It is one of the great philosophical questions of our age, or any age for that matter: if Liz Truss did not exist, would it be possible to imagine her? Could anyone conceive that someone so brain-meltingly dim could have once been our prime minister? And even if they could, would they dare to believe that in harness with this industrial-strength stupidity there could be such a total lack of self-awareness? Truss comes with a vacuum-packed confidence in her own talent. While the real world treats her, at best as a joke, at worst as the last cockroach still standing, she maintains her Messiah complex. The saviour waiting to rise from these streets.
In Truss's world, the problem is not that we had too much of her, but that we never got enough. And there is a part of me that cannot help but agree. Forty-nine days — really, 39 days, as during the 10 days of state mourning for the late queen, Truss was prevented from doing any actual harm — was just too short. Yes, I know she still crashed the economy and left us all worse off, but that was almost a price worth paying for white-knuckle ride entertainment. You wait more than 200 years for a prime minister this unsuited to high office, and I was fortunate enough to have a ringside seat for all of it. Just think of what she might have achieved had she been able to stick around for a few more months. A UK on its knees.
These days, though, Truss lives a mysterious half-life, split between the real world and the meta-world, both existing and not existing. She is occasionally spotted making incoherent speeches to small gatherings of the far right in the US, but mostly confined to a small attic space that doubles as the studio for her no-expense-incurred YouTube channel, The Liz Truss Show. Each episode deserves the accolade of 'mini-classic', just not in the way she might have hoped, because with every outing she goes from bad to worse.
Late on Wednesday, Truss released her latest offering, boldly called 'Labour's Secret Plan: Labour PANICKING as Reform surges in Makerfield By-Election'. This promised to be the inside story on Makerfield, an on-the-ground exposé of what all the major media outlets had missed so far, a perspective so radical it would change everyone's perceptions. To help her, Truss went to the very top. No need for John Curtice, every TV channel's go-to expert for polling analysis, nor for the equally brilliant Rob Ford, the man the BBC uses when Curtice is unavailable. Instead, Truss signed up June Slater, a former UKIP member, political blogger and occasional talking head on GB News. The psephologist's psephologist, the election guru of our times.
Slater wasted no time in getting down to it. Even though most anecdotal evidence from the constituency suggests Labour are likely to win relatively comfortably, with even Reform privately admitting they would need a miracle, Truss and Slater saw things differently. Labour were definitely panicking, or PANICKING as Truss put it. We knew this because Slater had been up to Makerfield and had spent a day campaigning with Rob Kenyon, the Reform candidate, and all she had seen was voters throwing palm leaves at his feet. 'Rob is a very busy man,' she confided. 'A quiet man, a bit of a thinker. Like my husband. When someone brought up a problem he got his phone out.' This must be the man who thinks so deeply that he refuses to apologise for offensive remarks to Carol Vorderman, reckons Russia had a point when they invaded Ukraine, and is not entirely certain whether he supported Brexit or not. But this, apparently, was why voters were switching to Reform in their thousands.
Slater did concede that some people were reluctant to vote Reform because 'they don't want to appear hateful', though she appeared bewildered as to why this should be. Truss just nodded. It was a mystery. It surely cannot have been anything to do with Nigel Farage calling for 'pure, cold rage' after the murder of Henry Nowak, or Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick promising to deport all foreigners, including Europeans with settled status, though as a gesture of goodwill their children would be allowed to stay and be put up for adoption if they were born in the UK.
Next we got on to 'Labour's Secret Plan'. This turned out to be so secret that literally everyone had heard of it, apart from Truss and Slater. Somehow they had been kept out of the loop. The by-election had been called because Andy Burnham was trying to get back into Westminster so that he could challenge Keir Starmer to become prime minister. Who could possibly have guessed? Stay tuned with Truss and new vistas will open up.
After that the conversation drifted somewhat. Slater admitted there had been a time prior to the Brexit referendum when she had considered voting remain, but had luckily changed her mind when her husband had pointed out that the EU was basically a communist state. Truss nodded eagerly, grateful for the brainwipe so she had no recollection she had been a Tory minister actively campaigning for remain a decade ago. We moved on to Covid and the importance of not getting vaccinated. How people just had to see a picture of Starmer to provoke a kneejerk response that he was Chinese. Looking at photos of Farage and thinking of Russia was a definite plus, however. Slater started to get a bit maudlin. She used to have a house in Austria but now there was nowhere she really wanted to live. 'The Blob' was everywhere. It will not be long before she holes up in the wilds of Montana with a few dozen semi-automatic weapons.
The last word went to Truss. She, too, saw the malign influence of 'the Blob' in every nook and cranny of the British state. The country was being lost. Labour had infiltrated every organisation. But at least we would always have her. While she still drew breath, there was hope. Never underestimate the power of the quarter-wit.
