You know Theresa May’s cabinet row has turned into an all-out war when Liz Truss gets involved

In a speech last night, Truss had planned to take all the piss out of Michael Gove, but at the last minute decided to leave some of the piss in. In the ensuing confusion, Team Truss denied having taken any piss at all, either via the plastic straw ban or otherwise

Historians like to argue about the precise conditions required to elevate a war to a world war. In both instances thus far, the threshold is considered to have been crossed at the point at which the fighting has spread to obscure colonies the major powers had all but forgotten were there.

And in that sense, you know that “cabinet infighting” has achieved “total war” status when suddenly Liz Truss is involved.

It is not yet 24 hours since the part-time minister for Instagram and full-time human GIF entered the conflict, and already the events are disputed. It is a pity, really, that AJP Taylor died around three decades too soon to produce an eight-part BBC lecture series on the short- and long-term causes of it.

The closest we have to an undisputed version of events is as follows:

In a speech last night, Truss had planned to take all the piss out of Michael Gove, but at the last minute decided to leave some of the piss in. The white-hot banter about “wood-burning Goves” and “smoke and hot air at the environment department” remained. But the bit about the plastic straw ban was edited out, although not in time for it to be removed from the government website. And then in the ensuing confusion, Team Truss denied having taken any piss at all, either via plastic straw or otherwise.

But video evidence has since been produced, in which piss is clearly taken, and which we must assume to be the first footage of Truss in which nothing is "a disgrace", no pork markets are opened, and that does not automatically loop back to the beginning after four mad words.

Across the other theatres of war, the bodies are piling up. Greg Clark has publicly rebuked Boris Johnson for saying “f*** business” in private, which in his defence is the least you might expect a business secretary to do.

Sajid Javid is demanding more money for the police, Gavin Williamson is demanding more money for the armed forces, and telling anyone who will listen that he can bring the prime minister down if she doesn’t cede to his demands. Whichever aspect is the more tragic – that Gavin Williamson is a) the defence secretary, b) can bring down the prime minister, or c) appears to know people who will listen to him – is up to you.

Truss, as the government’s junior purse-string holder, warned her colleagues to stop making “macho” demands for more money.

As a minister whose most noticeable impact on government thus far has been to be photographed by civil servants in the act of taking close-ups of snow-covered daffodils outside the treasury for use on Instagram, this order is unlikely to be heeded.

Still, it is possible Truss does not actually consider herself to have entered the war at all. After all, her view on armed struggle is a niche one. For last night, at the London School of Economics, she again made clear her view that Britain is somehow raising a generation of “Airbnbing, Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters”. If getting a minicab, eating a curry and booking a couple of nights in a Spanish apartment is all that it takes to be a freedom fighter, well it might come as a surprise to her new friends in the Ulster loyalist movement.

Indeed Britain’s new young generation of “freedom fighters” might not even consider themselves to be freedom fighters at all. And not merely because getting a minicab or eating a curry doesn’t actually make you a freedom fighter, but more because mainly they are paying exorbitant rent, and that the chicken bhuna paramilitary wing is doing most of its recruiting from the other generation, the one that’s having all that exorbitant rent paid to them – namely Truss’s generation.

All of which leaves us little time to mention the freedom fighting credentials of those who are not Uber-riding or Deliveroo-ing, but Uber-driving and Deliveroo-delivering. Still, as they say, one middle-class man’s quest for freedom is another’s removal of around 150 years' worth of employment rights and the imposition of crushingly low wages.

Still, as the mole may or may not have said in the South Park movie, though we die, la Liz-istance, lives on.