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So it’s over, then. Just 44 days since taking office, and with eleven of those days given over to the now almost forgotten funerary rites for Queen Elizabeth II, Liz Truss has resigned as Prime Minister, having crashed the economy and revealed, inadvertently, how the Conservative Party of 2022 is in its death throes, finally succumbing to the suicidal impulses of its defining obsessions — the privatisation of everything, tax cuts for the rich, and propping up the failed fantasy of Brexit as something liberating rather than the disaster that it so clearly is, was and always will be.

The trigger for Truss’s record as Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister was the outrageous ‘mini-budget’ she cooked up with her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in which, with extraordinary arrogance, this delusional pair of shallow ideologues — marinaded in the far-right ‘libertarianism’ of the Tufton Street lobbying groups, who refuse to reveal their funding (although we know it involves climate change deniers and fossil fuel polluters) — sought to push through massive tax cuts for the rich at a time of rising inflation and spiralling energy costs. This was a recipe for disaster as the former Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, repeatedly explained during the farcical summer-long leadership in which Truss, somehow, wasn’t adequately exposed as an empty vessel.

The ‘mini-budget’ — shielded by Truss and Kwarteng from scrutiny by almost anyone, including, to cite one particularly pertinent example, the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), which was established by George Osborne to review the public finances — spooked the markets to such an extent that the economy tanked, leading to the sacking of Kwarteng, and now the resignation of Truss.

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