Norfolk’s brutal humiliation of a former prime minister: How Liz Truss was booted out

Already the shortest-serving PM in history, Liz Truss has now also become the first former leader since 1935 to lose their seat. Her scalp was the greatest ‘Portillo moment’ on the bloodiest of nights for the Conservatives, says Sean O’Grady

Liz Truss lost her Norfolk South West seat, finishing second to Labour by 630 votes (Jacob King/PA Wire)

Did you see the marmalade-dropper at your breakfast table? On a night with a record tally of Conservative losses, Liz Truss losing her seat was surely the most delicious of the many “Portillo moments” that unfolded overnight.

The former prime minister made us wait, with the slow hand-clapping heralding her denouement at 6.48am. Absent from the declaration for a while, and not wearing her Tory blue rosette, she should have been represented by a lettuce.

The retribution meted out to her by the people of Norfolk South West was richly deserved. No one who contemplates Truss’s career could think otherwise. Not only did she help, with her infamous mini-Budget, shred her party’s reputation for economic competence and drive it into oblivion, she will also now serve as the pre-eminent symbol of the miserable end to the Tories’ time in power.

Truss has never displayed a hint of contrition about the damage she did but actively, and preposterously, tried to rewrite history and blame everyone but herself for her brief, brutal and bankrupting premiership. As others have noted, after she was forced out of No 10 after 49 days of chaos, she behaved as if she was the captain of the Titanic who blamed the iceberg for the disaster and thought she deserved another go at setting the transatlantic speed record. She becomes the first former prime minister since 1935 to lose their seat.

Until Truss fell, the outstanding casualty had been Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who rivals Truss for his lack of self-awareness. Rather like the fall of Michael Portillo in 1997, there is something about the man’s character that combines exquisite manners with an underlying sense that they were the thinnest veneer on a certain arrogance.

It is impossible to rid yourself of that image of Rees-Mogg, who is not the nice man he affects to be, lounging on the Commons’ benches like Little Lord Fauntleroy. His ejection from the House will go down as the totemic moment of Tory failure.

Almost as much as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Rees-Mogg symbolised Brexit, with all its delusions and post-imperial fantasies. A faux toff with a taste for double-breasted suits, he patronised his civil servants as gleefully as he did the British public. He was once, if you can bear to recall it, the minister of state for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency, during which time about the only Brexit benefit he could identify was a discount on the cost of fish fingers.

Before you feel sorry for him, perchance, just remember that time when he said that victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster died because they lacked the “common sense” to flee the blazing building. He later apologised – but, sorry to say, his sense of innate superiority won’t be diminished by his electoral punishment at the hands of the people of Somerset North East and Hanham. He’ll be free to spend more time with the fortune he made out of Brexit. No more will he be able to drape his languid frame on the government front bench. There is a God.

He’s not the only big beast to find themselves in enforced leisure – quite enough to form a government of their own. The cull began with Rob Buckland and Grant Shapps (who had a victory speech) and proceeded to include Gillian Keegan (who once said that “everyone else has sat on their a***” while she tried to fix the scandal of schools containing collapse-prone concrete), Lucy Frazer, Therese “let them eat turnips” Coffey (Truss’s deputy prime minister), Theresa Villiers, Jonathan Gullis, Andrea Jenkyns, Penny Mordaunt, Johnny Mercer, Liam Fox, Alex Chalk, Simon Hart and Brexit’s most extravagant figure, Michael Fabricant.

There is no clear evidence here that recognition and fame (or notoriety) played much of a role in the mass fall from grace and favour; the status of these big beasts may have made some voters more determined to mete out the metaphorical beating. That certainly seems to have been the case with Truss – on the regional swing, she should have hung on.

This was a brutal election. Fame and fortune were yesterday’s game. Today’s was tantamount to execution.

At any rate, the bodies of failed Tory politicians were piled high. They represent a timely lesson that it is the politicians, be they ever so mighty, who are the servants of the people, and a fat majority and a public school education is no defence when the peasants decide to revolt.

Labour ministers, take note.