Lord Bonkers' Diary: He's looking down on us and not saying a word about it

Lord Bonkers is still bereft at the death of the Queen. "I can't start a new week of diaries on the day of her funeral," he sobbed to me this evening, "It wouldn't be right."

The he brightened. "Tell you what, put it up before midnight and no one will be able to say a word against me."

Monday

"What we need is a mole," said Paddy Ashdown one day. "Awkward blighters, moles," I replied, "you should hear Meadowcroft on the subject." "No," he persisted, "we need to place a deep-cover Liberal Democrat agent at the very top of the Conservative Party." 

I naturally assumed that Ashdown wanted to make one of our chaps leader of the Tory enemy so he or, indeed, she could bring it down from within. I have myself installed alumni of the Home for Well-Behaved Orphans in all sorts of useful places and read their reports avidly. However, as Ashdown outlined his scheme it became clear it was much subtler than that. It was so secret, indeed, that not even the mole could know what was going on. 

"So what we need," I summed up for him, "is a young Liberal Democrat who would be perfectly at home in the Conservative Party, is insanely ambitious and bound to be a disaster if they ever become prime minister." 

We looked at each other for a moment and then exclaimed as one: “Elizabeth Truss!” Today Ashdown’s plan has come to fruition and I feel sure that, in a very real sense (as the Revd Hughes would put it), he's looking down on us and not saying a word about it

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.