Sir Keir Starmer is reportedly considering calls to strip Labour members of their vote on the party leader. Allies apparently pushing for this measure are calling it the “Liz Truss lock”, presumably because they would rather remind the nation about her than Jeremy Corbyn.

But coming in the same week as Anthony Seldon’s excruciating new chronicle of Truss’s premiership, it does pose the obvious question of how we avoid the elevation of the next Truss – as well as the much less obvious question, which I’ll get to, of whether we should.

The answer depends a lot on what we mean by “the next Truss”. Yes, it would be nice if we were spared another prime minister as straightforwardly politically incompetent as she. But the people best positioned to screen for such things are MPs, and for all the fingers pointed at Tory members, it was her parliamentary colleagues who put Truss in the final two.

Raising the bar a little higher, perhaps we want to close the door to ideologues. But to anyone familiar with the various strands of Conservative thought, what was remarkable about Truss was the shallowness of her ideological thinking – especially when compared to her idol, Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher took office in 1979, having been Leader of the........

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