In the House of Commons, they were discussing the Chagos Islands, again. Outside, The Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, was overseeing the installation of a Christmas tree. He pressed a button and it lit up — a neat but probably unintentional counterpoint to Friday’s debate on assisted dying.

Over in Whitehall, Keir Starmer had appointed someone called Sir Chris Wormald as Cabinet Secretary. No one was quite sure who he was, or could even remember seeing his name on the shortlist, but he nevertheless appealed to the prime minister. Perhaps his anonymity spoke to something deep in Starmer’s soul. 

The press release put out announcing the appointment did little to dispel the idea that Wormald doesn’t in fact exist. We were asked to believe that he responded to his appointment by saying: “I am delighted that the Prime Minister has appointed me to the privileged role of leading our talented Civil Service, as we rise to the challenge of delivering the Government’s focused agenda to deliver its Plan for Change.” I’m always fascinated by lines like this from press offices. It’s impossible to escape the idea that hours of negotiations went into a sentence that, even if a reporter pasted it into their story, any half-decent editor would immediately cut. No one speaks like that. 

Or perhaps they do. Across the Atlantic, record-setting uberfailure Liz Truss was giving a speech. It was full of quotes that, if you write them down, make no sense. “The Trump victory that we saw in November couldn’t have come any earlier.” Well no, that is the nature of fixed terms.

She denounced anti-Israel politicians in Britain: “The government that allows these movements to gain traction within domestic politics should not be protected from the full force of…” She paused, having begun without knowing how she was going to finish. She tried again: “The full force of the free world and putting serious pressure on those people, that is what needs to happen.”

As things began to go wrong during Truss’s brief stint at the top, she acquired an anxious, uncertain air. Perhaps it was the effect of realising that the world did not, in a quite profound way, work as she had believed it did. She still has it. On top of that on Monday she seemed to be speaking without a text, giving the distinct impression that she was trying to busk her way through the event. Some people can do this: I once watched Ken Clarke give a coherent and amusing speech based on three words that he’d scrawled on a scrap of paper during lunch. But as I’m sure Liz Truss would agree, she’s no Ken Clarke.

She was speaking to the Heritage Foundation, a Washington outfit whose staff photos tend to sit somewhere between “Televangelist Awaiting Trial” and “Incoming CEO Who Will Fire You”. It’s become famous for its “Project 2025”, a sort of blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term that, if followed, may or may not involve any of us living to see 2026. 

We should probably hope that Heritage’s grasp of American politics is better than their understanding of things in Britain, which is summed-up by a piece on their website: “Liz Truss Gave the People What They Wanted and Was Punished”. Well, it’s a point of view.

Her subject was officially the question of Iranian nuclear weapons, but her real subject, as ever, was how she was undone by a conspiracy of Guardian journalists, freemasons and the Bank of England. To pander to her audience, she had spiced her speech up with attacks on “leftist media” and “neo-Marxist philosophies”. The latter, she said, had been “appeased by the mainstream left to keep the far left onside”. Addressing members of a political party that has decided to pretend an armed assault on Capitol Hill was just high spirits, it was impressive chutzpah.

Still, you can understand why Truss has latched onto this outfit. It’s not, after all, as though she’s being asked to open a lot of supermarkets back home. A couple of dozen people in a room in Washington is probably as good as it gets these days.