A new Tory leadership race is underway

We could be getting our 6th Tory PM in 7 years

The Tory conference is getting really exciting now. You might have thought nothing could top the appearances of Liz Truss and Suella Braverman, but a half-cut Penny Mordaunt has unexpectedly given us the third Tory leadership bid in three days. It’s almost like Rishi Sunak doesn’t exist…

What do you mean, who’s Rishi Sunak?

He’s the one who became prime minister after getting fewer votes than Liz Truss (zero) and kept forgetting to declare his expenses and conflicts of interest and has business ties in Russia. You remember, the one with 11 heated swimming pools? The guy who saved us from the meat tax and the ban on cars? Yes, the one who scrapped HS2 and replaced it with a smoking ban!

Yeah, the Tories think he’s a bit shit too…

The consensus at conference is that 13 years of Tory rule have been rubbish because everything has turned woke, and Rishi is somehow making everything worse, but things will definitely get better as long as {insert sane person here} takes charge of the country. The latest sane person to have a go at convincing you she is the Tory to save the Tories from the Tories is Penny Mordaunt.

What do you mean you can’t remember who she is either? She’s the one who wore the Poundland outfit at the coronation and resisted the urge to swing her sword at the bloke called Charles, proving she has the restraint we need in these trying times.

Penny has always been considered one of the more sensible Tories, which means she’s probably got no chance of winning, but she did her utmost to convince the membership she is just as batshit as Liz and Suella.

Penny left the Poundland outfit at home and channelled her inner-Churchill to deliver a Shakespearean speech that she’d proudly written all by herself, but sadly, the effort was wasted because she came across more like Nadine when she’s knocked back a bottle of Gordon’s Premium Pink, lost her voice by singing too much karaoke and threatened to punch the barman because he won’t serve her again.

Penny needed someone to come on stage, gently whisper she might have had a few too many, and carry her back to her seat. Unfortunately, the onlookers decided it would be much funnier to let her get on with it… and they weren’t wrong.

Penny’s speech lasted all of 79 seconds before she’d run out of words and 50% of those words were “stand up and fight” (the other words were explaining that socialism is made of velvet and iron, which I think is a compliment).

Here is as accurate a transcript as I could do, given how drunk she was:

“Stand up and fight,” Penny slurred, only no one did stand up and fight because the audience were all about 106 years old and they have bad knees. She slurred incoherently about socialism being velvet and iron, prompting one intruder to yell: “Damn right, comrade!”

Penny continued in a slightly more coherent manner:

“Stand up and fight because when you stand up and fight, the person beside you stands up and fights, and when our party stands up and fights, the nation stands up and fights, and when our nation stands up and fights, other nations stand up and fight, and they stand up and fight for things upon which the entire progress of humanity depends, freedom, that is what [hiccups] Conservatives do, [dramatic pause] that is what this nation [hiccups] does.

“Have courage! Bring hope! STAND UP AND FIGHT! STAND UP AND FIGHT! Thank you, conference.”

Penny nodded, clapped, and pointed in the air with both hands as though to say “fucking nailed it”. She turned around, stepped from the podium, span back and pointed aggressively at the camera, causing the cameraman to run away in case she decked him.

Now I know what you’re all thinking, she’s going to start World War III, isn’t she? And you would be right!

Liz Truss is appealing to the Tories who don’t like paying taxes, Suella Braverman is appealing to the Tories who hate foreigners, and Penny Mordaunt is appealing to the Tories who are still basking in the glory of World War II, leaving Mark François very confused because he is all three.

The only thing Tories can agree on is they’re nothing like the current prime minister who is determined to hang onto his job for some inexplicable reason. Rishi Sunak delivered his conference speech, prompting social media users to say this is the least convincing AI-generated deepfake they’ve ever seen, only it was real. He began:

“As I did last summer, I will tell it as it is. And conference, you can already see my approach with the course I charted on net-zero.”

I’m pretty sure Rishi meant not-zero, given how many drilling licences he’s dished out recently, but let’s not split hairs. What’s important is that he saved us from having seven bins in our home and other things that were never actually policy.

Rishi boasted that “we’ve grown faster than France and Germany”, skilfully omitting that our economy is playing catch up with theirs. He bragged about a trade deal with countries at the other side of the world that is expected to boost our GDP by 0.08% (1/50th of what Brexit has cost us).

“I know you want tax cuts. I want them too and I will deliver them,” Rishi boasted before mumbling the small print. He explained he will bring down the inflation his government caused, effectively giving us a tax break, because he’s hoping Tory voters are too stupid to understand lower inflation does not mean lower prices; it just means prices won’t be rising as quickly as they were before.

To be honest, I tuned out at this point because Rishi’s voice is so boring it could send an insomniac to sleep, but I caught the end where he droned about building a better future for the next generation. I suppose you could call this Sunak’s leadership bid, or his bid to keep his job in defiance of the stiff competition from the other three nutters.

Only a fool would count Rishi out at this point in the leadership race, given it hasn’t even started yet…

Let’s not forget Rishi is so well organised, he signed a £300 million contract for HS2 a few days before he scrapped HS2’s northern leg. He said this was necessary to save £36 billion because we needed to claw something back after the £36 billion test and trace system and the £42 billion we failed to collect in tax last year (half of which was from Akshata).

If anyone thinks Rishi is not a man of substance, I would like to remind you he’s been making fun of trans people all week and hiding his Whatsapps from the Covid inquiry, proving he is the man to deliver “bright decisions for a long-term future” or whatever the latest Tory slogan is. I can’t be arsed to check.

All I know is the man who didn’t get a mandate from his party and is refusing to get a mandate from the public is determined to dramatically change the country by doing absolutely nothing, not even the things the Tories promised in their last manifesto. The three nutters who want his job will have their work cut out if they want to top that vision x

Thank you so much for letting me vent! If you enjoyed this article, you can buy me a coffee below or simply share this article with a friend. It helps me more than you realise x