Delusional Liz Truss makes it clear that the Conservative civil war will never end

If he had sacked four or five cabinet ministers, withdrawn the whip and cast them adrift we would not be here now. But he didn’t and the emboldened nutters took control.

Not enough to take over the party totally but enough to create a civil war which led David Cameron deciding to risk leaving the EU in order to shut them up. Well, we all know where that ended.

Which brings us to Liz Truss and her speech to the Institute for Government, in which she denied that she has crashed the economy and claimed that the UK’s economic problems have nothing to do with her, her party or even capitalism, but instead are down to “25 years of economic consensus” that have moved Britain towards being a more corporatist social democracy in Britain than we were in the 1980s and 1990s.” She even said she had been deposed as prime minister not because of gross incompetence but because her ideas were not “fashionable on the London dinner party circuit”.

It is, of course, nonsense. But it is not surprising.

The most serious of many mistakes Truss made while prime minister was to give the far right of her party what they wanted, forgetting that she was only supposed to pay lip service to the gurus of the think tanks based at 55 Tufton Street, not actually introduce any of their mad policies.

But having tried and failed, she and they are attempting a fightback, because what Brexit taught them was that if you fail the first time, just keep attacking.

Keep your powder dry, raise funds, give speeches to sympathetic fools and supporters, undermine the established leadership, get the commentariat onside, blame the woke, get your people into positions of power and appear respectable.

You can launch attack after attack on your own party. Eventually you will wear down the sensible, the realistic, the informed and the competent. Then you will have your chance.

The only difference between Brexit and trickle-down economics is that the latter would do even more damage to the economy and the markets know it.

Remember the markets? Those lefty bond dealers, woke investors, Bolshevik bankers and Guardian-reading hedge funds and the rest? They are what brought Liz Truss and her economic fantasies crashing to earth, not parliament, not the Tory party and not the Blob, the markets. And they would do exactly the same next time.

They know that unfinanced tax cuts are an economic time bomb, they know that trickle-down economics doesn’t work, they recognise a government avoiding scrutiny of its own proposals and one that believes in unicorns and they bet against it. It is a surefire way of making money.

Try it again and the markets will slaughter the UK economy.

As Mark Carney said at the weekend, “when Brexiteers tried to create Singapore on the Thames, the Truss government instead delivered Argentina on the Channel”.

We very nearly ran out of the ability to borrow money on the bond markets, because of Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng and their cheerleaders.

But undaunted by the facts and the truth, Trussonomics’ supporters are back, trying to rewrite history so that they can launch another attempt.

Remember, if the Brexiteers had lost the 2016 referendum they were just going to keep going and demand more votes until they won.

This is no different. They will keep coming back, keep trying to take over the whole Tory party again – after all they got to No. 10 once.

Even if they succeed and the UK does become the Argentina of Europe, they will tell us that things are bad because the liberal elite have sabotaged their policies. Just like they do with Brexit.

Rishi Sunak, like Major, is incapable of throwing them out of the tent. The long Tory Party civil war continues, and we are the ones who are going to suffer.