The Sunday Post View: This government of misrule cannot just blunder on. It has lost the right

Oh dear, oh dear

– King Charles III welcomes Liz Truss to their weekly meeting on Wednesday

Even in our new monarch’s wildest dreams, he could not have hoped to find himself the voice of the nation just a few weeks into his new job.

His murmured sympathy as he welcomed the equally new prime minister to Buckingham Palace last week was possibly a little embarrassing for Liz Truss after being caught on camera. However, it was also very possibly the nicest thing anyone said to her in the course of another knuckle-chewing seven days of calamity and U-turn as the government of a once-proud nation staggered around like a drunk chasing a chicken.

Astonishingly, it actually got so bad that by the time Truss stalked out of her press conference after taking four whole questions on Friday afternoon (the same number of chancellors we’ve endured in the last three months, incidentally), some observers might even have started feeling a little sorry for her. They shouldn’t bother.

The prime minister is quite completely the mistress of her own misfortune. She was, of course, enabled by those deluded and delusional members of the Tory party who voted for her and has, after all, only done exactly what she told them she would.

The rest of us, however, can, with a clear conscience, damn her – and them for electing her – for launching a kamikaze mission to transform the UK’s economy when it was least ready to stand her naïve, unfunded, dogma-driven foolishness.

Former chancellor George Osborne liked to suggest it was best to fix the roof while the sun was shining. Truss and her defenestrated chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, managed to torch the house while a storm was raging. And then blame the storm.

Whatever happens now it cannot end well for her, her government or her party. They have run themselves into the ground at Westminster: viciously divided, exuberantly rancorous, and lacking ideas, commitment and discipline, they can no longer be trusted to go to the garage for chocolate, never mind run a country.

However, since the only way to call a General Election is with the agreement of Tory MPs, many of whom are unlikely to survive one, it is already being suggested they can continue with a propped-up Truss or a new leader, the fifth in six years. That is, frankly, unconscionable.

Of course, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas but what are we, sheep? Tory MPs will, of course, be keen to spend the next two years trying to find an alternative berth – a few nice directorships perhaps, or something in the City? – but are we simply expected to shrug and grimace as our mortgage payments surge and the slow crawl to payday gets longer every month?

As Boris Johnson trousers $150,000 for a 90-minute “fireside chat” with a conference of American insurers, when will we, the voters, stand up and say enough?

Nicola Sturgeon was absolutely right on Friday. The country needs an election and Tory MPs need to look into their hearts, do the right thing, and vote for Christmas.

This government by fiasco, this riven, incompetent, shallow administration, can no longer go on. It has lost all right.