It’s roughly a hundred days since Liz Truss scuttled away from 10 Downing Street, an address she managed to occupy for less time than it took for her to be anointed by the 0.12% of the population who thought a Margaret Thatcher tribute act, squawking ‘growth’ like a parrot , was the natural successor to Billy Bunter’s less-intelligent twin.
55 Tufton Street Trussonomics
Those three months have been tough for her handlers at 55 Tufton Street, although not as tough as they’ve been for the rest of us, left to literally pick up the bill as their ideology imploded in a cloud of inflation and interest-rate hikes.
These free-market zealots have spent years fantasising about having one of their people in charge of the country. Every step away from Europe or towards abolishing taxes for the rich has seen the residents drooling at the prospect of even more influence over government policy. The election of Truss must have seemed like a waking wet-dream to this “zealous ideological clique”. If you think it too far-fetched to believe Truss would simply spout her masters’ gibberish, remember this is a woman who was told that drones were scared of dogs and repeated it in parliament!
Among the swivel-eyed loons based there are groups that boil with rage about migrants, the EU and Greta Thunberg.
Now when racists and conspiracy theorists start mouthing off down the pub it won’t be too long before someone tells them to shut up or shove off. But, when the same drivel comes from a Georgian town house, backed by weird billionaires with even weirder agendas, they get to call themselves a think tank, be quoted by respectable broadcasters and have their nonsensical reports treated as if they were genuine academic studies by the flotsam that run the Daily Mail.
So convinced that their unpleasant ideas are simply truths about the world that the rest of us are too liberal-minded to grasp, it’s tempting to think the Tuftonites are the victims of a fake Faustian pact, after all why would the devil want to spend eternity listening to a bunch of climate change deniers whinge on about “woke” culture?
Crashing the economy
When it came to it, the reality of having their puppet in charge (a weird sort of Pinocchio, every time she lied it wasn’t her nose but the national debt that grew) was one where their theories were blown out of the water. Having been forced to stand her down before what was left of the economy turned to dust, you just know Truss’s promoters will have skulked back to their Westminster hideout to tell each other the disaster was everyone’s fault but theirs.
After a death of someone close, experts talk about the five stages of grief. Having lost their cherished economic philosophy, the Tufton Street crew were no doubt angry and let’s hope, depressed. The re-appointment of Suella Braverman as home secretary might suggest they managed to do a bit of bargaining but Truss’s 4,000-word self-justification in the Telegraph shows there is absolutely no acceptance of the truth, she is firmly stuck in denial.
Manifesto of fantasy
If anything, Truss’s interview has all the hallmarks of a ‘manifesto’ discovered by the FBI on the laptop of some deranged mass-shooter after they have gone postal because they were ‘treated badly’ at school. Dripping in self-pity with no hint of contrition, the writer believes that the only reason they are a sad, lonely loser is due to some imagined enemy intent on doing them down.
So, I guess we should be thankful that she hasn’t got a gun. The last thing we need as we queue for the foodbank is to find a disgruntled ex-PM sitting on the roof with an assault rifle, screaming, ‘Who’s a Haggis Basher now!?’
