Cruella de Vil had a ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’ about cruelty to dogs. Suella de Vil goes much further than that

It’s possible Liz Truss will in some way be pleased that a third straight day of civil war in Birmingham has concealed a more obvious truth – that a very large number of her senior ministers are demonstrably mad. But it is truth only partially concealed.

Day three was another day dominated by what has become the prime minister’s new and quite remarkable habit of doing pre-recorded interviews in which she aggressively defends a policy which she then abandons before the interview comes out.

On Monday, it was about the 45p tax cut. On Tuesday, it was about when her budget analysis will be published. On Monday afternoon, she said it would happen in late November. On Monday evening, she said it would happen this month. On Tuesday morning, what she’d said on Monday afternoon was played out on the Today programme, and for a second day in a row, it had to be explained that the thing she’d said was no longer her position. For an added flourish, on Tuesday afternoon, she had returned to her original position of Monday morning, making the entire embarrassment not merely embarrassing, but utterly pointless.

Elsewhere, the usual hell continues to break out. The 45p tax U-turn was, according to Suella Braverman, a “coup” forced on Truss and Kwarteng by selfish backbenchers who don’t have the courage to ride out being 33 points behind in the polls and therefore definitely losing their jobs.

And herein lies yet another problem Truss faces. When senior figures in your government blame other people for making you back down on one of your signature policies, senior figures in your government are not bright enough to work out that they are not helping. That when you criticise people for “undermining the prime minister”, you are, yourself, confirming that she has indeed been undermined – a reality the prime minister would rather deny.

Indeed, denying is all the prime minister wants to do. Indeed, she has slipped into her own private reality. In a lunchtime interview, she was asked four times whether she still “trusts” her chancellor. She was asked it because she has decided to blame either him or his deputy Chris Philp in strict rotation for the 45p tax cut policy that has killed her premiership before it began.

She declined, four times, to say that she trusted her chancellor, the kind of thing that, it is usually acceptable to conclude, means that she does not. But reaching conclusions about what Liz Truss really thinks has become impossible. There appears to be no causal link whatsoever, anymore, between questions she is asked and the words that follow. Her interviews have come to resemble a kind of fantasy word cloud. Theresa May used to say the same thing over and over again and wait for the problem to go away (it did not go away). Liz Truss’s tactic is to just make noises that vaguely sound like they might have something to do with current affairs and hope for the best.

And if she is dreaming, she is not the only one. Arguably the most horrifying moment of the entire rolling horror show was when Suella Braverman spoke in a fringe event of her “dream”. This stuff is not uncommon. Politicians like nothing more than to talk about themselves, and their origin stories. (And who can blame them? They are certainly mutants, though not in the way they imagine.)

Suella Braverman’s “dream” is different. Her “dream”, she said, was this: “I want to see a Telegraph front page, by Christmas, of the first deportation flight to Rwanda. That’s my dream, that’s my obsession.”

What a lovely dream. I dream of seeing those desperate people, flown off for a life of misery at my hand. I dream of crushing the lawyers who keep quite correctly pointing out it’s illegal and therefore stop it from happening, and “by Christmas” too. A kind of Christmas present to herself. Cruella de Vil only ever dreamed of cruelty to dogs. Suella de Vil goes one better.

She managed to stop fantasising about her own viciousness in time to give her keynote conference speech. It’s hard to tell whether she thinks her own uniquely dreary brand of culture war drivel can save her, what with the 33-point deficit, or whether she really does believe this stuff.

She announced she would be stopping the police from “policing pronouns on Twitter”. Answers on a postcard, please.

They clapped like mad for her promises to stop a “foreign court” from telling the UK government what it could and couldn’t do – in this case deporting people to a country with an appalling human rights record. She means the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which is not a foreign court, in the sense that the UK gladly participates in it.

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It was time, she said, for the UK to “take back control”. None of the architects of that phrase, namely the Vote Leave gang of 2016, have ever wished to leave the jurisdiction of that court, which has nothing to do with the EU. It wasn’t part of the referendum campaign. Boris Johnson has always been in favour of it, and Liz Truss has given no indication of her intention to leave it.

But Braverman doesn’t care. She’s more than happy, howling at the moon and hoping for the best. The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, was last on, taking aim at “the self-loathing keyboard warriors who pray for bad news. The people who aren’t happy until they’re unhappy.”

He’s right, in a way. A lot of people have been driven mad in the mad recent years, but not because they want bad news. It was because the prospect of good news had become impossible, and they had been left entirely politically homeless by a national politics that had gone entirely mad. But those people aren’t praying for bad news. They can see good news coming very clearly, and Cleverly and co are not going to like it one bit.