Liz Truss’s ludicrous political comeback was straight out of Mean Girls

Not since that movie’s reboot has a bunch of cliquey, pretentious wannabes so deserved to be panned. Pravina Rudra watches the drama unfold at the launch of Popular Conservatism, the Tories’ latest splinter group

Gang busters: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Mhairi Fraser, Lee Anderson, former prime minister Liz Truss and her adviser Jonathan Isaby, at launch of Popular Conservatism (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

I hear the Popular Conservatives before I see them. Or, rather, the noisy agitators that their high-profile launch event in Westminster has somehow attracted.

From a couple of streets away, I detect the megaphone dulcets of Steve Bray, College Green’s resident protester, blaring out “We all live in a Brexit tragedy” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”. He’s accompanied by a woman wearing a sandwich board, with the faces of Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg superimposed on cut-outs of popcorn kernels: “Pop Con,” it reads, “the Tories are exploding.”

By my reckoning, Popular Conservatism is the sixth group in recent years to have formed within the Tory party – a new addition to the Five Families, along with – deep breath… – the European Research Group, the New Conservatives, the Northern Research Group, the Common Sense Group, and the Conservative Growth Group. Got it?

The PopCons are launching themselves at the churchified Emmanuel Centre. Inscribed in the foyer are the words “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”. Not since the new Mean Girls reboot has such a bunch of cliquey, pretentious wannabes been so widely panned.

Today’s keynote speaker, Liz Truss is Queen Bee, throwing shade at everyone to the left of her. For a new splinter group calling itself Popular Conservatism, their chosen figurehead is literally the least popular politician right now; a poll puts the former prime minister’s current approval rating among 2019 Tory voters at minus 54 points. Her reign of terror may have only lasted 49 days, but it had an effect on the pound that hadn’t been achieved in nearly 40 years.

“It’s not about Liz Truss!” I keep being assured, including by Nigel Farage, looking flushed and self-pleased as ever. Wouldn’t Farage be better suited to be up on the stage instead? “Who’s to say?” he demurs, a twinkle in his eyes.

Stood at the back of the room, Farage presence here embodies his effect on the Conservatives: he might not be in the party and he may not be making a speech, but he’s really the star of the show. Cameras and microphones clamour around him.

Is he causing mischief just by being here, causing all these groups to splinter off in a panic the Tories aren’t right-wing enough? “I’ve been causing mischief for 25 years!” he smirks, explaining that Labour have already won the election, so this event is all about “ideas”. Farage, recast as politics’ armchair philosopher.

The first other woman I see, in a room of bespectacled men, is Lois Perry, the aspiring leader of Ukip. Dressed in a floaty magenta dress and looking every inch the beauty queen, she flutters her false eyelashes and assures me that once Truss gets here, there’ll be at least three women…

A couple in their sixties take their seats next to me. They smile and wave at numerous people they seem to know from their years spent campaigning for Brexit. The wife tells me she struggled to meet any decent men until she found her husband at an Enoch Powell speech. They are, they tell me – and as you might predict – worried about immigration.

First to speak is Mark Littlewood, the former head of free-market think thank the Institute of Economic Affairs, and said to be the driving force behind this new movement. In a phlegmy warble, he attempts an interminable metaphor about the Conservatives trying to achieve their aims being like pushing water uphill (probably not a good idea, then). He passes over to Rees-Mogg, who starts by quoting a bit of French, then squeezes his hand into a tiny fist to shake it at us, blaming the country’s ills on “International Davos Man”, a new phenotype he has devised. He uses the word “quango” several times.

Mhairi Fraser, the Tory candidate for Epsom and Ewell, is then welcomed to the stage as the future of the Conservative Party. Just to clarify: the future of the Tory party, as per the PopCons, is someone who once said she had “never been as excited” about a politician as Donald Trump.

Fraser stares at the horizon and speaks very slowly – necessary to fill the time, because her only substantive point is that she doesn’t like Rishi Sunak’s smoking ban. Someone should have let the woman light up on stage, because the crowd actually seem energised by this (“Hear hear!”).

Next, Lee Anderson is up, cracking a joke about both him and Rees-Mogg being born on an estate – actually, quite a good gag – and saying “only weirdos” care about net zero.

And then, it’s Liz Truss.

She tells us we have more than 500 quangos in Britain. She takes a dig at rumours of Sunak’s Silicon Valley ambitions. She jokes that she is never invited to dinner parties, which causes a sympathetic coo from the crowd and the man next to me to slap his thigh. Then, there’s another water metaphor about conservatism involving swimming against the tide (maybe the lesson to the PopCons is to stop trying to take on large bodies of water?), and a complaint about left-wing extremists who want to help LGBT+ people and ethnic minorities.

But here, she loses her train of thought, because she isn’t making the left sound like the egregious criminals she has hoped.

Before you know it, Littlewood is back, talking some more about how popular the PopCons are, neatly fulfilling Thatcher’s observation that if you have to tell people you are, you aren't. He marvels at how the size of the crowd has defied fire regulations, and – in the last of the water metaphors, I promise – jokes that “Next time we’re going to need a bigger boat!”

A Jaws reference, clearly, but one that also brings to mind Noah’s Ark and impending doomsdays. I predict the PopCons will soon experience that sinking feeling.