Prime ministers are done for when they lose their credibility. Gordon Brown never recovered from being frightened out of calling a general election. Theresa May revealed herself to be ridiculous in the 2017 election campaign. Boris Johnson made it transparently obvious that he could not be trusted or believed.
Liz Truss, not yet a month into the job, has already lost hers and the consequences will be the same. She will go through the Tory party conference refusing to back down, refusing to change course. But she will also continue to refuse to be honest about its consequences, and everybody but her can see what they are.
She is already if not delusional, then seeking to delude others – but they are not fooled. In the traditional prime minister’s eve-of-conference BBC interview, she continued to maintain, as she did in her disastrous round of interviews on Thursday, that the terrible reaction to her Budget in financial markets was in fact a reaction to Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine (it isn’t), or a reaction to her much-needed energy market intervention (it wasn’t – this intervention happened three weeks ago).
