We’re going on a Truss hunt! We’re going to catch a PM! What a beautiful day. We’re not scared!

Oh no! Labour! Keir Starmer’s Labour! We can’t go over them. We can’t go under them. We’ll have to go through them!

“Cautious cautious, Cautious cautious, Cautious cautious.”

Liz Truss occupies an odd place in this election campaign. She has been publicly denounced not just by Keir Starmer but also by her own party leader, Rishi Sunak. She has become a byword for Conservative failure, a punchline to every joke, and a warning of the dangers of recklessness in office. And yet there has been no sign of her. She is the absent villain from the movie, hanging over everything, never seen. 

And so on a hot summer’s day, I set out to track her down. Could she be in Washington, I pondered, giving lectures on success to credulous Americans? Or might she have gone into hiding in Argentina or South Africa or the Bahamas, like Lord Lucan? Perhaps she might, replied The Critic’s accountants, but unless you can get there on a cheap day return, you’re not going to find out. So having put away my mosquito net and cleft sticks, I set off for the brilliantly named constituency of South West Norfolk. 

This is, theoretically, ultra-safe Conservative country. In 2019 Truss won two out of every three votes here, almost four times as many as her closest rival. But — thanks largely to her own efforts — polls are putting the constituency into play. Some have suggested that Labour will take it. So it seems worth going to meet the party’s candidate, a young councillor with a big smile named Terry Jermy. He lives in Thetford, a town in South East South West Norfolk, where most of the Labour votes come from. 

It’s routine for candidates to talk up their local connections, but in Norfolk they make others look like amateurs. It’s not simply that Jermy grew up in Thetford, or that his family has long lived there. It’s the commitment that they have put into this. He has, he reveals, 42 aunts and uncles. And 100 cousins. By my reckoning, this makes him directly related to 0.2 per cent of the electorate. 

Does Jermy know where I might find Truss? Do any of his cousins? Could he put a note on the family WhatsApp? His understanding is that she’s been in the constituency since the start of the campaign, but no one knows where. She didn’t turn up at the previous week’s hustings, instead going to a pub to watch the football (being Truss, she posed for a photo of herself watching the match from a corner table next to the television where it was impossible to see the screen. It really is hard to believe she struggled with the job of prime minister). Perhaps she is still there. I set off for Swaffham, in North East South West Norfolk. 

One of the characteristics of South West Norfolk, I am learning, is its size. By some miracle of geographic trigonometry, no two parts are less than half an hour apart, separated by endless flat fields. When I eventually reach The Greyhound in Swaffham, the former prime minister has long since departed. “You should have come last week,” a morning drinker tells me outside. “Liz Truss was here.” 

His tone suggests this is a noteworthy appearance, even though, according to Truss’s website, her headquarters are at Swaffham Conservative Club, a couple of hundred yards away. But there is no sign of her there either. Or indeed of anyone, except for a couple of electricians. Someone suggests that there might sometimes be meetings upstairs, but they’re not sure. I have visited election headquarters before, and this is not their usual vibe.

I get a whisper that the campaign is being run from Downham Market, in North By North West South West Norfolk, where Truss’s agent lives. On the way over, I find my first piece of evidence that Truss is a candidate in this election: two large posters of her in a front garden. The game is afoot!

“I’m voting for you” shouts Andrew Farrow, a retired lorry driver, as he walks through Downham Market. Unfortunately for Truss, this is addressed to James Bagge, the independent candidate, who is chatting to people outside the town hall. Farrow cheerfully offers a view: “Liz Truss is completely useless. She made a whole mess of being prime minister, and she’s not interested in Downham Market.” He considers for a moment. “I don’t like her, as an MP or as a person.” Don’t hold back, Mr Farrow.

Bagge is the wild card in this election, a shire Tory of the old school, running, he says, out of a sense of duty, a belief that the area needs an MP who cares about it. I am picking up a sense that however much the rest of Britain may feel it dislikes Truss, there are people in South West Norfolk who have disliked her longer, harder, and with greater specificity. By a stroke of good fortune, these are also the only people in the country who actually get a vote on her future.

Independent candidates hardly ever win, so the likeliest outcome is that Bagge takes enough votes off Truss to help Jermy over the line. I suspect he could live with that result pretty easily. But his campaign has energy. If Truss is proving hard to track down, Bagge seems unavoidable. There is a van with loudspeakers delivering his message, and banners everywhere. He has even recruited a celebrity supporter, of a sort, in the shape of Dominic Grieve, the former MP for Beaconsfield, expelled from the Conservatives over Brexit.

This is the first clue that if there is a revolution taking place in South West Norfolk, it’s of a particular kind. The second one comes when Bagge and Grieve address a busy meeting a little later. “Rory Stewart is actually a model,” Bagge, speaking confidently without notes, tells the room. “How many of you have read his book?” Perhaps a dozen hands go up. Others nod like a 16-year-old asked if she has heard of someone called Taylor Swift. We get newspaper articles about the way young men are radicalised online by Andrew Tate, but no one is talking about the way the over-50s are being lured into extreme centrism by Old Etonian podcasters. 

Bagge is hoping that Stewart will come and visit the campaign, to bestow his blessing in person. Personally, if a dozen people in one town had read my book, I’d move there. 

Will there be a revolution in South West Norfolk? It would make for a crowning election night moment. And Truss will at least have to turn up for the result, which will be the first time quite a lot of people in the constituency have seen her in the campaign. 

We’re going on a Truss hunt! We’re going to catch a PM. What a beautiful day. We’re not scared!

Oh no! Independents! Tall, patrician independents! We can’t go over them. We can’t go under them. We’ll have to go through them! 

“Rory Stewart, Rory Stewart, Rory Stewart.”

We’re not going on a Truss hunt again.