Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) was a Nobel prize winning physicist, who had a particular gift for distilling complex concepts down to simple, clear, layman understandable statements which embodied the essence of their meaning.

He presented a number of fascinating public lectures about the basics of physics, and he posited that there was one simple notion that was at the heart of the scientific process in physics. Essentially, this was that you could propose any theory you wanted about the behaviour of the world, but unless that agreed with observation it was wrong. Period. Importantly he noted that agreeing with observation did not mean that it was correct, but just that it was ‘not wrong’.

The relevance to Ms Truss is that there have been nearly a century of meaningful observations on whether making the rich richer materially improves the lot of the ‘not haves’ relative to those with wealth. The consensus of opinion surely has concluded that not only did ‘trickle down’ not work, but that in the last 20 years the rich in the USA have got spectacularly richer, whilst the relative lot of ‘blue collar’ workers has hardly moved in the same period.

Notwithstanding this, Truss embarked on an attempt to repeat previous failed experiments hoping for a different outcome, and it became clear that the markets did not accept this (whatever her plans might have been for funding it – which were not revealed at the time) .

Worse, the dramatic collapse of her government has – in the space of a few short days – gone from tax cuts to (Jeremy Hunt 14.10.22) to tax rises, austerity again and sacrifices. The sheer speed and scale of this is unique in Grumpy’s lifetime. She must surely be the most inept leader in a century.

The upshot is almost certainly that, barring some catastrophic blunder by the Labour Party or unforeseen misfortune, the Tories (in a twinkling of an eye) will be out of power for at the least one electoral cycle at the next election.

The inward looking conservative MPs who took out Boris in a fit of self-righteous grandstanding over what in historical terms was a trivial transgression must now be rueing the day they trashed an 80 seat majority.