Give me my ball back

Liz Truss’s relaunch over the weekend received quite a lot of attention, with many a suggestion in the right wing media that she was right all along but was just badly treated. One headline, reported by the BBC suggested that she was done in by ‘the left wing economic establishment.’ This suggests several lines of enquiry, the first of which must be that when he was Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell on his many trips to the City actually did sell Corbynism to the Masters of the Universe. But I think that would be a step too far. Another explanation would be that the significant coterie of hard right Tory MPs who still support Truss’s agenda are much to the right of the market makers. These Tories may be described as extremists but never are, even by the Guardian’s standards. For these Tories, the best rewards come out of the destruction of the system. Tory Maoists. A third explanation is perhaps the most worrying, namely that Starmer’s Labour Party has now so closely aligned itself to the interests of the City that it has indeed become part of the ’left wing economic establishment,’ although the word ’left’ has been misappropriated. To discover the truth of this last supposition, we could do well to ask the current Shadow Chancellor, formerly of the Bank of England, Rachel Reeves. As regards Truss, we now face the unappetising prospect of her popping up every other week as she tries to rehabilitate herself and her destructive fantasies, such efforts never of course being accompanied by an apology. The reason she won’t apologise is that she actually believes she had a mandate to do what she did. The fact that this ‘mandate’ was largely delivered by a small bunch of racist gerontics in the Tory Party seems to have escaped her notice.