There’s a gaping hole at the centre of the Tory party where ideas should be. The risk is Liz Truss will fill it | Rafael Behr

Truss’s bizarre demeanour, self-regarding without self-awareness, limits the purchase her ideas might get on public opinion, even with audiences primed for conspiracy theory.

But Truss’s argument still stands out as the most prominent expression of what Tories should believe about the recent past and the near future; why western civilisation is imperilled and how it can be saved.

Photograph: Danny Lawson/PAThe core proposition is a facile cult of political freedom, defined as minimal taxation and horror of state interventions that prioritise collective social obligation over individual enterprise.

A fundamentalist concept of liberty is then used to flush out a disparate coalition of enemies – the Chinese Communist party, Joe Biden’s industrial strategy, woke academia, unsupportive journalists, the UK supreme court and, of course, the European Union.

There is no way to configure Trump and the Kremlin fandom rife in the Republican party as defenders of “the west” without stripping that word of all previous historical and geopolitical connotation.

In the competition to explain election defeat, the account that blames the establishment, high taxes, flaccid leadership and an electorate brainwashed in leftism has a head start.