Cooked-up

+With high drama, thrills and spills the Tory Party leadership race is drawing to a nail biting climax. It’s barely possible to walk up the street or enter the market without hearing snatches of animated conversation about the merits of each candidate. On the other hand . . .  Well, it has been reported that James Cleverly is making the running coming up from behind having delivered a speech which had superior soundbites and more gumption than the current frontrunner, the oafish Robert Jenrick. I heard Cleverly the other day on the radio and he sounded like an overinflated ego about to burst. So I read his barnstorming speech in an attempt to discover why commentators think he’s maybe going to win. Like all party conference speeches these days, it is largely a collection of single lines designed to punch, punch, punch the message home. There are no developed lines of discourse or argument, except perhaps for the overall case that ‘I am the only possible saviour of our party, our country, the world (i.e. that part of it with which I agree).’ It’s the kind of no-nonsense self-belief that got Liz Truss where she is today.
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+Starmer is back in Liverpool today to announce a £22 billion 'boost' for carbon capture and storage, the technology that has struggled for 25 years to prove itself (and still hasn’t in my view). This dosh must be an amazing Labour commitment the like of which we have never seen before. Except that last year Rishi Sunak announced a £20 billion investment in carbon capture and storage. Labour’s extra £2 billion is probably just a cooked-up add-on to make it sound like this is fresh money. There is absolutely no way anyone will ever know whether it was real or not.