‘I know the name,” texts a friend when I ask if she knows who Liz Truss is, but like most Americans can’t quite put her finger on why. “Like 8%,” guesses another when I ask her to put a number on how many of her countrymen she imagines know of Truss. The standard response, in my extremely unscientific poll of Americans as to whether or not they know of Truss, however, was: “No, should I?” – the answer to which, of course, depends entirely on whether you want to understand why the Tory party is polling around 20% or whether you happen to be Liz Truss.

Truss, the only one of us to suffer that particular misfortune, was in Washington DC this week trying, like so many minor British celebrities before her, to catch the eye of the Americans. At the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank that hosted the launch of Truss’s book Ten Years to Save the West, she came bearing a “warning”. Not an ideal ice-breaker, perhaps, but one clearly tailored to an audience receptive to the frisson of the term “forces of the global........

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