Liz Truss’s strange and chilling desire to ‘channel the spirit of Don Revie’

At Conservative party hustings in Leeds six weeks ago, Liz Truss declared she wanted to “channel the spirit of Don Revie”. Which suggests she wasn’t entirely familiar with his experience of leading his country. Still, as she takes office amid dismal poll ratings, with a sceptical parliamentary party and an election looming in 2024, the new prime minister may just regard three years in the job, followed by a lucrative and widely reviled sinecure in the Middle East, as a pretty decent outcome.

Of course, political coverage in this country has long been influenced by the confected drama and basic unseriousness of its sporting counterpart. And sure enough much of the recent coverage of the Conservative leadership “race” has been essentially indistinguishable from the media flurry that usually greets big managerial appointments in football.

The soft-focus features on her background and upbringing. The feverish speculation over spending plans and backroom appointments. The customary references to her in-tray, as if the monumental responsibilities of a prime minister are somehow akin to items of office admin. One: make Downing Street a fortress again. Two: get Jacob Rees-Mogg firing again. And so on.

There is, nevertheless, a serious point to be made here. Perhaps one of the reasons political culture in this country has developed such an air of impermanence is the insistence on covering it as if it were a rolling entertainment product: the obsession with personality clashes and snap judgments, the fixation on crises and instant fixes, the impatience and wild mood swings of a football club chasing a morale-boosting three points every Saturday. Who “won” prime minister’s questions? Can Boris Johnson turn it around? What is the