Liz Truss today signed her own death warrant. Any hope she might have harboured of being able to ride out a disaster of her own making vanished during a nine-minute press conference.
Instead of steadying the ship, the Prime Minister provided a reminder of all the reasons why she should not be running the country.
It was not just having to U-turn on her signature policy of corporation tax cuts that sealed her fate. It was her complete inability to show any contrition for the damage she has inflicted on her country and her party.
When you lead a party that has burned through three Chancellors in almost as many months, hiked the price of people’s mortgages and trashed the economy, then there is an expectation for you to show some form of remorse.
There are Thunderbird puppets with more emotional intelligence than the Prime Minister. There are robots who are better at reading a room.
Her replies to the questions were nonsensical. You cannot rip up the centrepiece of your mini-budget and then tell people the “mission remains the same”.
It is laughable to sack your Chancellor after he’s caused carnage on the markets and then claim your priority is to deliver “economic stability”.
She could not explain why Kwasi Kwarteng got the boot but she gets to stay because there is no plausible answer to that question.
Sacking Kwarteng will not save her.
It doesn’t matter how much she changes the line-up of the band and shakes up the set list – the audience left long ago.
There is no purpose to her remaining. Her economic strategy has disintegrated, she’s incapable of leading her party and she has no rapport with the public.
Somehow the Tory MPs will engineer her departure. The Conservatives have made their calculation. They would rather risk the ridicule of having yet another leader than stay with a Prime Minister who is certain to lead them to electoral doom.
What they have yet to decide is who will replace her. One of the reasons people suspect Jeremy Hunt has agreed to be Chancellor is
to position himself as a caretaker Prime Minister.
Others are pushing a Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt joint ticket. There is even talk of Boris Johnson making a return. What they do agree on is it has to be anyone but Truss.
The Tories are resigned to losing the next election. The only objective is to limit the scale of the defeat.
