Liz Truss is foreign secretary. During the time it has taken to write this column, I have repeatedly stared at that first sentence for approximately as many hours as it took the James Webb telescope to deploy in space, but sadly nothing has changed: Liz Truss remains foreign secretary.
In The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the vaguely humanoid Vogons were the race who crawled out of the sea and survived by sheer obstinacy after evolution had given them up.
Just by existing, they rose to become the galactic government’s bureaucrats who “wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders – signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters”.
By the sheer luck of being less awful than the other potential candidates, Ms Truss is now tipped as the next prime minister.
She certainly has the same cast-iron commitment to her political beliefs as Boris Johnson.
During the 2016 Brexit referendum, Ms Truss, then the environment secretary, urged voters to back Remain.
She said the European Union was responsible for environmental measures which reduced the hole in the ozone layer and cut levels of acid rain.
“This is a debate about our country. People who care about those issues, who care about us being an outward-facing, internationally-focused country, go out and vote,” she told The Guardian.
In an unprecedented move, Ms Truss joined former Labour leader Ed Miliband, the former Liberal Democrat energy secretary Ed Davey, and Green MP Caroline Lucas to draw up a pamphlet on the environmental benefits of remaining within the EU.
To borrow from every reality TV show ever made, Ms Truss has really ‘gone on a journey’ since 2016.
The Foreign Secretary is now one of the government’s biggest supporters of Brexit.
In a speech last month which marked her bid to be prime minister, she claimed Brexit is a “new opportunity for the UK to shape the international agenda” and an “unfrozen moment we must capitalise on”.
“As an outward-looking sovereign nation, we are rebuilding our muscle to fulfil the promise of Global Britain – ready to win opportunities for our country and win the future for freedom,” she said.
I’m not entirely sure what an “unfrozen moment” or winning “the future for freedom” actually mean, nor, I suspect, does whoever wrote that speech.
And talk of Britain “rebuilding our muscle” sounds both deeply unpleasant and like a New Year’s resolution which has already fallen by the wayside.
It’s been a year since Brexit kicked in. Shouldn’t Britain’s muscle have been rebuilt in 2021?
In the absence of any real positives arising from Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly attempted to gain some kind of control by trying to renege on a deal which he made and fully endorsed in 2019.
The British government has been trying to re-negotiate the Northern Ireland Protocol for six months, with mixed success.
Now Ms Truss has said she is willing to override the Protocol altogether - a move the EU's ambassador to the UK said was deeply unhelpful.
“We've heard this before from the government, so we're not surprised. We are not too impressed," Joao Vale de Almeida told Sky News.
We know from our own recent history that endless negotiations and talks about talks are rarely fruitful and are often used as a delaying tactic.
But then, if a government cannot govern, negotiations are a way of suggesting that something is happening, without anything actually happening.
Vote Leave claimed Brexit would ‘bring back control’ of Britain’s borders. The real result is that thousands of migrants sensibly decided to leave, sparking a severe labour shortage.
If Brexit has done anything at all it has been to destabilise Britain’s relations with the EU, and with the Republic and France in particular.
Negotiations and threats to pull out of international agreements are to international diplomacy what Vogon poetry - ‘the third worst in the Universe’ - is to Yeats.
The best you can say about Ms Truss is she’s the third worst leader or potential leader of the Conservative Party, behind Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab.
All we can do over the next few months is watch on as the Tories use the Protocol to prove who loves Brexit the most.
As a young Vogon guard would say: "Resistance is useless!"
