“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over. . . .  At least I’ve been prime minister.” Thus concludes the final chapter of Out of the Blue, hastily written by Sun political editor Harry Cole and the Spectator’s James Heale and initially intended to inaugurate the triumphant rise of newly christened Tory prime minister Liz Truss. Truss reportedly uttered these words to her Downing Street staff on October 20, 2022, moments before proceeding outside to announce her resignation. Fitting enough, Truss’s bromide-encrusted speech lasted exactly eighty-nine seconds — roughly two for each day of her chaotic and brief tenure at Number 10. So fleeting was her premiership, Cole and Heale write, that podium placement marks for the resignation speech still remained on the pavement from her first address to the country only six weeks earlier.

To those who lived through it, Truss’s forty-nine-day stint in office will probably be remembered (if remembered at all) as a tour de force of managerial incompetence, occasionally punctuated by moments of amusing political theater. On the rare occasions that public ineptitude reaches such heights, the old adage about train wrecks and car crashes definitely applies: sudden meltdowns in the halls of power are often hard to look away from, because they puncture structuring myths of elite competence and, in doing so, strip institutions of their artifice. But insofar as there’s a broader story here beyond that of an individual politician self-immolating in record time, it’s one of right-wing dogmatism ham-fistedly pushing beyond the limits of what markets will tolerate.

Save the lurid details of backroom conversations and frantic meetings as Tory apparatchiks realized their erstwhile Iron Lady was headed for political oblivion, there is no mystery at all surrounding the Truss premiership or what ended it with such speed. On September 23, shortly after the Queen’s death, Truss’s chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng tabled a mini-budget entitled “The Growth Plan 2022,” a would-be neo-Thatcherite speedrun of tax cuts rooted in discredited trickle-down orthodoxy under the fraudulent aegis of restoring Britain’s economic dynamism. Among its key planks were the scrapping of the UK’s top income tax rate, the elimination of a cap on bankers’ bonuses, and the cancellation of a planned rise in corporation tax from 19 to 25 percent. Also teased soon after were cuts in social and welfare spending pitched by cabinet minister Simon Clarke as a potential antidote to the British economy’s flagging productivity.