Former British prime minister Liz Truss in 2023 (Image: EPA/Andy Rain)
Former British prime minister Liz Truss in 2023 (Image: EPA/Andy Rain)

Deck the halls Liz Truss, who will go down in history as a woman who held on to the office of UK prime minister for a period that was dwarfed by the shelf life of a head of lettuce, has launched a new group to reinvigorate conservative politics — and that’s not even the funny part.

It’s called PopCon, short for Popular Conservatism and it splintered at the *first* event it held, with two of the billed speakers simply not showing up. That’s kind of the funny part, showing Truss is somehow still improving her skills in self-destruction, a sort of Novak Djokovic of failure.

But the really funny part is that the group’s celeb figurehead is our very own Holly Candy (née Valance). A star of Neighbours in the era when writers could get away with calling a character “Flick Scully”, Candy told a journalist for British Aldi Fox News GB News about her political philosophy:

Everyone starts off as a leftie, then wakes up at some point, after you start either making money and working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home and then you realise what crap ideas they all are and then you go to the right.

After following the well–trod path for Australian celebs (Neighbours then a cover song pop hit), Candy married property billionaire Nick Candy, who with his brother Christian has done so much to improve housing affordability.

“Jacob for PM,” Candy added, referring to Conservative Party politician Jacob Rees-Mogg. Actually, that’s the funniest part: Truss got a “celeb” along to her popularity contest, and the celeb chose literally the only other politician in attendance as her favourite.

Riding the Coatsworth Tales Former deputy chief medical officer Dr Nick Coatsworth has been busy lately. Over the weekend he added to the list of Liberal Party-adjacent events he’s addressed at the inaugural Young Liberal Federal Convention in Brisbane.

Coatsworth has eyed a potential run at federal politics, and while he’s been equivocal about which party he’d prefer, or if he’d run for a party at all, he made a name for himself during the early COVID era as one of the faces of the Liberal government’s vaccine ads and as a persistent critic of the Andrews government.

Aside from politics, Coatsworth has been announced as the co-host of Do You Want To Live Forever? with former A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw on Channel 9 later this year. Even more surreally, he filled in for Karl Stefanovic on Today over Christmas. So maybe Brisbane’s young Liberals are just benefiting from Coatsworth’s reluctance to turn down an offer?

Governor General interest Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers: This item contains reference to a deceased person.

Yankunytjatjara leader and activist Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue passed away over the weekend, leaving a legacy and life that changed the country. Daniel Casey, a doctoral researcher at Australian National University (who has previously shared with us a bunch of the “weird shit” people have sent politicians over the year), got in contact with Crikey to tell us there could have been another item on the incredible list of titles she accrued: governor-general.

Casey has uncovered correspondence to John Howard advocating for O’Donoghue to take over the office when Sir William Deane’s term came to an end in 2001.

“Back in late 2000 when Sir William Deane’s term as governor-general was coming to an end, prime minister Howard received a large number of letters from ordinary members of the public, keen to put forward their own ideas,” Casey said. “There were a few letters advocating for Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue, with one saying:

In the name of democracy it would be much much better if you considered appointing an original Australian to fill that post … it is also much much better than saying ‘I am sorry’ … this is a beginning to Reconciliation’.

Another letter put O’Donoghue at the top of a decidedly diverse list of possible appointees:

Trump Watch A monumental legal blow to former US president Donald Trump came on Tuesday morning Washington DC time — turns out, contrary to Richard Nixon’s famous maxim, the US president is capable of doing illegal things. A federal appeals court in the nation’s capital rejected Trump’s argument that as a former president he has total immunity for actions he took while in the White House. The judgment was unequivocal:

For the purpose of this criminal case, former president Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.

Of course, Trump’s team was slightly snookered by the 2021 impeachment process, when his counsel had argued: “instead of post-presidency impeachment, the appropriate vehicle for ‘investigation, prosecution, and punishment’ is ‘the article III courts,’ as ‘[w]e have a judicial process’ and ‘an investigative process … to which no former officeholder is immune’.”