Sitting behind us in a small hall at the Conservative conference was a group of what appeared to be schoolchildren. This is a worrying new front in the battle against youth delinquency, and needs to be tackled, with troubled teens steered away from Tory events and towards healthier activities like smoking or getting pregnant.

It won’t be an easy fight. You’d be astonished at some of the material that kids can find online. For instance, the event we were attending was being streamed on a part of the Dark Web known only as the Daily Telegraph. The publishers have been forced to put up a paywall to keep unsuitable material away from people who shouldn’t see it (everyone).

The speaker was someone who my well have been a victim of online radicalisation herself. Once a pro-European Tory centrist, Liz Truss has now attained enlightenment, swallowing bottles of red pills to the point where she can see the hand of the deep state everywhere, from her own downfall to the buckets of rain currently falling on Birmingham. 

The Conservative party has a complicated relationship with its recent leaders, in fact with all of them since 1990. At the party’s merchandise stall, which sells plenty of tat memorialising Tory history, there is no evidence of any leader after Margaret Thatcher. 

Boris Johnson has done his best to disrupt things this week with his memoirs, but the serialisation has been somewhat underwhelming: Monday’s revelation was that David Cameron had opposed Brexit. 

Most of them hadn’t shown up. Even Rishi Sunak, technically the current holder of the post, made only a flying visit. But Truss, answer to so many pub quiz questions that she could sustain a round all of her own, had chosen to give an on-stage interview. She has become the Ancient Mariner of Toryism, stoppething one of three to explain that she was done over by the Bank of England.  

On this occasion, she was being interviewed by the Telegraph’s sketchwriter, Tim Stanley. Other sketchers, embarrassed that we hadn’t known we were supposed to bring something along to amuse the class, could only applaud his initiative. It was a revolution: a satirist had seized control of the means of joke production.

Possibly Truss also saw it that way. “We are already in socialism!” she declared within seconds. “We are already a socialist country!” This was greeted with the kind of hearty grunts of approval that suggested an audience not yet fully reconciled to Britain’s adoption of the metric system.

At least, though, Truss was not pretending that the horrific state of Britain was purely the responsibility of the people who have been in power since July. Far from it, she was clear that Conservative governments (May 2010-September 2022 and October 2022-July 2024) were to blame. “This makes me very, very sad,” she said. 

Why had the Tories failed so dismally? The answer was a battery of initials: LDIs, OBR, BOE, WEF. If you’re not sure what these stand for, just think of them as Big Alibi. 

Voters, Truss said, want to get rid of establishment figures like Keir Starmer, and install revolutionaries like her. For some reason, the last time the electorate was asked, it turfed her out of parliament and gave Starmer a massive majority. The explanation for this is false consciousness.  

But what about her own seat of South West Norfolk? Wasn’t her defeat there something of a personal rejection? Not at all, she said. Constituents had wanted to vote against Sunak. It was simply bad luck that the only way they could do this was by voting against Truss. 

If only she had been allowed to stay in Number 10, she could have done better at the election, she insisted. There would have been fracking everywhere, bringing down fuel prices! Is there any part of her that recalls her inability to persuade her own MPs to support fracking? Or indeed her inability to persuade her own MPs that she should be allowed to stay in post?

Could she not tell the room anything to cheer it up? “Donald Trump might win!” This got only a smattering of applause. Sensing that even this audience wasn’t completely sure about this idea, she explained that it was important to look at his domestic record. What’s one armed mob storming Congress between friends?  

“The media in this country is not serious,” she complained. You can’t exactly argue with that, but it might have come better from someone who hadn’t spent quite so much of their time as a minister focused on their Instagram account. 

Were people there out of support or morbid curiosity?

But she has ascended beyond such trivialities. She is focused on the real fight: “There is a battle not to save just Britain but to save Western civilisation.” All that stands between us and destruction is a small band of superheroes assembled by Truss: the Lettuce League. 

Were people there out of support or morbid curiosity? There wasn’t exactly a surge of enthusiasm in the room at the suggestion of her returning to parliament. And none of the current leadership candidates was given the coveted Truss endorsement. It would be interesting to know whether any of them had passed the word that they would rather not have it.

It was also interesting that what had probably seemed like an obvious clap line, her comment that the party had made a great mistake in getting rid of Johnson, was greeted with silence. Is the spell breaking? 

Elsewhere at the conference, candidates were bouncing from drinks party to hustings to interview. Here was reticent former soldier Tom Tugendhat revealing that he served in the military, though he couldn’t really talk about it. Here was Kemi Badenoch, complaining that she was being stitched up by journalists writing down the things she says, and explaining that children shouldn’t be taught about “fisting”. 

This is not the sort of thing that impressionable minds should be exposed to. But some people need it. Asked how she’s managed not to just hide under the duvet for the last two years, Truss smiled. “This is what I do to be happy,” she said, and I believed her. Kids, if someone offers you politics, just say no.