First, an apology. I should never have christened Theresa May “the Maybot”. With hindsight, she appears positively emotionally present. Touchy-feely. Almost functional. If not entirely competent. Certainly not the 1980s piece of Amstrad junk she always seemed when she was running the country. If you can call it that.
But the Tories are just playing with us. It’s as if the members said: “So you think David Cameron is useless? Just wait until we give you Theresa.” And once we’d all had about enough of May, they gave us a narcissistic, sociopathic liar instead.
Now, to top it all – at least we hope so; surely there can’t be another one who is even worse? – we’ve been landed with Liz Truss. Someone who is not just half-witted and robotic, but reckless enough to bankrupt the country. The ideologue with only a tenuous grasp on reality. There’s always a job waiting for Truss in an automated call centre: a deathless loop that sucks the life out of you.
I’m not sure who was stupid enough to suggest starting the reclusive prime minister’s media rehabilitation with a tour of the BBC regional radio studios, but they won’t be doing it again in a hurry. If they thought they were going to ease Librium Liz out of her week-long hibernation with a series of short, “lifestyle” interviews – think author flogging new book on PR junket – that would reach a smallish, local audience and fly beneath the national media, then they badly miscalculated. Local radio presenters are no mugs and they weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Inevitably, they all mainly asked the same questions. After all, there really is only one game in town. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Didn’t it occur to you that your mindless mini-budget could wipe £500bn off the markets, putting pensions at risk and increasing the cost of borrowing? Thanks very much for the £100 or so tax cut that the least well-off will be getting, but did you know that you’ve just made most people even more broke?
But there was a virtue in hearing the same question asked on eight separate occasions. Because it reinforced the key message that Librium Liz doesn’t have any coherent answers. She really didn’t seem to have any idea of the scale of the damage she had done. She was in total denial. Like an arsonist caught with a can of petrol.
It also said much about Truss’s limited capacity for rational thinking. Most artificial intelligence is programmed to learn from its mistakes. So you’d have thought she would have got better and better as the hour went on – that she might even have sounded half human and half intelligent by the time she came off air.
Only she didn’t. She got worse and worse. Out came the same absurd answers, and the pauses as she tried to think of something credible got longer and longer. She is the embodiment of the circle of doom on a laptop that’s crashing. She is not AI. She is Artificial Stupidity, programmed to carry on repeating more and more errors until she collapses in on herself. A dead cert to win this year’s Darwin awards for those who have contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Wire Truss up to an ECG and you’d find no activity. Just a flat line.
The circus began at Radio Leeds, where presenter Rima Ahmed cut to the chase. Why had Truss crashed the economy and what was she going to do about it? “Um … er,” muttered Librium Liz, apparently astonished to be asked about why the country was in crisis.
“We took decisive action.” Thousands of people shouted at their radio. You took decisive action to wreck the economy. To make everyone significantly less well off. The one thing you weren’t supposed to do. What we really want to know is what “decisive action” you are going to take to reverse your child death squad mindless destruction. Doing nothing isn’t an option. “Nothing,” said Truss.
It was like this, she said. It all went wrong because we were trying to help people out with their energy bills. “Are you stupid?” everyone screamed. Of course it didn’t. You had announced the energy bailout early in September and no one had batted an eyelid. The markets had taken it in their stride. It was only when you and Kamikwasi Kwarteng announced your unfunded tax cuts that benefited the most well-off that the pound nosedived. It was an entirely self-inflicted crisis that only the ever delusional John Redwood and the batshit-crazy Institute of Economic Affairs welcomed.
On and on Librium Liz went. Through Norfolk, Kent, Lancashire, Nottingham, Tees, Bristol and Stoke. Each time sounding less and less convincing. Detached, emotionally dead, intellectually wanting. Careless with other people’s lives. Not even curious to find out how people were experiencing her calamity economics. The dead-air silences became so long I presumed she was trying to communicate by telepathy.
It was Putin who had crashed the economy, Truss insisted. Which was weird, because no one could remember the Russian president having delivered the budget in the Commons. Then it was the fault of the Marxist International Monetary Fund for sticking their oar in. Go back to North Korea! Finally, it was all down to the Bank of England. Mortgages getting more expensive was all their fault. They were the ones who had put up interest rates. Out of pique. Not in response to the budget.
Come the end, Truss was little more than a puddle on the floor. A pool to be mopped up and taxied back to Downing Street. She couldn’t even answer any of the local questions she was asked. Who would have guessed local journalists might ask local questions? She was clueless on fracking. Clueless on everything. When she was talking to her own local radio station in Norfolk, she didn’t just seem unaware that the roof was falling in on the hospital in King’s Lynn. She also seemed to have forgotten she was prime minister and in a position to do something about it.
It could have been worse. She could have spoken to 10 radio stations rather than eight. If there was a way out of this mess, Librium Liz wasn’t letting on. At present, her only plan seems to be to hang on and hope for the best. Much the same goes for Kamikwasi. He spent the day in Darlington doing not very much. At this rate, our two star-crossed lovers could be the only Tories to show their faces at the party conference in Birmingham next week. Let’s hope they’ve thought of something better to say by then.
