Hugo Rifkind is hilarious about her in today’s Times, noting how she blames ‘the deep state’ for everything, whilst simultaneously blaming the lack of state depth and capacity for everything
He concludes
Other PMs have managed to implement their ideas, so why couldn’t she? The notion that they might simply have been unworkable doesn’t seem to occur to her. It must be a conspiracy. It must be obstruction. Somebody must be in the way.
Truss is not the first politician to think like this. If we’re lucky, in fact, she may be one of the last, because Sunak for all his flaws is something quite different. Perhaps Truss is best understood as the logical endpoint of the mindset that has dominated Conservative politics since the Brexit referendum; the one that cries “bias!” and “foul!” when complex and messy reality simply fails to obey a political mandate.
Truss all but says exactly this herself, complaining pricelessly that “part of the problem we faced was a distinct shortage of expert voices supporting our agenda”. As if in a fairer world, expertise itself would be allocated equally across the political spectrum. With strict quotas even for the mad.
As with all deep state conspiracists, perhaps what Truss truly mourns is the lack of one. Isolated, incoherent and out of her depth, she’d have benefited no end from the ability to have newspaper editors sacked, or dissident economists silenced, or chemists and hairdressers dragged to Downing Street on pain of death. Instead, it was just her and her friend Kwasi, somehow caught short at the failure of other people to lift them up, achieve the impossible and solve all the problems they couldn’t solve themselves.
Less a deep state, then. More a government as shallow as a puddle.
