Truss can deliver – she just decided not to over the past eight years in cabinet

Things, at long last, are finally going to change, because Liz Truss is here, and she ‘can lead, make tough decisions and get things done’

“Trusted to deliver.” Liz Truss. “Trusted to deliver.” Get it? Well it’s a shame if you didn’t because down at the Liz Truss campaign launch, it was all downhill after that.

Liz Truss, apparently, can be “trusted to defeat Vladimir Putin”. Liz Truss, apparently, “can be trusted to deliver on Brexit”. Bit of a strange one that, really, because there are many, many millions of people all around the country who trusted her to deliver on Remain and that didn’t work out all that well.

One thing she couldn’t be trusted to do was arrive on time. When Kwasi Kwarteng had finished introducing her, he had to stand there for an agonising 20 seconds or so, in a state of ever rising panic about whether she was going to walk in or not. It would later transpire that the delay had clearly been caused by technical issues with her own camera crew who were on hand to film her walking in.

(Liz Truss will gladly tell you she has a “track record of delivery”. Absolutely anyone who’s ever worked with her will tell you she has a track record of being “obsessed with comms” to the detriment of all else.)

By the time she made it to her own campaign launch, it was clear there was only one thing she wanted to say, and she said it time and again, sentence after sentence, answer after answer. And that was her “track record of delivery”.

The Conservatives have been in government for 12 years, and during that time, no one has been in the cabinet for longer than Liz Truss. This, she seems to think, is why she above all others has the track record to deliver. Which is kind of strange, in a way. Because there’s a very real and ever growing sense absolutely everywhere that the country is utterly on its knees.

That people can’t pay their energy bill, that they can’t afford their weekly shop, they can’t afford to fill up the car, and that they can’t afford to sit around in A&E for 18 hours, and certainly not while the hospital car park meter’s running up to infinity and beyond.

There is very much a growing sense that this particular government can’t be trusted to deliver anything. That the only thing the voters actually did trust them to deliver was Brexit, which they still haven’t managed to do.

And it’s why Liz Truss has had to be trusted to introduce illegal legislation so that her government can wriggle out of its legal obligations, which is not the kind of sentence in which the word “trust” sits all that naturally, and she’s still not managed to do that either.

She has the “track record of delivery”, but she is, even so, quite possibly the only person in the country who has failed to deliver on both leaving the EU and staying in it.

We would learn, naturally, all about the comprehensive school she went to in the poshest part of the not exactly downtrodden city of Leeds. We would hear about how the people there were let down by poor education, and poor opportunities. “Too much talent went to waste,” though – a miracle – not hers. She somehow managed to escape the deprivation and head off to Oxford, presumably because she’s just so much better than everyone else.

(I happen to know one other person who went to her terrible school. He, like her, has struggled with his sad lot in life, and has only managed to set up a highly successful PR agency from scratch and, though I’ve not spoken to him for several years, I did spot him on the TV earlier this year, sitting a few rows behind Will Smith at the Oscars. Another miracle, though with one caveat. By the time he went to that school, Labour were in government. Liz Truss had the misfortune of growing up under the party she now wants to lead.)

But Truss, like absolutely every Conservative Party leader before her, is going to turn all that around. She wants us to be “an aspiration nation”.

“Everyone should have the same opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background or where they live,” she said. And that’s why she has such a track record of delivery. She was there, doing her bit to help David Cameron, when he made it his mission “not to defend privilege but to spread it”. She’s been in Boris Johnson’s government for the last three years, helping him to deliver on his big election promise to “unleash Britain’s potential”.

She was also in Theresa May’s government for its entire duration, delivering on the promise that she made outside Downing Street: “We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.”

And yet, somehow – another miracle – despite Liz Truss’s incredible track record of delivery during all those years in government, now that her time has come, it just so happens that there are still great reservoirs of unleashed talent going to waste for her to set free.

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Somehow there always, always is. Somehow you really can spend 12 years in government, working for absolutely everyone, all of whom have promised the exact same thing, all of whom have been able to draw on the services of this wunderkind with the track record of delivery.

And yet, somehow, none of it’s been done, so now it all falls to you, and your track record of delivery, to finally make it happen. Because things, at long last, are finally going to change, because Liz Truss is here, and she “can lead, make tough decisions and get things done”.

And with that, she was off. Within seconds of her departure, people on the internet were being cruel about the clear video footage of her getting lost between the podium and the door, which were around nine steps apart. But that’s not fair. What was actually happening was making sure she didn’t walk out without her private film crew having captured the moment. One wonders what they’ll charge for the footage. It surely won’t be long before Truss’s exit, and the broadcasters could do with the pictures.