I fear a new phrase will soon enter common usage to describe events that unfold in a notably shambolic way.
It’s your wedding day and you stumble down the aisle and break your leg: you’ve just done a Truss.
You’re giving a big presentation at work and the projector overheats and burns down the building: that’s a Truss.
It’s parents’ night at your child’s school and you get stuck in one those tiny wee chairs, prompting a call to the fire brigade and the mass cancellation of the rest of the teacher’s appointments: congratulations, you did a Truss.
The events of the last week would be funny if they weren’t so gravely serious.
But if we don’t laugh we’ll almost certainly cry.
To recap: Liz Truss is currently treating the UK – the livelihoods of its citizens and the economy itself – with all the careful attention to detail of a toddler eating spaghetti bolognaise for the first time.
She nearly crashed the economy and her ineptitude means thousands of home owners will see their mortgage payments increase by hundreds of pounds a month.
Which wouldn’t be a great start to a new job at the best of times, but given we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis it’s obviously less than ideal.
Liz Truss disaster goes from bad to worse
As the markets became spooked by the idea of Liz Truss careering around Downing St, crashing into closed doors and stumbling over the tea trolley, the Prime Minister decided that something must be done and promptly sacked her Chancellor.
His crime? Doing exactly what the Prime Minister told him to do.
These were her economic policies. She set them out during the leadership contest. She defended them when experts told her they would unleash fiscal chaos.
But this is Liz Truss we’re talking about – a woman so dazed and confused she makes Mr Bean look like a figure of authority.
So there’s a chance she might simply have forgotten that she wrote the to-do list that nearly burned the economy to the ground.
Somebody needs to remind her that this is her circus and those are her monkeys in the corner currently wiping their bums with £50 notes.
Truss did another Truss at the emergency press conference she called to explain what the hell was going on.
You know that odd period between sleep and waking, when you aren’t fully unconscious but you’re not yet totally alert either?
That was Liz Truss throughout the entirety of her eight-minute masterclass on How Not To Do Politics.
She had wanted to project strength and stability.
Instead, she read out a vague speech and then legged it when journalists started to ask her questions about it.
Mind you don’t fall off the Downing Street merry-go-round Liz
Her colleagues have had enough and they are now plotting how to get rid of her.
Scotland isn’t allowed to vote on its constitutional future more than once in a generation. But Tory MPs get to choose a new Prime Minister for us every other week.
Go figure.
At the end of Friday No 10 took some solace from the fact that no Tory MP had publicly called for Truss to go. Weekend isn’t quite over and now we’re at MP no 3 calling for her to quit. https://t.co/ooA17XHuQp
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) October 16, 2022
If they do ensure that Liz Truss is the first Prime Minister in history not to make it past the 12-week probationary period, let’s hope they give the choice of her replacement a little more thought than they did in the summer.
Downing Street is not an Airbnb.
They can’t keep shuffling leaders in and out until they eventually get it right.
Not least because if they keep subjecting the role of Prime Minister to this bizarre rota system then at some point it will be Jacob Rees-Mogg’s turn.
Our living standards are already falling, we can’t afford to take them all the way back to the 18th century.
The next few days could be the beginning of the end for Liz Truss.
Let’s hope she doesn’t break too many things on her way out the door.
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