The short, brutal, unhappy Liz Truss era is over – so what did she do wrong?

Rishi Sunak and many others warned that it would end in tears. So it has been proven

Here we go again. The year of two monarchs and three prime ministers. The year when the British constitution was tested to the limit yet again. The year when the Tory party finally ran out of talent and ideas. But 2022 has more excitement in store.

What did Liz Truss do wrong? Most of all, she got her economic policy wrong, which was largely down to a fundamental misunderstanding about how markets work, and how fragile Britain’s economy actually is. She and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were incredibly arrogant. Those were unforced errors. She couldn’t recover from them.

More broadly, Truss herself was, I’m sorry to say, too vain to see that she didn’t possess the skill set that would have made her a competent – let alone inspiring – leader. She was just as wooden, intellectually dull, weak and incompetent as feared, and indeed as was perfectly apparent during the leadership campaign.

She ended up having to let Penny Mordaunt show her how to handle the House of Commons. She thought she could lead a split, fractious party via a cabinet of cronies. She thus created too many enemies. She also picked too many sub-optimal ministers, such as Kwarteng, Suella Braverman and Therese Coffey.

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Truss had few ministerial achievements to her name, and she was promoted beyond her abilities by the time she got to the Foreign Office. Boris Johnson plainly thought she was no threat to him, and that if she ever did succeed him, she’d make him look good by comparison. It all went to Liz’s head and she was propelled into a job she was not ready for by a bunch of careerists looking for roles, and party hacks who wanted tax cuts for themselves. She was always going to be a disaster.

It was one of those falls from grace that was entirely predictable, but still a shock. There will be a successor because there has to be and the King’s government must carry on. The next prime minister will be chosen by his or her MPs – and not, by the looks of it, the party membership. Whoever does inherit this unhappy state of affairs will find they face the same intractable problems, the same divisions and the same indiscipline as did for Mary Elizabeth Truss.

The short, brutal and unhappy Truss era is over. It can’t be looked back upon with much affection, but it was nonetheless a significant time and Truss managed to prove three crucial things, even if unintentionally.

The demise of Truss proves – were it needed – that the Conservative government has run out of ideas, out of discipline and is running extremely low on talent. Indeed, those triple deficits are interrelated. After 12 years in office, their attempts to blame Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for their own failings is pathetic, and the public has run out of patience with their excuses. Convenient conspiracy theories about “globalists”, Remainers, the establishment and the “blob” feed a myth that Truss wasn’t allowed or didn’t have the chance to put her policies in effect.

But she did have the chance, and the experiment failed. It is not only a failure of Truss, though, but the culmination of a dozen years which have demonstrably failed to make Britain’s economy work for the people. Compassionate conservatism, austerity, Brexit, deregulation and Truss’s free market dash for growth have all come, gone and failed. There is every chance the next leader will fail just as badly.

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So Trussonomics is dead. The myth that just borrowing billions to slash taxes will lead to rapid economic growth has been comprehensively trashed, albeit at great cost to the living standards of the people. The fantastical ideas of the Tufton Street think tanks and the hard right have been tested to destruction, almost literally.

Obviously, there will always be the likes of Braverman ready to give the madness another go, supposedly because the only thing that was wrong with Trussonomics and the Kwarteng mini Budget was presentation. However, the experience of the last few weeks should have inoculated much of the Tory party against such delusions.

Last, the experiment of allowing a tiny clique of Tory members to choose a new prime minister has been found to be not only democratically offensive but fundamentally flawed. As Labour found with Jeremy Corbyn, the tastes and prejudices of a cadre of the politically driven are at odds with those of the more normal population at large.

The Tory membership was strangely naive about the chances that Truss would indeed be able to deliver her impossibilist agenda, even if she herself believed in it. They must not risk doing that again. Rishi Sunak and many others warned Liz Truss that it would end in tears. So it has been proven.