Why on earth are you reading this? It’s a question that the more business-oriented of my colleagues in the creative sector will commend me for asking. This is where focus groups spring from. The best way to give the public what it wants, the reasoning goes, is to ask it what it wants. So: low taxes and a lavish welfare state. Unfortunately most creative people don’t care about giving the public what it wants. They just want to create what they want and for the public to pay for it. The notion of a “target audience” is unhelpful. Apart from conjuring up the notion of the poor audience being bombarded with projectiles rather than having a bloody good time watching TV or going to the theatre, it misses the point that, in artistic or entertainment terms, most of us don’t know what we want until we’ve seen it. No one in the early 16th century was clamouring for a painting of a lady with a stunningly realistic, ambiguous expression on her face and yet the Mona Lisa has, in modern parlance, smashed it. Talking of women with weirdly unreadable faces, let me get to my reason for posing the question above: Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss. On 9 November 2021, this is what I wrote about her: “Is Liz Truss ever going to be prime minister? It’s no, right? That’s pretty definite.” That’s how I began. After acknowledging that she had a marginally higher chance than a non-politician, I continued: “There’s no Tory leadership election I can imagine that wouldn’t be won by someone else.” Something of an imaginative lapse on my part, it turns out. And later, just to be clear, I added: “So I really think we, and she, can rule it out. She must realise that. I really hope she does because otherwise she’s delusional. She is literally more likely to win Strictly. She’s foreign secretary, and that is a very important job, but it is the most important job she will ever have.” That is me writing, exactly 11 months ago, in my role as a sage political commentator working for the venerable Observer newspaper. Looks like Liz Truss isn’t the only idiot who’s landed a job they can’t do. In light of those inept prognostications, why are any of you reading this? Have you perhaps just collapsed, on the point of turning the page, with locked-in syndrome brought on by the sheer horror that I’m still employed? Has your head thudded face down on to these words and they’re all you can see, with only the occasional involuntary blink giving you momentary respite from my uninformed drivel? Or perhaps this sheet of newspaper has been wrapped and rewrapped around a Christmas decoration for years and years and, as the baubles are brought out at some point many decades from now, someone has got distracted from decorating by this glimpse back into our benighted and incompetent age? I rather like that thought as it conjures up a vision of a future where people will still being doing nice things like putting up Christmas trees. Far be it from me, though, to be so optimistic as to predict it. I worry that that would put a hex on all of our hereafters. Sadly, neither of those demographics is going to be of much interest to advertisers as one of them can’t move to buy things and the other hasn’t been born yet. So I’d better hope that I’ve also lured in a few spendthrift contrarians with my apparently self-defeating opening question. I do take some comfort from the way this new administration, that I was so convinced was impossible, has begun. While Truss unquestionably is the prime minister, it doesn’t seem, on current evidence, like she ought to be. It’s been a record-breakingly poor start. Never, in all of British history, has a handshake killed a sovereign so swiftly. Though, as it turns out, it was only thanks to the Queen’s death that we were spared the run on sterling and the collapse of market confidence in the British state for a whole extra fortnight. How many first-time buyers’ mortgage offers did Her Majesty’s final sacrifice save? Instead of the customary honeymoon period, Truss enjoyed a funeral period.
Then she really got stuck in, achieving a rate of national decline Anthony Eden could only have dreamed of, with a mini-budget so incompetent that it was condemned as roundly by amoral interests in the City, whom it presumably sought to gratify, as it was by the opposition. She followed this up with an exquisitely mistimed U-turn in the middle of the Tory party conference. This had the effect of disappointing and undermining the tiny band which was still supporting her without instilling any meaningful confidence in anyone else. Accused of staggering heartlessness when she attempted to cut income tax for the rich during a cost of living crisis, she dropped the idea and instead proposed cutting benefits for the poor. It’s like political slapstick – she’s spinning round holding a plank. But why wouldn’t she believe her ideas might work out when she’s somehow become prime minister despite being what she’s like? Last year, I described any ambitions for the premiership that she might have as “delusional”, and I didn’t really think twice about it. It seemed obvious. So, from her point of view, dreams can come true, however daft. This is a woman who bet that a tossed coin would land on its side and it did. Next to attaining her current eminence, her absurd hopes that tax cuts will bring growth without disastrous inflation and crippling interest rates seem comparatively realistic. The final indignity of Boris Johnson’s political career is that the big joke of his being prime minister has been topped. Liz Truss is funnier than him because she doesn’t seem as if she’s trying to be funny. The effortful clown has finally been yanked off stage by the impresario’s hook and next up is a performer with Buster Keaton’s otherworldly deadpan. I don’t know what to think, which is probably for the best. I’ll only say – and let me imbue this with all my authority as a seasoned commentator – that there’s no chance at all that the Conservatives will lose the next election.