Last week, on ITV’s This Morning, the cheerily rodentine Phillip Schofield and his margarine-moulded familiar, Holly Willoughby, offered a desperate member of the public the chance to have their energy bills paid at the whim of a gaudy spinning wheel of chance. Schofield is a cruel god, for whom we are mere flies, our sufferings simply sport. The former gopher handler fired up his roulette wheel of misery, taunting his victim with possibilities, as the viewer’s financial security in the punishing winter ahead hung in the balance. This tasteless fiasco was in fact the perfect prologue to the Liz Truss era. Pray, poor peasants, and spin the wheel! Life is a lottery! And you lost it the moment you were born! But why don’t we meet some of life’s winners?
Despite the fact that the new government is comprised largely of people who were born to win, the fates conspired to usher Truss into power in the most ridiculous way possible, the loser. On Tuesday, a coiled serpent cavalcade of Conservative Range Rovers slowly ushered Truss towards Downing Street as the heavens suddenly decided to open, like an old incontinent seer soaking his leggings as he scried what lay ahead for the nation. Outside No 10, trying to second-guess the weather, a pair of technicians ran backwards and forwards with the Ricky Gervais-style lectern from which Truss was to make her opening speech, as if the Chuckle Brothers had been booked as her warm-up act. “To me! To you! That’s it. A little more to the right. No. More to the right. To the right. Further. Further to the right. To the right! The right!”
