The prime minister was helped by two Greenpeace protesters who interrupted her speech to the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham to hold up a banner reading: “Who voted for this?”
A reasonable question, but the disruption gave Liz Truss the foil she needed to loosen up after a tense opening section, in which the look in her eyes suggested she thought the representatives might heckle her for having trashed the party’s reputation so thoroughly over the previous 29 days.
When the heckling actually came from a couple of infiltrators, it allowed the assembled Conservatives to unite against a common enemy. More than that, Ms Truss, after an initial flicker of irritation, accepted the rhetorical gift from a group that is sceptical about economic growth, interrupting a speech built on the thesis that the country needs to overcome the “anti-growth coalition”.
