I’ve just come from watching our new Home Secretary Cruella  – sorry, Suella – Braverman’s speech to the Conservative Conference in Birmingham on TV this afternoon. I was pleased originally when the job was taken away from the evil Priti Patel when Truss became Leader; but I clearly shouldn’t have been. Cruella – sorry again – is obviously cut from the same cloth. The speech was appalling: dull and pedestrian for a start; but – more to the point – full of libels against Labour – do ‘many’ of them really want to ‘defund’ the police? can Labour really be held responsible for Europe’s Human Rights legislation (I wish!)? and can it be true that it’s Labour that has been distracting the police from their proper duties in order to prosecute ‘identity crimes’? – as well as of swipes against do-gooders and lawyers – in general: ‘don’t get me talking about them!’ (cheers). All this, of course, is pure anti-‘wokery’, intended as fodder for the Tory faithful in the hall, who, as I’ve noted before, have been mercilessly pruned down since Boris’s original purge of Conservative Remainers, and then by Truss’s selection of her ministers on the basis of  their ‘loyalty’ – to her – to leave only the Party’s reactionary rump in Parliament, and in the constituencies. Remember that Truss was chosen leader only by a tiny number of members, and a narrow and extremist one at that.

It led me to speculate – yet again – on why so many of the Conservative Party’s recent leaders have been (a) sons and daughters of recent immigrants, and (b) women; two groups that one might have expected to shy away from a party so firmly associated with racism and misogyny in the past. I can think of possible reasons…. but for another time, not now.

Two little postscripts. (1) I noticed that a fair number in the hall weren’t clapping or cheering at her anti-wokery, which may give some comfort and encouragement to liberals, and to the nicer Conservatives. (2) She repeatedly asserted that she wanted to make it illegal for foreigners – any foreigners – to come to Britain ‘over the Channel’. Which made me wonder how else they could come here, with the Channel standing between England and the Continent in any case. Under it? Round the back? – She meant, of course, in little boats; but that’s not what she said.