Let’s be honest — we have no clue at all about these Tory candidates

It’s hard to read Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. They don’t tell us much at the hustings. They can’t. If you tell someone the truth, you might alienate them. What we are left with is the candidates, and what they are prepared to tell us, unless you are willing to read their writings, which most aren’t.

It’s crisis management, hour by hour. I have realised that when Truss decides that she can’t answer a question truthfully, she makes a shape with her hands as if carrying a box.

It doesn’t help that they both supported a dishonest prime minister until they didn’t, and some Tory members still like Boris Johnson, as if he is a toy they realised too late that they loved. The candidates can’t insult him anyway: they colluded too much. It doesn’t help that the Tory membership is madder than Conservative voters. The mad show up. These ones present like property owners who spend their days fantasising about locking up asylum seekers when not idling over a game of bridge. What plays in the Tory party won’t play in the country. They are very different — sometimes opposing — constituencies. The candidates are facing forwards and backwards.

So watching the hustings is like inhabiting a parallel universe talking about a country called Britain which I have never lived in. And they are parallel candidates too, with polished narratives standing in for themselves. Anyone who wants to be PM is exceptional but the narrative strives for ordinariness. Again, I don’t know why.

Perhaps the narrative is safe. It doesn’t expose you like the truth does: to your almost unimaginable wealth (Sunak) or your youthful affair with your parliamentary mentor (Truss). It is simplistic and strives for relatability: Rishi Sunak, the son of a doctor; Liz Truss, the state-educated daughter of a mathematics professor. It’s class bingo that barely acknowledges class. The Strivers v Scroungers story — the founding libel of Austerity — endures.

In their speech, being working-class is something to be inoculated against. They escaped, due to the hard work and benevolence of their parents: prosperity theology.

It’s also neo-Liberalism with a terrible vapidity. Sunak, pictured, praised the weather and his family: I suppose someone told him everyone has a family. They both praised Margaret Thatcher. Truss said she was happy to be in Leeds and repeated the word ‘delivery’ as if addicted to it. She has used the phrase ‘Aspiration nation’. I think that was in The Thick of It.

Sunak called himself “the most northern Tory Chancellor in 70-odd years”. He grew up in Hampshire. I think Sunak is a genial-seeming nerd who has never known pain. Truss is more unknowable. She is driven but I don’t know by what. As we try to guess who they are — which is all we have — their defensive platitudes roll out.

It’s quite gruesome to watch people hedging themselves for power: jeopardy for them, and no less for us.

I grew up in London but I am a Polish Jew by descent, so I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I used to not belong in London: now I don’t belong in west Cornwall.

It’s a wonderful life, though disorientating. Winters are lonely: long and wet. You close your door at dusk and, unless you love getting wet, you see few people until spring. Your circles are small. I miss the hot throb of the Underground; the jeopardy; the filth; the Rembrandts.

So despite the parking problems — it is a proxy war too, people must fight about something — I love the summer holidays. I like watching Londoners stare at the sea with ecstasy. I love listening to them on the beach: they have a peculiar cadence.

I left so much of myself behind when I left: in summer, they bring a little back to me.