Why can’t MPs let Truss be Truss?

Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring with a regularity that’s disturbing to those of us who can remember the prelapsarian age when we were the only people who gave a stuff about politics and that we were considered odd because of it.

The marked outlandishness of British party politics has been evident since that day in September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party. Followed closely by parliament’s inability to implement the referendum result, Theresa May’s manifesto massacre of 2017, the rise and fall of Boris Johnson, with a dollop of Covid and war in Europe on top, and the broadcast media screaming and clucking and gotcha-ing throughout, has made the country seem, at times, ungovernable.