No 10 asked the Queen to save us from Boris – shame they didn’t do the same with Truss

New revelations about No 10 reaching to the Palace in desperation surprise nobody, writes Tom Peck. And when it comes to Starmer... well, nothing he can do to assist his cause can come close to the job Truss and Johnson are doing for him

Queen Elizabeth II welcoming the newly-elected leader of the Conservative party Boris Johnson during an audience in Buckingham Palace (PA)

It is still not a year since Rishi Sunak promised to bring “integrity, professionalism and accountability” back to government. He is, we are told, annoyed that he doesn’t seem to be getting any “credit” for such things as the Windsor Framework, which very partially makes up for a small amount of the damage of Brexit, of which he was and is very much in favour.

Presumably, he is also annoyed with himself for having, say, been fined by the police for breaking the law twice in a matter of months. He must be a bit disappointed that his big barge for asylum seekers had to be evacuated because there was an extremely virulent form of Legionnaires’ disease in the water supply; frustrated that schools are falling down and teachers and hospital workers are on strike and terrorists sellotape themselves to the underside of food delivery vans and drive out of prison through the front gate.

But even if none of these things, nor all of the so many other things, had happened, one has to think that Rishi Sunak would still be annoyed. Annoyed, that is, with the overwhelming insistence with which his party simply won’t let anybody forget how off-the-charts hopeless and outright insane they have been for so very long, and how they would be again if given a whisker of a chance.

When you’re really trying to get this idea of “integrity” and professionalism” out there, it is unfortunate that your attempts should coincide with a three-part BBC documentary about precisely how your party has been running the country, and the never knowingly overly dramatic BBC should title that documentary, State of Chaos.

The most serious, which is to say most laughable, allegation to be found in State of Chaos is that staff in No 10 were considering asking Her Majesty the Queen to have a quiet word with Boris Johnson to ask him to sort his life out and get his act together.

That really does appear to have happened. This, it seems, was in the early days of the pandemic, when Johnson had just come back from hospital and Dominic Cummings was still in place, and still very keen to burn down the civil service mainly because he’d spent too long in the “management” section of an airport WHSmith. This period of time was described, by one civil servant, as “utterly grim and totally crazy.”

It’s kind of hard to believe this stuff can possibly be true, which means it certainly is. Most of us can probably remember those grim and crazy times in the spring of 2020. Most of us, if we had elderly relatives, were in a state of panic, working out what we might be able to do to help them. Sitting, for example, in the 10,000-strong queue on the Ocado website to try and arrange them a home delivery.

It is somewhat surprising that 10 Downing Street were doing the same, except with the very slight twist that they weren’t trying to assist a 94-year-old woman with her problems, but rather get her to sort out theirs. The documentary also seems to suggest that Buckingham Palace was reluctant to assist with Boris Johnson’s problems, at least partially because Buckingham Palace may still have been more than a little bit annoyed by, not six months earlier, having been conned into assisting with shutting down parliament in a fashion that was ruled to have been illegal.

Yes, these are the sorts of things that make life difficult for prime ministers, but arguably not that difficult, as this particular humiliation lasted scarcely an hour-and-a-half on Monday morning, when it was entirely displaced by another one.

There is scant point engaging with anything Liz Truss had to say in her hour-and-a-half-long speech at the Institute for Government. Scant point, because she has said all of it before. She really did stand there and talk about the need not to “redistribute the pie, but to grow the pie.” There is really no surer measure of the complete pencils-up-the-nostrils madness of the woman than that she is still, even now, repeating the campaign slogans of a leadership campaign which she won, then did exactly what she said she was going to do, and in so doing banjaxed the economy and had to be almost forcibly removed from office six weeks later.

The only question worth asking is, “why”? Why is she doing it? Not why does she still absolutely insist she is right about everything, despite having been proven more wrong than quite possibly any human being who has ever lived. We know the answer to that. It’s because she’s mad. But what does she want to get from it? What is she hoping to achieve?

She still thinks that the country’s problems are that all of the arguments have been won “by the woke left.” We can only imagine she thinks it was the “woke left” that waved the Union Jack and whistled the Great Escape and then stormed out of the European Parliament for the final time, in the words of Ann Widdecombe, just as “we stormed the beaches on D-Day.”

She thinks the Bank of England are the “woke left”, the bond markets are the “woke left.” The former Bank of England governor Mark Carney yesterday said the Truss government had tried to turn the UK into Singapore-on-Thames but instead had turned it into “Argentina on the Channel.” This, of course, is the sort of thing you expect from the “global left”, especially the ones who spent a full decade and a half working for Goldman Sachs.

Somewhere, watching all this, must have been Keir Starmer. Whatever his plans might have been for the day, he will surely have known to just cancel them. There is absolutely nothing he can do to assist his cause that can even come close to the job Truss and Johnson are doing for him. She has a book out in April, so you can be certain there’ll be another, immaculately timed round of all this then as well.

Starmer, theoretically at least, is going to be in an election campaign soon. He may be wondering whether he will need to write a single speech, produce a single document or knock on a single door. What can he possibly do to surpass all this?