Liz Truss fell because she was elected on a lie. Not the kind of lie Boris Johnson routinely told – the blatant tactical fib – but the strategic lie, believed by millions of people and encoded in the textbooks: that the small state is the only route to growth and that redistribution is both economically and morally wrong.
She clawed her way to the front of the Conservative leadership contest by repeating this doctrine without nuance. And 81,000 party members drawn from the white, suburban, selfish middle classes backed her because the lie is their gospel.
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