Now people are joining the civil service who are essentially activists – they might be trans activists, they might be environmental extremists – but … - Liz Truss

Truss believes in the wisdom of the markets. It is the unaccountable power of quangos, civil servants and law courts she fundamentally mistrusts. So what caused the banks and the currency exchanges to turn against her? Are they communists, too?

This is a naked conservatism that believes in itself with such fervour it thinks facts should make way for its fantasies. Borrowing for tax cuts in a period of surging inflation was always going to spook the markets, but Truss’s faith told her otherwise. She was determined to jump off the cliff, insistent that all the talk of gravity was so much stuffy scientific "orthodoxy".
The refusal to bow to empirical evidence, to reality, is Truss conservatism’s defining feature. Its origins are not mysterious. We might call it Brexitism: the creed that holds that the real world, even the facts of geography, can be bent to your will, just by closing your eyes and wishing it were so.

I feel like I’m a child of the union, I really believe we’re a family and we’re better together and I think the best thing to do with Nicola Sturgeon is ignore her. [...] She’s an attention seeker, that’s what she is.