The fact is that Truss’s departure from Number 10 is a symptom, not a cause, of what is wrong with centre-Right politics across the Anglosphere, for two reasons.

First, centre-Right Parties in the UK, Canada and Australia have abandoned core centre-Right principles – including economic liberalism – and ceased making the case for them.

PARTYGATE

In Britain, the Conservative Party long ago decided it didn’t want to be a conservative, centre-Right Party.

Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, did not lose the prime ministership because of “Partygate.” That was merely the excuse.

Johnson was removed because his embrace of net-zero emissions and climate change super-activism led Britain into an energy crisis.

It has resulted in massive price hikes for household energy bills, borne by the very voters in the “red wall” that gave the Tories its biggest electoral majority since Margaret Thatcher’s huge 1987 win.

Johnson won dozens of working-class seats that had never before voted Conservative.

He won them on Brexit and patriotism and because the centre-Left Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn was so extreme. Now the Conservatives could easily lose those seats.

As The Australian newspaper journalist Greg Sheridan points out, on Brexit, Johnson forced his Party to make a choice in utter defiance of the zeitgeist.

But on everything else, Johnson governed as a Left-of-centre, zeitgeist-observing Labour leader might.

The two Conservative leaders before Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron, accepted all of Labour’s social agenda. Cameron’s only conservative feature was attempting to control spending and balance the budget, plus some modest tax cutting.

Now, under a Conservative government, Britain’s tax take is the highest since the 1960s, soon to become the highest since the 50s.

The energy crisis and the tax burden are the two big things Truss tried to address, but was unable to do so thanks to her predecessors.

As John Roskam, of the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote in The Australian Financial Review, what has occurred in the last few weeks reveals what happens when you stop making the case for economic freedom.

RIDICULE

He cited former Tory leader and Foreign Secretary William Hague, who wrote in The Times that all that was left for the Conservative Party to do was to live with big government and try to make it work a bit better (this is also what many centre-Right Liberal MPs in Australia believe too, by the way).

They have given up because, in their mind, it is too hard since it will likely provoke horror in the financial markets, ridicule from commentators, and spook voters who have become comfortable with staying at home – while leaving future generations with a debt burden.

This parlous state of affairs is thanks to ever-increasing government largesse, practised by both centre-Right and Left-wing governments.

We have been here before. Advocates for economic freedom are back where they were in the 1970s. They are “policy dissidents”, as Roskam describes them.

What follows is an extract from the memorandum of advice provided to the incoming Thatcher government in 1979 (which former Australian Prime Minister John Howard reproduced in his autobiography, Lazarus Rising).

It is as true today as it was then.

First and foremost, the UK public sector has swollen beyond belief (due to) the Welfare State, rampant.

Necessarily, therefore, the overall burden of taxation is too high,

• and its effects are exacerbated by the structure of the taxation system;
• which, although ostensibly directed at the “fat cats,” in practice results not (or not so much) in levies falling genuinely on well-to-do but rather on the middle classes;
• so that, literally, people in that category are increasingly disposed to “vote with their feet” by taking their skills, energies and, not least, their attitudes towards their society, elsewhere.

 Thatcher had to argue not only against her opponents, but even more fiercely, against those of her own Party, to convince them of the benefits of economic freedom.

Even those in her own Party begged her for a U-turn, which she famously refused to do.

The second reason for Truss’s demise is the system that chooses our leaders no longer produces calibre, like Thatcher, that can make the case for economic liberalism and carry it through.

As Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson told Piers Morgan, there needs to be a “rethink” in how leaders are chosen because “it’s not working”.

“Clearly the systems that we have had in place post-war, the last 80 years to raise up talent to put in positions to rule over the rest of us – that system is very flawed,” Carlson said.

SHORT-SIGHTED

“It’s producing instead short-sighted day traders who have no real investment in the countries they lead, no long-term vision for those countries and no moral strength.

“They’re weak, and weak leadership in the home, as in the nation, results in disaster.”

Truss did not succeed because she, like her predecessors, does not possess Thatcher-like skills to make the case that prosperity is built on the back of economic freedom, lower taxes, smaller government, and less regulation to allow private enterprise and individual initiative to flourish.

One only has to look at her media performances to know that she was, to put it simply, not up to the task.