Traitor

Pundits have been pondering the paradox of Rees-Mogg and Dorries fawning over Truss when she voted Remain. Agreed, she's now a Brexiteer, but that's more to do with opportunism - you don't go from knowing Brexit is bad to believing in sanctioning your own country, especially after what's happened since 2016.

Writing in the Times, Daniel Finkelstein has nailed it - they're setting her up as the next Traitor to the cause.

Herewith the summary on The Knowledge, a new news organ that, in their words, makes the important news manageable. 

The fantasy world of the Tory right: 

The Tories have an “incredibly destructive tendency”, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Whenever a leadership election comes around, the right of the party picks someone who “isn’t really right wing” and supports them as their candidate. When the anointed one then fails to live up to the right’s impossible expectations, they are accused of “betrayal”. It happened with John Major, Boris Johnson and Theresa May. Their latest “traitor-in-waiting”? Liz Truss. The Foreign Secretary has been heartily endorsed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries as “probably a stronger Brexiteer than both of us”. Which is, of course, nonsense. Truss forcefully backed Remain in 2016 – indeed, she gave “one of the best speeches” of the whole campaign. 

“Real Brexit” is for the hard right what “real socialism” is to the hard left – an “abstract, undefined idea, always a little over the horizon”. All the problems with Brexit, we’re told, are because we haven’t “tried the real thing”. Again, it’s nonsense. And it’s setting up the next leader to fail. The right will be similarly disappointed when its other pie-in-the-sky demands aren’t met: when tax cuts don’t pay for themselves; when government policy doesn’t stop migrant Channel crossings; when the Northern Ireland border problem doesn’t just “disappear”. And as long as the gap remains “between what they expect to happen and what is remotely likely to happen”, the right will continue “electing leaders and feeling betrayed by them”.

This analysis, I think, is spot-on.

What's certain about all the contenders is that they're in campaign mode and, if they've learned anything from Boris Johnson, that means promising all manner of things they know to be impossible. The only exception to this appears to be Sunak, who is showing signs of responsibility, although he is still, inexplicably, wearing his Brexit suit from 2016, despite events having proven his hopes ill-founded and naiive. 

There again, like Rees-Mogg, he was a hedge fund manager before entering Parliament and hedge funds are about the only entities that will profit from Brexit as they make money from market volatility. Hedge fund also don't like regulation of their activities, which increased after the 2008/9 global financial crisis, which was caused by - want for it - unregulated markets.