Scary Tory clown squad play government in alternate dimensions | John Crace

While Radon Liz and Kamikwasi Kwarteng set quantum dates for fiscal steadiness, Suella Braverman was talking up a coup

Small steps and all that. The Tory party conference may be on life support in the ICU - most delegates have written thank you letters to Mick Lynch for Wednesday's rail strikes that have given them a gold-plated excuse for leaving early - but things aren't quite as bad as they could be. It was probably more luck than judgment, but Liz Truss finally got through an interview relatively unscathed. Put it like this. It wasn't a total car crash. More a minor scrape.

There are caveats, of course. For one thing, the interview with Nick Robinson for the Today programme had been prerecorded the day before. So we might just have got a moment in time when a version of Radon Liz existed that was not quite so catatonically hapless. There was no way of knowing whether another iteration of Truss that was live at 8.10am on a Tuesday morning would have given the same interview. Things have turned unusually existential in Birmingham.