We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict’s fervour.

Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they “hate western civilisation”. She couldn’t possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed “globalist network”, operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization.

Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a “Trump-style revolution” will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia’s main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that “globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe”.

It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no........

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