Lockstep

Who writes this stuff? I hate everything you say and you’d still be better off asking me.

Liz Truss is speaking right now. Aside from saying that her priorities are “growth, growth and growth” which sounds both like something from a Monty Python sketch and a dermatologist’s nightmare, she’s announced she’s in lockstep with Kwasi Kwarteng. That sounded weird to me, so I looked it up.

Oh.

Team Truss in general seem to present their champ in the most bizarre way. There was a “visionary with thousand-yard stare” photo outside a shipyard in a Belfast now mostly associated with alternative energy (which Truss doesn’t seem keen on) and that random BBC interview in the Empire State Building where she had hard shadow lines down her face so that her pupils were different sizes and she looked like the protagonist in an Andrzej Sekula movie… every time I see her I think “did you do that on purpose? Or are you just scrambling to catch up?” They put her in positions which make her look odd, and then her slightly hesitant rhetorical delivery increases the sense of oddness…

And then they give her zingers like this.

In the declining days of John Major’s government, the then-PM was afflicted by a bizarre series of disasters - he sat in the driving seat of an advanced motorcar and the steering wheel came off; he gave a speech premised on comparing the powerful engine to the economy only to have the sheet lifted to reveal that it had no wheels.

There was just this feeling that the party was so disheartened they didn’t have the energy to stop him walking into glass doors.

“Lockstep.”

Blimey.