After spending several days hiding from the economic crisis created by the “mini-budget” delivered by her newly appointed chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, the PM emerged from the shadows to submit herself to a series of interviews with hosts of breakfast shows on regional BBC radio stations across England.

You will, I’m sure, know what happened next.

Truss quickly found out that, unlike her, those asking the questions knew what they were doing. It was brutal.

Prime Minister Liz Truss steps out 10 Downing Street. Picture: AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali

The way these rounds of interviews work is the person being asked the questions sits in a remote studio and is then connected to a series of different stations. It’s a way of allowing an individual to get their message to as many people as possible. Usually, that may be considered a good thing.

On Thursday morning, it was a way for as many people as possible to tear a chunk out of the Prime Minister.

At no stage did it seem as if Truss understood – or indeed cared – about the impact of her Government’s actions on voters worried about the impact on their pensions, mortgages and jobs, resulting from a financial plan that saw the Chancellor slash taxes for the rich without explaining – or, seemingly, thinking about – how this policy might be funded.

Instead – usually after an unsettling silence – Truss either told her interviewers she didn’t accept the premise of their questions or misleadingly claimed she had ensured nobody would pay more than £2,500 on energy in the year ahead. That figure is, in fact, a predicted average bill. Many face far higher charges.

Prime Minister Liz Truss during a visit to the British Gas training academy, near Dartford, in north west Kent. Picture: Ian Vogler/Daily Mirror/PA Wire

When she wasn’t bullsh***ing about bills, the Prime Minister spoke about the war in Ukraine as if, somehow, Russian president Vladimir Putin had made it necessary for Kwarteng to ease the tax burden on multi-millionaires.

From time-to-time during those awkward silences, radio microphones picked up the rustle of paper. Either aides were passing notes to the out-of-her-depth PM or writing their resignation letters.

During the Tory leadership campaign sparked by the departure from 10 Downing Street of Boris Johnson, Truss’s rival for the job – former chancellor Rishi Sunak – repeatedly suggested her financial plans would cause chaos. Interest sates would soar, he said.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Sunak had some idea of what he was talking about.

After the bruising experience of Thursday morning, Truss attempted a different tack, writing a piece for The Sun. In the article, which went online late on Friday evening, she told the paper’s readers that when she became Prime Minister, her government “could not afford to dither or delay”.

She knew how worried people had been by – of course – the impact of Putin’s war on energy bills. If she and her team had not “stepped up”, the cost would have been unthinkable and unforgivable.

Then – rather ominously – she restated her promise her Government would be “on your side”. Gosh, just imagine how much worse things might be if it was not.

I would be surprised if Sun readers – or indeed anyone who has caught sight of Truss’s piece – will be reassured by its content.

When one reads her assertion that she is “going to do things differently”, it’s difficult not to despair, When she writes of “difficult decisions” and “disruption”, my instinct is not to think here is a Prime Minister forced into radical action, but that here is a wing-nut, enthusiastically experimenting with the UK economy without any thought for the consequences.

A major problem – apart from the constant lying – with Boris Johnson was that it was impossible to detect in him the slightest impulse towards public service. It seemed – because it was so very clearly the case – that his political career was entirely about the satisfaction of his ego rather than the needs of the public.

I’m afraid Truss has already revealed a similar lack of interest in voters. She and Kwarteng are crank theorists let loose on the real world, able to conduct their experiments on actual people, able to cause appalling damage. And, thanks to current circumstances, able to, at least, try to blame Vladimir Putin when things go catastrophically wrong.

When Truss wrote in her piece for The Sun that her plans would encourage growth, meaning more funding for public services, even the most gullible reader will have wondered how that’s going to happen. Cutting taxes for the super rich without any plan to replace that loss to the treasury is not a plan for growth, but an experiment gone wrong at stage one.

The Conservative Party was once, by definition, a cautious thing. It shied away from the radical in favour of policies which were aimed at creating and maintaining stability.

The party may not always have succeeded in achieving this, but even its critics were able to agree the Tories were driven by the belief that, in order to succeed, it was important not to scare the horses.

Well, those days are long gone. The rise to dominance of pro-Brexit ideologues means the modern Tory Party is now a mess, a chaotic organisation where the impact of policy is considered in the abstract, if at all.

Truss, a Remainer turned Brexit true believer, is clearly unfit for the post she has not yet held for a month and no number of flimsy articles in the Currant Bun will shake that widely held view.

In recent days, we have seen a series of polls showing record-breaking poll leads for Labour. It may be too late to save the Conservatives, but those of her MPs who would like some kind of functioning party to exist, even in opposition, should start – loudly and publicly – demanding Liz Truss goes. This outcome is in their interests and the country’s.

Liz Truss is a 'crank theorist' whose experiments with the economy have caused 'appalling damage' - Euan McColm

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