Kelly’s Eye

IT’S HARD to pick my favourite moment from last week’s events. But I’d struggle to beat discovering Liz Truss really had appointed Grant Shapps as Home Secretary, and reading the deadpan description of him in one of the news reports that followed: “He once sold get-rich schemes under a fake name and is now in charge of UK law and order.”

It is with such details that the best farce is to be savoured.

I’ve said here previously that it would have been preferable for us, the voters, to pass verdict ultimately on Boris Johnson, instead of a combination of his own MPs and the media.

Instead many of those who defenestrated him only six weeks ago seriously invited us to believe he was the saviour again, until he calculated the odds and stepped down from the latest non-contest.

That only serves to illustrate why the Conservative party is a dismally spent force. It’s an unfair cliché usually to depict politicians as believing in nothing but their own survival.YetTory MPs presently personify that jibe.

The party would benefit from a period in opposition, to allow time and space to someone like Kemi Badenoch to restart it from first principles.

An ex-banker like Rishi Sunak probably is best placed to placate the market gods in the short term. But appeasing the warring wings of the Tories is another matter, and most of us have tired of the pantomime involved.

Similar numbers would once have laughed at the prospect of regarding Keir Starmer as much more than, say, a dull neighbour you wish you didn’t feel obliged to invite to a party.

Even allowing for the black comedy that’s just played out, we’re not laughing now.