Truss's First Speech As PM Was Dystopian Nonsense

Liz Truss spent the best day of her life going round in circles first to avoid the mist, then the rain, and then the truth.

- Tom Peck

Britain's new prime minister can't change the weather, but she could certainly do with changing the record. It had gone 5pm by the time she'd made it to Balmoral and back. She'd spent the morning doing laps over Aberdeen airport, waiting for clearance to land. When she got back to London, it is hard to avoid the evidence that she drove deliberately into suburban rush-hour traffic so as not to pull into Downing Street in the middle of the kind of September monsoon that informally informs the nation that summer is over.

This, if nothing else, should have given her plenty of time to consider whether some fresh sentiments might be required; if a line in the sand should be drawn. But she didn't do that. Instead, she did what she's been doing for the last two months, and heaped praise upon the man whose job she's now taken.

It is, as ever, fully dystopian stuff: that a man can be kicked out by his own party for no reason at all beyond his own disgraceful personal conduct, and yet the contest to replace him was never about anything beyond who was the most loyal to him. Boris Johnson, said Truss, "will be remembered as a consequential prime minister” a statement that could not possibly be further from the truth. He'll be remembered for lying. That's it.