Librium Liz

First, an apology. I should never have christened Theresa May “the Maybot”. With hindsight, she appears positively emotionally present. Touchy-feely. Almost functional. If not entirely competent. Certainly not the 1980s piece of Amstrad junk she always seemed when she was running the country. If you can call it that.

But the Tories are just playing with us. It’s as if the members said: “So you think David Cameron is useless? Just wait until we give you Theresa.” And once we’d all had about enough of May, they gave us a narcissistic, sociopathic liar instead.

Now, to top it all – at least we hope so; surely there can’t be another one who is even worse? – we’ve been landed with Liz Truss. Someone who is not just half-witted and robotic, but reckless enough to bankrupt the country. The ideologue with only a tenuous grasp on reality. There’s always a job waiting for Truss in an automated call centre: a deathless loop that sucks the life out of you.

I’m not sure who was stupid enough to suggest starting the reclusive prime minister’s media rehabilitation with a tour of the BBC regional radio studios, but they won’t be doing it again in a hurry. If they thought they were going to ease Librium Liz out of her week-long hibernation with a series of short, “lifestyle” interviews – think author flogging new book on PR junket – that would reach a smallish, local audience and fly beneath the national media, then they badly miscalculated. Local radio presenters are no mugs and they weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Inevitably, they all mainly asked the same questions. After all, there really is only one game in town. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Didn’t it occur to you that your mindless mini-budget could wipe £500bn off the markets, putting pensions at risk and increasing the cost of borrowing? Thanks very much for the £100 or so tax cut that the least well-off will be getting, but did you know that you’ve just made most people even more broke?

But there was a virtue in hearing the same question asked on eight separate occasions. Because it reinforced the key message that Librium Liz doesn’t have any coherent answers. She really didn’t seem to have any idea of the scale of the damage she had done. She was in total denial. Like an arsonist caught with a can of petrol.

It also said much about Truss’s limited capacity for rational thinking. Most artificial intelligence is programmed to learn from its mistakes. So you’d have thought she would have got better and better as the hour went on – that she might even have sounded half human and half intelligent by the time she came off air.

Only she didn’t. She got worse and worse. Out came the same absurd answers, and the pauses as she tried to think of something credible got longer and longer. She is the embodiment of the circle of doom on a laptop that’s crashing. She is not AI. She is Artificial Stupidity, programmed to carry on repeating more and more errors until she collapses in on herself. A dead cert to win this year’s Darwin awards for those who have contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool. Wire Truss up to an ECG and you’d find no activity. Just a flat line. (...)

Detached, emotionally dead, intellectually wanting. Careless with other people’s lives. Not even curious to find out how people were experiencing her calamity economics. The dead-air silences became so long I presumed she was trying to communicate by telepathy.

by John Crace, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Hannah McKay/Reuters
[ed. I know next to nothing about British politics, but this seems bad indeed. See also: Liz Truss to hold emergency talks with OBR after failing to calm markets (The Guardian). Update: Kamikwasi Kwarteng delivers his excruciating career suicide note (John Crace -The Guardian.]