If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you then, as Rudyard Kipling almost wrote, there is a strong possibility you haven’t appreciated the gravity of the situation. Or as Corporal Jones put it more pithily in Dad’s Army: ‘Don’t panic!’
It is undeniable that Liz Truss is in a bind. Her first big play following national mourning for the Queen – the ‘fiscal event’ of last Friday – has not gone well, contributing to a meltdown about UK prospects in financial markets and emergency intervention by the Bank of England. Two successive opinion polls have put Labour 17 points ahead – the sort of lead that suggests Keir Starmer’s party is heading for victory.
Meanwhile, a round of BBC local radio interviews has handsomely proved Truss’s own contention that she is ‘not the slickest communicator’, producing numerous embarrassing silences and misspeaking about maximum household energy bills to boot.
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