In an idle moment, while watching your electricity meter spin like a Catherine Wheel, for example, you might suggest to Alexa: “Tell me some unlikely facts.”
You would quickly discover the stage before frostbite is known as frostnip; people who suffer from boanthropy believe they are a cow; every continent except Antarctica has a McDonald’s; and a duel between three people is called a truel.
However, while her mind-boggling algorithms have not yet caught up with the recent days of political ineptitude and economic chaos, it cannot be long before Alexa’s top astonishing but true result will confirm: “Liz Truss is a worse prime minister than Boris Johnson.”
Her predecessor, for all the countless things that made him unsuitable for high office, was, fundamentally, a people pleaser and if we didn’t like his principles, he had others. Truss is, instead, an ideologue, on the record saying she is willing to take unpopular decisions, a true believer. Depending on the beliefs, this is not, necessarily, a good thing.
In years to come, historians will pick the bones out of the last few days and be every bit as bemused as we are at the magnitude of the self-harm inflicted. When they have stopped laughing, that is.
Truss has been in office for a little less than four weeks. The first two were paused by the Queen’s death, the last two have crashed the economy, set pensions ablaze, taken 3,000 mortgages off the shelf, and turned her and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng into figures of derision and pity in financial markets at home and abroad.
These two will never fully recover from the economically inept, politically catastrophic not-so-mini budget delivered just nine days ago. Their party is unlikely to recover in anything like enough time to stop a crushing Labour victory at the next election. In truth, the Tories should call one sooner than later and get the builders in because our latest prime minister is going to make a lame duck look limber.
“Never apologise, never explain” is one of the many Winston Churchill quotes he probably never said, but Truss and Kwarteng had no intention of apologising last week and we needed no explanation. Everyone and their granny knows why they did what they did: arrogance, hubris, naivety and incompetence.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, and there is plenty, the deadly duo believe, and still believe, their brand of supply-side economics has not properly worked before because it’s not been properly done before. So they pulled the pin on their big plan.
The city spivs and speculators, aghast and amused in equal measure, had a field day as Truss and her hapless sidekick went into hiding and the pound bumped down the stairs and into the basement.
Out of sight for four days, the Downing Street titans may have been frantically leafing through their co-authored blueprint for a brighter, richer tomorrow – “Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons For Growth And Prosperity” (still available from skip fires near you) – but as the peerless Guardian columnist Marina Hyde had it, the chancellor “appears to have taken a pamphlet to a gunfight”.
So, Alexa, how long can we go on like this? Alexa? Alexa?
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