Liz Truss has a big idea for the Budget! (Remember how well that went last time?)

She famously ‘prepared the ground’ for her notorious mini-Budget by sacking the top man at the Treasury and threatening to cancel the Bank of England, writes Tom Peck. But the valiant former PM is back and this time – don’t laugh – she’s serious…

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Liz Truss, by her own admission, did not do enough to “prepare the ground” for her “mini-Budget”, the one which led to the Bank of England having to intervene to protect people’s pensions from annihilation, and her being kicked out of Downing Street after 49 days, a fifth of which were taken up by a period of national mourning.

She has now announced plans to publish her own “alternative” Budget, in advance of Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement next month, and before we get on to the main, sociopathically delusional narcissism of it all, we might briefly ask whether or not she has learned her lesson on the ground preparation front.

Last time, she “prepared the ground” for her mini-Budget by sacking the most senior civil servant at the Treasury, making veiled threats about cancelling the independence of the Bank of England, and then refusing to let the Office for Budget Responsibility look at what she was planning to do, which for some reason led people to think that if you’re not letting the “responsibility” people see what you’re up to, then maybe you’re up to something irresponsible, which very much turned out to be the case.

This time round, she has “prepared the ground” for news of her intention to put out a rival budget, by blocking on social media a very large number of pundits, commentators and former No 10 chiefs of staff, who might have had the temerity to point out that she was yet again revealing herself to be entirely insane.

Given that the problem, last time around, was very much that she appeared to have lost her mind, it’s possible this time round that she has given considerable thought to how to prevent the sort of market-spooking negative reaction that might follow, and concluded the best thing to do is simply to prevent anyone who might not like it from seeing it. That will work, won’t it?

Other mitigating factors are in place. Last time around, Kwasi Kwarteng made the problem many times worse by breezily telling Laura Kuenssberg that “there’s more to come”, spurred on by the encouragement of various hedge fund managers who had placed enormous bets on impending chaos and then told him to keep going with the incredible job he was doing. They have since called him a “useful idiot.”

This time round, there is less at stake because Truss is nowhere near power, will never be again, and absolutely no one cares, other than to point and laugh. The thing they are pointing at and laughing at specifically is Truss’s “growth commission”, staffed by various so-called policy experts, some of whom she is understood to still be trying to ennoble.

They have described their own work as providing a “detailed challenge to conventional thinking.” To which all that can really be said in response is that, didn’t they provide a “detailed challenge to conventional thinking” this time last year, and wasn’t the direct outcome very much a victory for conventional thinking? Didn’t the “conventional thinking” – that you can’t borrow £45bn just to give it all to already rich people, and also spend about £100bn paying people’s energy bills for them – and expect no one to notice that it doesn’t add up?

Truss is destined to be the victim of “conventional thinking” from now until the end of time, the conventional thinking being that she was a horrific accident that can never be allowed to happen again. Of course, some points can be made in mitigation. She was in some ways right that the problem was that she hadn’t “prepared the ground”. If you sack everyone whose job it is to tell you you’ve gone mad, then people might assume you’ve gone mad, even if your intentions are less mad than they might initially seem. If you turn up at the bank to pay in a cheque while wearing a balaclava and carrying a sawn-off shotgun, don’t be surprised if you end up in a cell.

Truss, meanwhile, continues to blame “economic orthodoxy” for her downfall, which is a kind of 2023 reboot of Gove’s immortal 2016 line about having “had enough of experts”. Sometimes, there’s a lot to be said for “orthodoxy”. And there are quite a lot of people out there who’ll be paying off higher mortgages for the rest of their lives, who rather wish “orthodoxy” had been able to get a look in when it really counted.

Naturally, we wait and see precisely what will be in the Growth Coalition’s alternative budget, but with the obvious caveats that, as far as Truss is concerned, there are no alternatives. Not even becoming the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the country, and by a massive margin, through a series of entirely self-inflicted catastrophes, have been sufficient for her to ponder whether maybe she might wish to come up with some “alternative” ideas of her own, rather than relentlessly calling for more of the same, and blaming everybody else for why it all went wrong.

Still, they are notoriously dry affairs, autumn statements, so we must at the very least thank her for giving us all something to laugh at. That, after all, will be her principal role in the lifetime of the nation, for quite possibly centuries to come.