It is not easy to feel sorry for Liz Truss. She has a deeply unattractive streak of vanity – when in the Foreign Office, she seemed more interested in posing for the official photographers who trailed her round than she did in building relationships with the places she visited. She campaigned hard and sometimes dirty to obtain a job for which she was manifestly out of her depth.

Once in that job, she exercised power with peremptory arrogance. She rewarded people who had sucked up to her, cast out anyone who had spoken up for her rival, and allowed experienced civil servants to be hoofed ruthlessly out of their jobs. So confident was she that she knew best that she didn’t bother to seek the support of cabinet for her most radical proposals, and she rejected the advice of the OBR before it had even been given. She cannot claim to have been badly advised because she made sure that she was not advised at all. When the whole jerry-built rocket of her premiership exploded on the launch pad, she had nobody to blame but herself.

And yet, I think the human way into the story is this one. It is that her mini-Budget – and I use the possessive advisedly, because not a soul who pretends to have any insight into the matter thinks Kwasi Kwarteng was anything other than an enthusiastic junior partner in the project – was the folly of somebody deranged by unrequited love. Here was a new prime minister who loved, as the saying has it, not wisely but too well. Liz Truss was not in love with a person, but with an idea. She was in love with ‘the market’ – that belle dame sans merci of the Tory right. Her previous positions – republican, Liberal Democrat, Remainer – had been discarded like old crushes. Inexplicable what she ever saw in them. This, though: this wasn’t going to be like the last time, or the time before that. This was The One.

Don’t think of her as prime minister, with all the pomp and apparent assurance of her office. Think instead of ‘Liz’, the ambitious, clever teenager hiding in those power suits. Liz is an awkward girl who doesn’t make friends easily. She has a shy, detached manner. She misreads social signals. She sometimes seems cold or standoffish, then smiles awkwardly or expresses warmth and enthusiasm like someone who has read instructions on how to do so in a book. But inside, her emotions are in turmoil. On the bedroom wall where she lives inside her head are hand-knit samplers with quotations from Hayek and Adam Smith, Athena posters of Laffer curves smeared with lipstick kisses. She lies there sockless on top of her duvet, for hours at a time, kicking her legs and daydreaming hotly about ‘animal spirits’.

The fatal attraction of Liz’s idea of the market was its perfect simplicity. Small state good, big state bad. Tax cuts good, public spending bad. Freedom wasn’t a complicated concept of the kind Isaiah Berlin might write a book about but, rather, a simple and noble good which made your heart soar to even think of. The principles were so attractive, so gleamingly clear-cut, that you wouldn’t have to bother yourself with the mystifying contingencies of behavioural economics, or even the need to do any sums. Exchange rates, interest rates, gilt yields, inputs and outputs – all those tedious details were secondary. They were window-dressing. If you were only bold, and cut the wealth creators free, the magic of the market would make everything all right. And then, only then, would the market love her as she loved it, and the adoring eyes of the public affirm their union. This was a vision of economics no more realistic than a pull-out poster in a faded issue of Just 17.

When we’re in love, we don’t think rationally. Love is projection. We are not – during that initial period of what psychologists call ‘limerence’ – attracted to the person we adore, but to an idea of them that we have constructed in our own heads. As the trajectory of marriages contracted in haste tend to show, we love them so intensely because we don’t really know them. Their insistence on putting wooden-handled knives into the dishwasher, leaving the door open when they go to the loo, or humming tunelessly on long-distance car journeys, only start to impinge on our consciousness when we come to see them as they really are.

Much of that sort of infatuated love is almost indistinguishable from wounded narcissism: the desperate need to have our insecurities assuaged. We imagine that, if only they can be persuaded to love us back, the beloved will solve all our problems. We yearn not to know the beloved fully, but for the beloved to know and understand us as nobody else does. We ask them to validate our most cherished ideas of ourselves. And that, of course, sets us up for disappointment.

We abase ourselves before the beloved, and the beloved grows inexplicably crueller. As Yeats warned:

Never give all the heart, for love
Will scarcely seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss.

This is what happened to Liz. Her pash on the market was unrequited. It did not love her back. The market took from her everything she had to give – the bonus cap, the tax breaks – and then it said, roughly: ‘Seeya, loser.’ And it did so, like a cruel bad boy in a teen movie, in front of everybody.

The market didn’t love her back, because it doesn’t love anyone back. It is an impersonal, collective, often marvellous but entirely unsentimental system for exploiting opportunity and allocating resources. You might as well fall in love with a thunderstorm or a man-eating tiger. And here she is, now, broken-hearted and alone, having pushed away the friends who tried in vain to warn her off her unsuitable infatuation. She tries to front it out, to find scapegoats, to insist, against all the evidence, that she had the right basic idea and it was just the execution that was wrong. Back in the bedroom in her head, she’s singing brokenly along to Liza Minelli: ‘Maybe this time…’

On a psychological level, I think that’s how to understand the story. And it is indeed a matter for sympathy. It’s a reminder of how too human and silly, like us, people in the highest office can be. But it’s certainly not a reason to keep this too human, silly creature in power for a moment longer.