Sociopathic self-regard backed up by absolutely nothing – Truss is out

The Tory party has now completed its extremely high-budget advertising campaign to prove that it is entirely incapable of governing the country

The national lottery runs a game called Set for Life, in which the winner receives £10,000 a month for the rest of their earthly days.

So if you’re trying to work out quite what it was that Liz Truss was smiling about as she absolutely smashed the record for shortest ever British prime minister (and without even having to die to do so), it’s important to remember there are upsides.

That’s exactly what she’s won. A £120,000 a year payout, for evermore, is what ex-prime ministers receive. A token of the nation’s eternal gratitude for absolutely, absolutely nothing. Humiliated forever but, you know, still set for life.

Is it a farce? Fawlty Towers was a farce. Farces are funny. Liz Truss clearly thinks, on some level, it’s hilarious. But we all have our coping strategies. If it feels surreal for all of us, imagine being her. It’s barely two months since she bought her Margaret Thatcher costume. She must regret not renting it.

Still, no one can say she didn’t get a lot done. Alright, so she got nothing done, but there were some great moments. Sacking your chancellor for the crime of agreeing with you about absolutely everything, and then appointing a replacement with whom you disagree about everything, and then telling him to reverse all of your policies in the hope it might help you cling on? That kind of dysfunction is one for the Guinness books, even these days. And all who witnessed it should, in some regard, consider themselves grateful.

Not even the eight sentences she could be bothered to read out came close to articulating that she had a clue what she’d done or what had happened. There are rising interest rates everywhere, rising energy prices. The consequences of Putin’s war in Ukraine are felt everywhere. Poland is trying to find homes for five million Ukrainian refugees. So how do you get to the bottom of Britain being the only country that is making an international tit of itself?

Liz Truss clearly hasn’t. Nor will she ever. The self-regard is too sociopathic, the cocksuredness backed up by considerably less than nothing.

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We should know by now that things only ever get worse. The TV cameras had not yet panned away from the Downing Street door before odd little Tory MPs had appeared, agitating for the return of Boris Johnson. The Tory party has now completed its extremely high-budget advertising campaign to prove that it is entirely incapable of governing the country. It should surely be able to work out that if it returns to the person it threw out before this one, it will only be making that case ever more forcefully.

Already the evidence is clear that they’re going back to the only thing they actually know how to do. Manoeuvring and machinating, factionalising. That a once-serious country seriously has to hear, yet again, talk of who is backing who in a Tory leadership contest. Suella? What’s Gove up to? Jeremy Hunt’s ruled himself out. Rishi Sunak’s the bookie’s favourite.

Just spare us. Please, please just spare us. A week from now, in theory, there’ll be somebody else standing on the steps of Downing Street, giving yet another moist-eyed, breathy speech about how much they love their country, about everything it has given them. About unleashing Britain’s potential.

Enough’s enough. No more now. Just unleash yourselves, gallop off over the horizon and never come back. No one even cares if you take your winnings with you.