Conservatives are not only more damaged than they imagine. They are more damaged than they can POSSIBLY imagine

Lowdown podcast on a party driven mad by Brexit and Truss

This week’s Tory party conference has just begun, and as special guest Nick Tyrone and I discuss, already the radicalisation of the right is on full display.

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As we say, Conservatives have lost the ability to cope with a real world that stubbornly refuses to conform to their ideology. There’s no discussion about how the country can afford to pay for its elderly population and its collapsing public services without raising taxes.

Kemi Badenoch, joint favourite to win the party’s leadership election, said yesterday that she was all for cutting maternity benefits for young women but dare not raise taxes on wealthy pensioners because they form the party’s core vote.

Badenoch and her rivals for the leadership cannot talk about Europe, of course, or about the insanity of the Liz Truss Thatcherite tribute act. In short, they don’t know or dare not mention the real reasons why they lost the general election.

As Nick Tyrone and I discuss in this podcast, the right’s surprise win in the 2016 Brexit referendum drove it into a land a make-believe. In the process something strange and unremarked has happened to our intellectual landscape, not just in the UK but in the US too.

In the past conservatives bragged that they were practical, empirical people while liberals and leftists were wild-eyed utopians who fell for disastrous ideas. Now the roles are reversed. Conservatives are drunk on ideology, whereas Labour is duller than drying paint.

No one is more responsible for the descent of conservatism into a world of fantasy than Boris Johnson. Below is my take on the wreckage he left behind.

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Boris Johnson destroyed the Conservative party - and the Tory leadership election proves it

The Strange Death of Tory England (cont)

Boris Johnson wrote a novel in 2004 called Seventy-Two Virgins – I swear I am not making this up. It was awful. The skills you need to knock out a 1000-word column for a right-wing paper are entirely different from the discipline required to pull off an entire book or, indeed, govern an entire country.

Johnson was only ever good for the one liner and the easy laugh. He entertained Conservative readers by deploying a basic literary skill and by playing to their prejudices.

And by lying. Oh God how he lied.