For Liz Truss, sorry seems to be the second hardest word

The very hardest one begins with R. And we’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later

At some point, somebody must have told Liz Truss that it hadn’t gone well. That a) having to appoint a new chancellor after 39 days solely to cancel your entire programme of government; and b) pretending you couldn’t come to the commons chamber because you were too busy having a meeting with someone who it turned out was already in there; and then c) despite not being able to be there for a “very serious” reason, suddenly appearing anyway like one of the twins from The Shining and sitting stock still, silent and smirking for more than 30 minutes – this is not much of a way to pretend you know how to run a country.

No, something had to be done to turn it around and that thing would have to be to do a long, sit down interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason in time for the News at Ten.

It was only a fortnight or so since she had tried to avoid the detailed interrogation that such things inevitably involve by doing a quickfire interview round with eight separate BBC local radio stations in the space of one hour, but which ended with her being ritualistically humiliated in a different county, on repeat, every eight minutes.

And she’d done a press conference, in which she appeared fully unhinged for absolutely all of the seven minutes of which it lasted, which had the effect of further spooking the bond markets she had only held to try and calm.

So whilst this absolutely was the last thing Truss should possibly have done to try and turn things around, it was also the only thing she could do. Everything else had been tried. Everything else had failed. And so did this.

There’s only really one question to ask the prime minister, and that’s whether or not she accepts that her budget has made life worse for everyone. She was asked it several times. For the first three, she would explain that actually the world is facing a lot of problems at the moment. One the fourth occasion, she changed tack and decided instead to say, “I’ve said sorry.”

When a president or prime minister apologises for having made everyone’s lives harder, it tends to happen in about the second paragraph of a short speech. The third paragraph is about what a privilege it has been to serve and the first usually contains the words, “I have resigned.”

We haven’t had the beginning or the end yet, but now that the middle is out, it is only a matter of not very much time. Because people aren’t necessarily inclined to accept this kind of apology.

She also faces the same problem as her predecessor, albeit in a different way. He had to deal with the near-impossible challenge of a global pandemic, but when a problem hits every nation at once, it is quite easy to benchmark who’s doing well and who’s doing badly, and the phrase “the largest economic hit in the G7 and the highest death toll” made Boris Johnson’s life really rather difficult.

And when Truss blames her own woes on rising interest rates around the world and on Putin’s war in Ukraine, people can also see that these are global problems – but only one G7 country has seen its borrowing rate skyrocket as a result of its own stupidity, and only one country is now paying on its debts what has become known as the “moron premium”. And there is only one moron. There were two but she sacked the other one to save herself, and it does not appear to have helped.

So she can sit there and say that she still believes in a low tax, high growth economy, but she can’t really hide from having had to appoint a new chancellor, who’s reversed every tax cut she tried to bring in, and is also making it clear that others will have to go up.

And the problem, really, that the prime minister faces is that she spent all summer repeating, over and over again, exactly what she was going to do. When it was pointed out to her that it wouldn’t work, she accused her critics of “abacus economics” and “Treasury orthodoxy”, and then she sacked the guy at the Treasury for the crime of telling her exactly what was going to happen. Which it then did.

She apologised, several times, for “going too far and too fast,” as if these are minor transgressions rather than precisely what they are, which is incredibly stupid and extremely dangerous. As if going too far and too fast is something that can only be deduced with the power of hindsight. Going too far and too fast quite often ends with someone in court and somebody else dead. And they can say how sorry they are, but the verdict isn’t going to change.

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She also finds herself in another predicament, just the same as her predecessor, which is that going out to defend her on the TV and radio has already become an act of humiliation.

The junior defence minister James Heappey has already found himself on theToday programme saying the following words: “It’d be completely disingenuous to claim that on that morning, when the cabinet was presented with the mini-Budget, there was anybody sat around the table who said it was a bad idea.”

A real classic of its kind, this. It’s not simply that Mr Heappey has breezily announced that there is no one in the cabinet capable of understanding the utterly inevitable consequences, which began on the bond markets before the chancellor had even sat down. It’s also that, up until now, the defence – including Liz Truss’s – had been that none of them had even been told what was in it.

Unless I fundamentally misunderstood series two of Line of Duty and what’s going on with various Russian oligarchs at the moment, this marked the first time someone has ever been thrown out of a window to protect them.

This kind of thing eventually evolved to form a crucial plot point in the Johnson arc. People get very fed up with humiliating themselves, even more so when they never liked you to begin with. In politics, sorry tends to be the second hardest word. The very hardest one begins with R. And we’ll be hearing it sooner rather than later.