Very rarely do politicians actually pay the price of overpromising and under-delivering. Liz Truss’s newly earned title as ‘shortest-serving Prime Minister’ is a notable exception to this rule. The sequence of events leading up to yesterday’s second resignation is so absurd and ludicrous that it would almost be comical, were it not for the financial hardships that households up and down the country are now having to shoulder as a consequence.

There is no doubt about it: Truss had to go. But her departure marks the beginning of the end for a once-omnipotent Conservative party.

For starters, the countdown to the 2024 general election is ticking. Whilst in any other normal period, government would be gearing up to neatly present its policy progress to the British people, by the end of 2022 there will have been no functional government in Westminster for over six months. Even before Johnson eventually resigned on one fateful July morning, the ‘levelling up’ motor so crucial to holding on to northern Red Wall constituencies was already stalling under the weight of scandals, corruptions, and accusations of ministerial malpractice. Account two months for the protracted summer leadership contest, two more for the Truss misadventure, plus another two to give whoever takes her place time to find their footing, and voters will be acutely aware of how little progress has been made towards the real work of today’s government: addressing the cost of living crisis.

But the problems go beyond the looming threat of electoral defeat foretold by the polls. On an internal level, the impending party leadership contest is, in itself, an inherently self-destructive affair. 

Incapable of agreeing upon a leader to snatch the baton directly from Truss’s faltering fingers, the Conservatives have instead opted to thrust a fresh round of visceral, faction-on-faction infighting upon a fatigued British public. And with reports now suggesting that none other than Boris Johnson is expected to run, any hopes of the campaign being little more than a formality have been obliterated.

Even in the comparatively condensed one-week form of this iteration, the impending media bombardment of self-serving rhetorical vanity will do nothing but further distance Westminster politicians from the day-to-day realities of voters up and down the country. No manner of televised debate or reference to the ‘British people’ will detract from the fact that whoever takes the keys to No.10 next week will do so as the second unelected premier. More than yet another unprecedented moment in modern politics, the inherently undemocratic nature of two back-to-back internal selection processes is electoral gold dust for an increasingly energised Labour party under Sir Keir Starmer.

Whilst Trussonomics will live on as a synonym for everything wrong with late-Conservative populism, the doomed leader will quickly be forgotten in the public consciousness. Even Facebook might well think twice about offering her a job as they did with Nick Clegg.

To avoid the fate befalling the Liberal Democrats post-2015, the Conservative party as a whole is now faced with a task of truly astronomical propositions.