Sunak likes to pretend his predecessor never happened. But are the moderates going to sit back and cede their party to fanatics?
It would be charitable to ignore Liz Truss. Attention is her addiction and any dose, even laced with scorn, sustains the toxic belief that she has important things to say. Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister has been bingeing on publicity for a memoir that cannot enhance her reputation. She is a stranger to contrition. She regrets only the haste with which she tried to implement an economic plan that she believes was sabotaged by the establishment.
She thinks the meltdown in financial markets that brought her down was engineered by the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility. Truss’s bizarre demeanour, self-regarding without self-awareness, limits the purchase her ideas might get on public opinion, even with audiences primed for conspiracy theory. The loudest cheers when she appears on television are from the Labour party.
