Collar and Ties

Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg and other close allies of Boris Johnson supported Liz Truss because she would be easy to remove with a view to the Restoration. They would not have done so without Johnson's participation, and the appalling treatment of Conor Burns will have accelerated that already very rapid process.

No one could possibly question the legitimacy of the Prime Minister who had won the most recent General Election. You can already picture him, flanked by them, on the steps of Downing Street. "Normal service has been resumed." "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted." He may even have the wit to reappoint Rishi Sunak as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then let this Parliament run its full course as if nothing had happened.

During that course, he could make The Labour Files the huge story that it deserved to be, he could find a way of reopening the Beergate business, he could resume the attack on Keir Starmer over Jimmy Savile, and having sent the Police round to Labour, he could also do so to the SNP over Ferguson Marine Engineering, and to the newly overthrown regime over Odey Asset Management and the rest of Kwasi Kwarteng's insider trading.

After all, what, exactly, is that regime? Herewith, page 34 of yesterday's Observer. Good work by the sub, no doubt. Look out and listen out for what are now the routine media references to Truss's status as a collared sub. In the last week, I have been asked whether I had heard it in public houses from Durham to Consett, including by people whom I did not know, but who clearly knew who I was. Similar conversations must be taking place the length and breadth of the land. The whole thing is common knowledge.

It is very British to dismiss this as a joke, but whose collared submissive is the Prime Minister, and what are her duties to her dominant? I remember a long-serving Conservative MP, now deceased, who really and truly believed that the government of this country was controlled by a witches' coven in Gloucestershire. People who are now Shadow Ministers have screamed in my face that I was the head of some cabal of hardline Catholic "incels" (a comically inaccurate word for several of the individuals in question) who had broken with Jeremy Corbyn over his indulgence of Remainerism, identity politics and Greenery, but who were biding our time with a view to one day emerging from the sierra and seizing the organs of the State.

Barking mad stuff, of course, and in the latter case an example of what I believe is called projection. But this is something else. Whose collared submissive is the Prime Minister, and what are her duties to her dominant? These questions demand to be asked on the floor of the House of Commons while Truss remained in office. But that may not be very much longer, anyway.