Liz Truss’s latest big idea? Convincing us she never existed

Sketchwriters were initially banned from the Liz Truss rally. Only news reporters were permitted to add their names to the list. But at some point, someone must have worked out that a Liz Truss rally will, by definition, reduce a news reporter to a satirist, and so they relented.

You can only imagine the crisis meeting. Many years ago, still in the afterglow of her “that is a disgrace” speech on the subject of imported cheese, Truss – then environment secretary – told me personally that she had deliberately staged a photo opportunity and speech at the premises of a cheese manufacturer. She hoped that journalists would not be able to turn down the opportunity to go and laugh at her, and was disappointed that the temptation had somehow been widely resisted.

So it is possible – likely, even – that the last-minute volte face came at her own instigation. That she’d had to have a quiet word with her advisers, to let them know that if you try to keep out the people who are only there to laugh, then no one is going to turn up.

Indeed, if all of the piss-takers had been banned, they’d have had to ban Truss herself from the Liz Truss rally, which in a way might have felt more normal than what actually took place.

Truss bounded onto the stage, her legs clearly moving at a speed that indicated that she must know that none of this is a dream. That the nightmare is real, and we’re all in it together.

She was wearing a dark navy suit, and a white blouse with a large white bow. It’s the same outfit she wore to the first debate of the leadership campaign last summer, for which she was not unfairly mocked for cosplaying as Margaret Thatcher.

And here she was again, and if she wasn’t launching another leadership campaign, then it’s not at all clear what she was doing. She’s the only person in the world who can possibly know for sure, which is no reason to believe that she does.

She was here to say why she was right and everybody else was wrong. Why Thelma and Louise were some of the most misunderstood motorists of their generation, and why actually what happened to them was the fault of the woke mob who go around insisting on there being very hard ground at the bottom of cliffs.

She was also here to praise GB News, which is, she said, “challenging the orthodoxy and broadcasting common sense”. You can’t seem to move at this year’s conference without someone heaping praise on GB News. Liz Truss has done it, Jacob Rees-Mogg has done it, and so has Priti Patel. All these people were senior government figures during the pandemic. That government deserves credit for overseeing a fast and efficient vaccine rollout.

It will not have been forgotten that the first normal civilian in the world to be vaccinated against Covid-19 was a British woman. And yet it seems that there is not a minister involved in the process who is not now in thrall to a news channel on which half the presenters regularly claim that they shouldn’t have bothered vaccinating anyone because it was all a scam.

Then there was the tagline for the rally itself – “Make Britain Grow Again”. It was plastered across two billboards, one on either side of Truss. There was, arguably, a time for loltastic, Donald Trump-based puns, but did that time not pass at the moment when Trump instigated an attempted coup on the Capitol that left a police officer dead, and very much confirmed himself to be a straightforward, unreconstructed fascist? Was that not the time to come up with some different hilarious references?

“Making Britain grow again is not going to be delivered by the Treasury!” she did her best to thunder. Who is it going to be delivered by, then? Liz Truss? Is that the idea?

It really did seem to be the idea. Here she was, the grand high-growth wizard, 12 months on from casting her magical growth spell over the land – and yes, maybe it did cause everything to shrink. But she had now worked out that the problem had not been the spell itself: it was simply that she hadn’t shouted it loud enough.

“We need to cut energy bills!” she yelled, before praising the shale gas exploration that allows gas to be cheaper in America than it is here. It is also – America, that is, and this might shock you – quite a lot bigger. We are, as a country, she reckons, “sitting on 50 years of sustainable gas” – a phrase that doesn’t actually mean anything.

And it especially doesn’t mean anything if the people who want to extract that gas will only do it if you let them sell it at a globally benchmarked price. Unless she wants to nationalise it? Does she want to nationalise it? Sadly, she did not take questions.

It can’t be real, all this. It is now 48 years since the great mix-up in the celestial canteen of fate, where baby Mary Elizabeth Truss was accidentally handed three full dollops of ambition but none of ability or shame. But even she must know her limits. She must know that convincing herself that it was all a bad dream is just about doable. You shove it all deep in the hurt locker, and you throw away the key.

But the current mission – which seems to be to convince not just herself, but the entire world, that those 49 days last autumn just never happened, and that what the world needs is more Liz Truss, doing more of the exact same thing – surely she doesn’t think she can pull that off?

People know it was real. They know it was real every time their mortgage payment leaves their bank account. They’ll know it was real when they’re still working several years after they might otherwise have retired. And they know it’s real when they turn on the television and can’t begin to fathom what is going on inside that lady’s head.

Communists like to avoid facing up to various purges and famines that have left millions of people dead all over the world by claiming that it wasn’t real communism, which has never, apparently, been tried. But surely Liz Truss must know that real Liz Truss has been tried? She was there. She did it. We all saw it. We all felt it. We all know that nothing can make it go away, but for some reason, neither will she.