Liz Truss, we deserve the truth about your TV appearance

We need to know whether your jewellery of choice set you back £4.50 from a high street retailer, Liz

Truss allegedly wore cheap earrings to a TV debate, and was by turns both publicly praised and savagely derided for it (Getty Images)

Six whole minutes. Six minutes – a not insubstantial amount of time given the entire Tory leadership TV debate was given 60 – yes, an hour of our lives – and six of those were spent dissecting the price of Liz Truss’s earrings.

Forget the cost of living, the NHS or tax cuts – were they from Claire’s Accessories? That’s what the country wants to know, Liz – we demand it! We deserve to know whether your jewellery of choice set you back £4.50 from a high street retailer that it’s impossible to get away from without them basically paying you to take stuff; where the entire experience (as any parent of a pre-teen child will know) is based on going in and getting handed a basket and “buying five and getting four free”, or buying one and being begged to take seven more, in different neon hues. And one inexplicably has an avocado on it.

You go into Claire’s wanting a simple black hairband and you come out with a pair of angel wings, a unicorn tail, a necklace where one half is a lettuce and the other is a carrot to give to your BFF (Nadine Dorries; perhaps she can have the carrot) and a face mask that makes you look like a panda at a rave.

And Dorries knows, apparently; she knows Truss’s jewellery is from Claire’s, because that is what BFFs are for. They know secret, private things about you. Like who your biggest crush is (Sunak’s is easy: he gave Boris Johnson a resoundingly dreamy 10/10, whereas Liz gave the PM a dreary seven); and where you prefer to spend your pocket money – on the high street or on Savile Row (eyes on the former chancellor for that one).

So, Truss allegedly wore cheap earrings to a TV debate, and was by turns both publicly praised and savagely derided for it, and such is life.

And while her mates may have championed her for her down-to-earth realism (as, say, compared to Sunak’s mega brogues and Willy Wonka purple crushed velvet suit, as they now exist in the field of my own imagining), someone else on Twitter berated her for doing the “low class” equivalent of turning up to a wedding in a dress bought at a jumble sale (a move I personally approve of, because Richards family legend has it that my grandmother did this at my parents’ wedding in the East End in the 1970s, and she also asked the cook to take the bone from the meat home in her handbag).

Tory MP Angela Richardson (what happened to sisterly sartorial solidarity, Ang?) even tweeted: “FFS Nadine! Muted.”

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This is the Conservative Party hustings, Truss’s critics seem to be saying; this isn’t the “of the people” dirty Labour lot! For goodness sake – we don’t drink in actual normal-people pubs and take the Tube and use contactless and we didn’t go to the local comp (okay, Truss masks that one well); and we do not – we do not, Elizabeth, now go to your room at once – shop at places that sell princess tiaras and saucy devil horns and lip glosses in the shape of mermaids and rubber phone cases that say “YOLO” with a boggly eyes emoji. That’s not for us. What were you thinking?

£4.50 in the middle of a cost of living crisis? In Tory Britain? No, bring back Liz’s posh lunch at an “incredibly expensive” private club owned by a Tory donor, which apparently cost £3,000. That’s more like it! That’s our future PM!

Not this. Never this. “Trinkets for Truss”, they’ll be calling her next. I don’t know. What is the country coming to?