No one can deny that Liz Truss was a dire front person for her own economic policies, offering a demeanour that had all the reassurance of a random stranger plucked off the street to become your local school’s headteacher. Having turned her own citizens into lab rats for an experiment brewed in the boardrooms of opaquely funded rightwing thinktanks, she has now been barred from the lab itself. Buried by the very “markets” she once fetishised, the prime minister is terminally wounded, fronting policies that, just days ago, she would have savaged as coming from the “anti-growth coalition”. Demanding the removal of Truss is something of an abstract question because, in any meaningful sense, she is no longer in power.
But beware what happens in the coming days and weeks. We must not let the Conservative party blame this all on Truss, anoint her successor, and then regroup and reset, as if everything is back to normal.
