Voices: Maybe a Madame Tussauds waxwork for prime minister is what this country needs

The most tragic aspect of Liz Truss’s truly bizarre decision to come to the House of Commons and spend 40 full minutes auditioning for the role of her own waxwork at Madame Tussauds is that they probably won’t bother making one of her anyway.

Perhaps she will be remembered as one of those weird ceremonial figures who appears roughly once a century to carry out some ancient heraldic function or other when the country buries a monarch, and then vanishes again. A bit like the bloke who broke that stick in half, except with the economy.

The only difference is that, by comparison, all that stuff looked perfectly normal. But we get ahead of ourselves. There’s never really been a day like Monday 17 October 2022 before, so we’ll have to start at the beginning.

At 6am, the new chancellor had to announce he would be making a statement at 11am. It couldn’t wait until the House of Commons got under way that afternoon, because those few hours would, the chancellor evidently thought, be all that the markets would require to wipe out the economy entirely. The currency, pension funds, the lot.

So at 11am, the cameras rolled on the chancellor’s desk. It scarcely needs to be said that this kind of thing is what prime ministers do, and they tend to do it only when they have a war to declare, which in this case he kind of did. He had a war to declare on his own government – on his own prime minister. Jeremy Hunt stared down the barrel of the camera and cancelled every single policy in the Budget of 25 days ago. He announced that future tax increases would be necessary, and spending cuts inevitable.

He announced that the government, still led by Liz Truss, now stood in direct contradiction to absolutely everything Liz Truss believed in, and that it would be doing the direct opposite of absolutely everything Liz Truss said she would do and then did.

Given that it was the first parliamentary day since Truss had sacked her last chancellor, Labour – somewhat unsurprisingly – asked the prime minister to come to the Commons and explain what was going on. She sent Penny Mordaunt instead, who spent a full hour gravely and cryptically claiming that the prime minister would have loved to have been there but had “a very real reason” why she couldn’t be; that she was “detained on urgent business”; and that, as much as Mordaunt wanted to, Mordaunt was unable to say just what that business was.

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Mordaunt said that Truss would be “back tomorrow”, and that she would be “in the House for Prime Minister’s Questions” the day after tomorrow. She was midway through that answer when the prime minister sat down behind her.

Well, it looked like the prime minister, anyway, whatever it was. The only difference was that it didn’t appear to be capable of any kind of movement. For more than half an hour, no trace of human emotion, or even cognitive function, came forth upon its countenance.

Two weeks ago, Elon Musk revealed a new prototype for a humanoid robot, but also admitted that one of the biggest challenges that technology faces is battery life. So it could be that whatever it was that walked in, sat down on the government benches and activated demented smirk mode simply ran out of juice at a decidedly inopportune moment.

If anything was whirring behind the eyes, then that is where it stayed. It could even be a strategy. There is absolutely no one in the entire country who has any idea what the point of the prime minister is any more, so perhaps she is chiselling out a new role for herself.

For more than 200 years, the preserved body and wax head of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham has been on display at University College London and, so the story goes, is occasionally wheeled into important meetings, where it continues to hold voting rights.

So there’s absolutely no reason to believe that you can’t run a country in this way. If the various graphs of government borrowing rates are to be believed, it possibly even works quite well.

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After all, the country has just lost a figurehead who very deliberately never said or did anything of any substance at all, and the replacement is already kind of compromised on that front – so maybe she could make that work for her?

Maybe a ceremonial prime minister is what the country needs? A demonic ventriloquist’s puppet that, in a really novel twist, doesn’t actually say anything at all? Because this, to be clear, is absolutely the only hope she’s got. It is all well and truly over. The flush is busted and on its way out of a sewage pipe at a beach near you.

There is absolutely no one – no one – who thinks Truss can carry on like this. If the voices in her head are still capable of speaking, they will certainly have said as much to her.

The markets may have calmed a little, but Tories don’t care as much about that stuff as they like to pretend – and, certainly since the 2019 election, most of them don’t understand them either. But there is a chart they do understand. At 5pm, a leading polling company published its latest findings, which showed that if an election were to be held tomorrow, the Tories would win 22 seats. Twenty-two.

Fortunately for the prime minister, a development like this means that absolutely nothing else needs to be said.