Troubles in Downing Street 

IN the short time this newspaper passes from the printers to your hands, who knows what new self-inflicted calamity will have been suffered by our incompetent government.

The prime minister is now staring at a future of being labelled the worst of all time, with every decision seeming to render her own and, more importantly, the country’s position weaker. And all of this at a time when serious and reassuring leadership is more needed than ever.

The Conservatives have only themselves to blame. None of them could have cited a single inspirational speech or memorably effective media appearance before they handed Liz Truss the top job, so why should they be surprised now to find her so woefully out of her depth?

Only self interest or the most narrow of party political perspectives can avoid the conclusion that the only proper course of action for the nation now is a general election. The only people who voted for what we have now was a tiny group of party members.

Catastrophic government reaches back long before Ms Truss, however. The Brexit debate may be over, but regardless of the right and wrongs of that, the culture of dividing the nation rather than uniting it has bedded in for a generation. Rather than bringing two sides together, the winners and losers made no attempt to build bridges.

Ms Truss was the same, to her peril, when she won her party’s lengthy leadership contest, relegating the “losers” to the back benches.

Suella Braverman gave us a virtuoso performance of this sort of divisiveness in parliament this week when, still holding a great office of state, she indulged herself in a rant against “tofu eaters”, “Guardian readers”and other tired stereotypes. Ms Truss behaved similarly earlier this month when she railed about “north London townhouses”.

These lazy shorthand jibes indicate a shameful ignorance of the truth that even in north London there are many people feeling racked with guilt because their children are hungry or do not have a suitable coat for the winter.

These culture war games jar badly when poverty is so extreme, and people who were never poor before find themselves on the breadline.

Playing on division, the Tories reap what they have sown, still believing that people want to hear incoherent lines about “wokery” rather than getting help to survive.

As Ms Truss desperately now reaches out to figures that she recently turned into outcasts, there’s a lesson which might be learned by the Labour Party as it sees the opportunity of government open up, almost by default.

With its left wing dismantled by deselection and aggressive internal sectarianism, it needs to reflect quickly on the importance of unity.

Now is not the time to fight itself when a broad alliance would offer the widest chance of finding the answers to what this paper terms the “cost of surviving crisis”.