The Shakespearean tragedy of Liz Truss

In his book The Five Basic Plots, Christopher Booker outlines five stages of tragedy: anticipation, dream, frustration, nightmare, destruction. So far Liz Truss has completed four of these. Tory party members, like Macbeth’s witches, hailed Liz Truss as ruler of a new low-tax, pro-growth era. She rose to the top, like Macbeth, in a triumph of ambition over ability, but took his advice with her mini-Budget (‘if it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly’) a little too literally. Frustrated by the fates of the markets, Truss is now surely in her nightmare stage: haunted, hunted, hiding (although apparently not under a desk).

Yet I feel no smug satisfaction, no schadenfreude in watching Truss self-implode so spectacularly, and I write this as someone directly affected by her calamitous choices (my fixed-rate mortgage comes to an end in 2023). The truth is that Truss looks not just beleaguered but broken, borderline unwell, and the bizarreness of her behaviour makes it difficult to want to join in with this public pillory.

The last week has been a parade of ritual humiliation: her panicked, eight-minute press conference; her sacking of kamikaze Kwarteng; the U-turns on almost every element of her mini-Budget; the poetic justice that Truss is now a puppet Prime Minister to Jeremy Hunt, the exact type of Tory she once scoffed was a slave to ‘Treasury orthodoxy’.