Entertaining to see that Liz Truss had to rapidly retreat from a cornerstone policy of her platform to become the next UK PM.
....she was forced into a U-turn on civil service pay after a backlash from within her own party.
The foreign secretary swiftly abandoned the cornerstone of her plan for a "war on Whitehall waste" when it was revealed it could lead to pay cuts for millions of teachers, nurses and police officers.
The foreign secretary had proposed creating "regional pay boards" to set civil sector pay, matching it more closely to local labour markets outside London and the south east. But it was scrapped within hours, after analysts pointed out the purported £8.8bn saving from the policy was only remotely achievable by cutting wages across the public sector.
And the penny dropped sharpish with some of the 'Red wall' crew.
"There is simply no way you can do this without a massive pay cut for 5.5 million people – including nurses, police officers and our armed forces outside London. So much that we've worked for in places like Teesside would be undone," he said. "Red wall" MPs including Jacob Young and Richard Holden had also raised alarm at the policy announced overnight, as well as the former cabinet minister Simon Hart, who said it would amount to cuts of nearly £3,000 for workers in Wales.
Anyhow, this is great stuff. Not least her explanation.
Truss abruptly withdrew the policy on Tuesday, little more than 12 hours after it had been floated, claiming in an awkward interview that it had been "misrepresented".
"There has never any intention to affect teachers and nurses, but I don't want to worry people, I don't want people to be concerned, so I am being very clear that we will not be going ahead with the regional pay boards," she told ITV.
But if anything this merely underscores how she and Sunak are so perfectly unfit for the position they aspire to. Sunak has deployed the woke war...
Sunak meanwhile has announced a series of increasingly hardline promises in a bid to stay in the race, including capping the number of refugees, doubling the number of foreign criminals deported and taking on what he called "leftwing agitators" in a culture war over gender identity.
And as if all that wasn't bad enough:
Rishi Sunak's proposals to strengthen the government's anti-terrorism programme risk "straying into thought crimes" and are potentially damaging to national security, a former senior police chief has said.
The former chancellor announced measures to beef up the Prevent programme on Tuesday night, as part of a bid to boost his flagging campaign to succeed Boris Johnson as the next prime minister.
These would lead to more people being referred to Prevent by widening the definition of "extremism" to include those who "vilify" Britain, with Sunak pledging to focus on "rooting out those who are vocal in their hatred of our country".
Where does that end? Not difficult to offer a few guesses.
What strikes me is how the dial of UK politics, as nearly always, seems to tip inexorably ever rightwards. This contest isn't going to halt that dynamic, far from it. If anything it will exacerbate it. And although Truss has had to bow to reality in this one instance her economic policies more broadly continue to be entirely unadjacent to even the shambles that is reality. And while I suspect many of these policy efforts will not see the light of day the fact they are brought into the public discourse in this manner will see aspects of them brought forward sooner or later.
Where this leaves Scotland, England and Wales and the people who live there is another matter entirely. Whatever else there's something deeply distasteful about the sight of this contest and those contesting it.
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