Suella Braverman has found an answer to the Tory party’s woes

What is the point of the Tories? What have they honestly got to offer today? They need to find an answer to that question – and fast – because they’re going to have to let the voters have a say sooner or later. And the polls suggest those voters are of a mind to take revenge for the catastrophe visited on the country as a result of the party membership buying into Liz Truss’s toy town economic fantasies.

They also still have to state their case in parliament every week, where Keir Starmer is having a blissfully easy time of it. Trying to say “yah boo sucks to you lot because, um, something bad happened under Labour in the 1970s” isn’t going to cut in when you’re serving up cuts, austerity and misery as the direct consequences of an economic crisis you created.

Home secretary Suella Braverman, who’s been positioning herself as the authentic voice of the right’s most fruit loop tendencies, has found one answer to this Tory dilemma: spraying as much petrol as she can find on the flames of the culture wars.

I rather think we’re in for an escalation of those as soon as the Office for Budgetary Responsibility has passed Hunt’s reverse-ferret Budget. Party managers will be calling open season on whatever hot button issue the right-wing media has got between its teeth today.

Braverman, who might be the answer to the prayers of the Bruges Group when they’ve finished their tooth gnashing about the alleged coup by Jeremy Hunt, got that ball rolling by announcing a crackdown on eco-protestors and the right of unions to call strike action on behalf of under-paid and poorly treated members.

She seems to have recalled what served her hero Boris Johnson so well: distort, distract, deflect! And she needs to employ this tactic because otherwise, Hunt’s incoming cuts to public services, which have spent more than a decade of Conservative rule being slowly strangled, are going to hit Tory seats.

With the party’s undeserved reputation for economic competence left bleeding at the side of the road, what else do they have?

So, let’s beat up the unions. They always go for that in the shires. Then throw the crusty kids who’re after a liveable planet in jail with murderers and rapists. And while we’re at it, tell Rwanda to get ready. There’s a fresh set of planes full of desperate migrants on the way.

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Next thing you know, Braverman could be sending the plod out onto the streets with orders to bundle teenagers into the back of police vans for the crime of wearing hoodies in public. Well, I suppose it will at least keep Met officers too busy to be sending racist and misogynistic messages to each other.

After the government has finished with that? There’ll always be the BBC to bash for the crime of doing journalism. That comes (very) cheap. And talking of media matters, if Hunt and his orthodox priests at the Treasury insist on making a fuss about the stuff that costs money –  fighting the court cases some of these things will provoke will cost a pretty penny for starters – then there’s always Channel 4 to flog to some US media giant for a knockdown price.

This isn’t an enticing prospect. It’s not going to save the Tories from the kicking they will inevitably face at the next election. But it might get the tabloids and GB News back onside. Those parts of Tory Twitter fulminating about coups will cheer it along too. Ditto the membership, who it might encourage to knock on the doors of the limited number of people who don’t put people wearing blue rosettes on the same level as particularly pushy Jehovah’s Witnesses these days.