Truss has gone. What lessons learned?

When Liz Truss resigned yesterday the pound rose against the US dollar; so it seems her Chancellor’s budget on behalf of the Mayfair hedge fund managers had failed to please the bond and currency traders. Electorate, meet your real masters.

How was such an unsuitable person selected as Party leader?

The process involves canvassing Tory MPs and whittling the field down to two, then putting the choice to the Conservative membership. This looks like democracy but it’s open to skulduggery in that the MPs may have structured the options with a particular result in mind.

Like David Cameron and his Brexit referendum, they must have thought the choice was a no-brainer; and were surprised when they got one. Truss is either stupid or lazy or both - Mrs Thatcher would never have gone into a meeting with the formidable Sergey Lavrov ignorant of the fact that Voronezh and Rostov are Russian sovereign territory.

Some are saying that Sunak was rejected by the Tory faithful because racism. Perhaps; or maybe it was because he is blatantly a globalist whereas Truss gaslighted us with visual references to the patriotic Mrs T, then struck the Union flag and ran up the Jolly Roger as soon as she was in.

Now she is back out of the door, but not before her Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who resigned after 44 days in office - another fast-track half-pay pensioner. Braverman went after a shouting-match with her boss on the issue of actually doing something about immigration, as per the Party manifesto (Truss wanted to back-pedal on that, presumably to suit her rich friends.)

The Tories will ignore calls for a General Election - the turkeys don’t want an early Christmas - but they are split in two, and neither half is what the public voted for. As Melanie Phillips says on Substack:

One faction seems to think it’s a pale lavender version of left-wing “equality of outcomes,” trans-nationalism and trashing energy supplies to prevent the reportedly imminent yet mysteriously ever-moveable climate apocalypse. The other thinks conservatism is all about cutting taxes and letting the market rip, from de-regulating childcare to the mass importation of foreign workers.

Neither of these alternatives remotely embodies conservative values. Each in its own way represents instead hyper-individualism or the ideological attempt to remake the world to create utopia, which all serve to corrode society rather than conserve it.

The Labour Party is also divided, and the current leadership has been at pains to sideline or eject anyone who supports a traditional Left agenda. That’s not to say that Starmer isn’t a Trojan Horse, like the smarmy deceiver Tony Blair.

Maybe the chaos heralds not the long-wished-for death of both parties, but a chrysalis phase. Would it not be wonderful if we got friendly rivalry between factions who all understood that our socio-economic problems are systemic and interconnected, and that Parliament is for serving the people? Could that happen peacefully and without further ruining the country?

Or must we rely on disaster to save us?