Tory leadership race goes through the looking glass and round the twist

Welcome to Moronic Wonderland, though we’ve passed through the looking glass so often you’d be forgiven if you no longer tell on which side poor Alice now finds herself.

To give you a clue, on this side of the glass the subject of “domestic violence” is something to laugh about at a Conservative leadership hustings. Over here, it’s the concerned citizens who need calling out or, as the vernacular has it, “doxing”, because they called the police when they heard a woman screaming in the night. In case you’re still confused, here’s the Mad Hatter (first name Jacob) calling those same neighbours “Corbynista curtain twitchers”. On this side of the political mirror, doing the right thing is all well and good except when it inconveniences your messaging and then it is bad.

Up is right and left is bad. Got that? Don’t worry if you didn’t. Here’s Sir John Nott crying “Disgrace!” on Sky News on Monday. Humpty Dumpty famously said his name described his shape and wondered what shape Alice’s name described. Well, what shape Nott, here tying himself into knots when pressed by Adam Boulton? It was a moment of pure Lewis Carroll illogic.

“Are you saying that in your view it is not legitimate to report something if you are concerned that abuse might be taking place next door?”

To which, Nott replied: “It depends on the motive.”

So, doing the right thing is wrong if the motives are bad… Carroll, the mathematician who loved logic puzzles, could not have imagined half of this. “If a big shaggy bear-of-a-man makes a commotion in his partner’s flat, but nobody is around to hear it, does it make a news story?”

The correct answer, here in Moronic Wonderland, is that it shouldn’t if reported in The Guardian but perfectly reasonable if reported in The Daily Mail, who on Monday reprinted photographs of the happy couple sitting in a country garden. In the Mail’s words, they are “SO MUCH IN LOVE”.

Let’s quickly slip back through the looking glass and examine the photographs in the clear light of Reason.

First, it’s notable how we have better images of distant planets than we do of a couple sitting a few yards away across some Sussex green. How on earth do you manage to take such poor photographs? The cynic would reply that it’s simple if you want them to appear intrusive: the long grass in the foreground makes it feel like the photographer is stalking them through dense vegetation; the low resolution implies the photos have been heavily cropped. Here, they seem to say, are photos taken with a very long lens from a very long way away and they reveal “THE TRUTH” that nobody else wants you to see.

Except they’re clearly not that. The Mail printed two photographs side by side and the shift in the angle between the two pictures is so pronounced that it doesn’t take a mathematician of Lewis Carroll’s calibre to triangulate the photographer’s position. Certainly, close enough that the couple would probably know they’re not alone. Close enough, perhaps, that they’d probably knew the photos would end up splashed across the nation’s breakfast tables.

This is truth and counter-truth posing as truth and if you want to know what a Boris Johnson government will look like, then we’re looking at it. This is that other reality where Johnson can avoid scrutiny, look bored at hustings, and have vague answers to hard questions yet still lead a man who knew his brief and had the stamina to answer every question.

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

“Why should Boris Johnson become Prime Minister?”

My answer is the same as Lewis Carroll’s. “I haven’t the slightest idea!”

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