allows for entryism or some such, but because it opens up the party to more mass pressure and makes it more difficult and politically damaging for party elites to pursue pro-oligarchy schemes and wheezes.

And this is precisely why establishment commentators are using the tedium of the leadership contest to call the process into question. They would like both main party leaderships to be MP-only affairs because it dampens the acuity of mass pressure, and coincidentally secures them their careers as gossip merchants who forecast and explain what's happening - something that has got harder since masses of people rudely trespassed onto their domain and upended politics. Defending what there is of Tory party democracy doesn't mean abandoning an analysis in which the party is recognised as the key political lynchpin for organising ruling class politics. But more democracy introduces an element of uncertainty that might interfere with, disrupt, and derail madcap schemes, some of which we've seen of late. And as the tempo of struggle rises, and/or the deeper the crisis gets, the more of a hindrance party democracy could become. A dysfunctional organisation permanently divided and hamstrung by its base, and therefore the onslaughts its launched in the past become harder to pull off. Mightn't a Tory party made weaker by democracy be a better opponent?

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Matia Bazar - Ti Sento

Growing up on a diet of Italian pop in the 1980s, a friend of mine once said it was all sub-Eurovision pap compared to the emerald mines that were the UK and US chart music of the period. This banger suggests she was very much mistaken.



Gloriously overproduced with bad hair and terrible dancing (check out the rhythm guitarist's rubbery legs), the release did better in Belgium than in Italy. But Ti Sento (I Hear You) matters where it counts - and that's in the choonage department.

Boris Johnson's Frustrations

A couple of things about the first of Boris Johnson's valedictory speeches.

In the interests of accuracy, he never said that buying a new kettle can help cut electricity bills. He knows not to be crass when the camera are rolling. Rather, it was an analogy. Railing against short-termism of successive governments over nuclear power, Johnson argued that if you had an old kettle that took ages to boil, spending £20 on a new one that saves £10/year on electricity bills makes cost-saving sense in the long run. That's all. It wasn't an energy saving tip. Sorry to spoil the fun, but really can't complain about his misconstrual. Dishonesty and lying have never been obstacles he's shied away from.

Second, this was a celebration of nuclear energy. Or rather, the history of nuclear energy here was foil for a polemic. Having pioneered civilian reactors, he lamented that Britain had let a technological advantage go to seed. Why? Johnson's answer was myopia, and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were to blame. Discussing the new Sizewell C reactor, if that was on stream now he said some six million homes would be powered and its contribution to the country's energy mix would mean £3bn off our collective energy bill. While his figures were right, Johnson could resist getting economical with the actualite. Blair was always very pro-nuclear, and Brown had signed off on new power stations in 2009. Someone who was less than keen was Dave and the Coalition government. There was nothing in the 2010 Tory manifesto apart from their favouring an "energy mix", and by 2015 the Tories were committed to Hinkley Point only. Right now, we're still five years away from completion - despite the operating licence getting granted in 2012. Leaving aside the debate about nuclear power, it's not difficult to locate blame for the dithering and delaying.

What was more interesting was Johnson's evident frustration. During the last three years, he's been most enthusiastic when unveiling infrastructure projects of various kinds. With a record in which (never built) vanity projects loom large, such as Boris Island in the Thames estuary, the ludicrous Garden Bridge and subterranean orbital motorway in London, and a bridge across the Irish Sea, the attraction to big projects are brick and mortar "achievements" his legacy can be weighed by. Unfortunately for him, his brief stopover in office has meant no infrastructure has materialised. Instead we get the talking up of Brexit, the vaccine programme, and latterly the shipment of weapons to Ukraine. Further, Johnson's modernisation project was stymied and stifled by the Treasury and his former protege, Rish! Sunak. This wasn't because of "ideology", but the character of the Tory coalition. They have little interest in seeing underdeveloped parts of the country returned to imagined past glories, nor in new housebuilding programmes. Asset price inflation has suited them well enough.

There were also elements of a warning to Liz Truss. He talked about the inadvisability of fracking given the difficulties, and especially when offshore wind is much cheaper. And though the pressure is on to fix the immediate crisis, long-term decisions have to be made to the benefit of future generations. In fairness to Truss, her ludicrous blend of nuclear and fossil fuels is exactly what she wants and fits the "long-term" bill, except she likes to pretend this is an immediate solution. She'd be better off following Johnson's advice.

And with that, Johnson was done. He wouldn't be drawn on much else because he has to hold something back for the memoirs. But because he came across as someone frustrated by circumstance, and with Tory papers and much of the membership already clamouring for his return, unfortunately there's a very good chance we haven't seen the back of him. If we're particularly unlucky, he'll be back in front rank politics in no time.

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Five Most Popular Posts in August

Here's what did the business on the blog this last month.

1. Inflation and Political Paralysis
2. Is Enough is Enough Enough?
3. Does Liz Truss Have a Death Wish?
4. How Liz Truss Threatens Labour
5. On Don't Pay UK

Inflation helped inflate this blog's audience numbers as my piece on political paralysis made it top of the pops for the month. It is, however, half-obsolete. Half because Labour now have an energy price freeze plan whereas the Tories are still prevaricating all over the place. Second came my consideration of the new solidarity/cost of living crisis campaign umbrella, Enough is Enough. I can understand why some comrades are weary of A-to-B marches, rallies, and petitions but this has much more potential precisely because the conjuncture is different. Coming third was Liz Truss's tendency to put her foot in her mouth, something she demonstrated on Tuesday night's hustings as well. I suppose looking forward to her premiership of gaffes and shooting from the hip might provide light relief among the misery. Then it was another obsolete-ish post, suggesting Truss might outflank Labour by offering something more comprehensive on bills. With hindsight, this looks extremely doubtful. And lastly I had a butcher's at Don't Pay UK, who are pledged to stop their energy direct debits on 1st October unless something is done. As of this second, 131,866 are pledged not to pay.

Two posts can be found swigging ale in the second chance saloon this month. There's last night's on the final leadership hustings. Truss knows she has it in the bag, and her victory lap in the Wembley Arena demonstrated that she's destined to be an appalling Prime Minister. And the second were some reflections on Usdaw and an attempt to answer the question why a union representing some of the lowest paid and exploited workers in the country is so reliably right wing?

And that was August. Next month we can look forward to more Liz Truss content, and if you're going to The World Transformed in Liverpool yours truly is speaking on this very topic. Apart from that, there will be more matters Tory and Labour to discuss. And perhaps I'll squeeze out a video game blog post too. If you haven't already, don't forget to follow the free weekly newsletter, and if you like what I do (and you're not skint), you can help support the blog too! Following me on Twitter and on Facebook are cost-free ways of showing your backing for this corner of the internet.