In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’. By chance, I was sitting in the peers’ gallery immediately behind the author of that famous phrase, Norman Lamont, who applied it to John Major’s administration in his resignation statement as chancellor in 1993. It grows ever more apt. I sometimes wonder if modern politicians positively welcome this situation. It is a general feature of the structures of the EU, where no elected politician has real power, but none seems to mind. Much of the joy of ‘compassionate’ Conservatives at the trouncing of Truss appears to derive from the proof it affords that the bond market, the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Treasury are more powerful than they are. They are pleased with Jeremy Hunt, the new Chancellor, because, like a senior civil servant, he puts his mental energy into finding what can’t be done, rather than what can. This is not a defence of Ms Truss, whose mishandling of her leadership victory has been astonishing, but it is a challenge to those centrist Tories who consider themselves to be ‘the grown-ups in the room’. If they are right about the collective powerlessness of this Conservative government, what reason can they give for its continuation? Labour would be no worse at being in office but not in power than they.

Liz Truss was certainly guilty of a lack of realism about what could be done in the pre-election timeframe. But it remains true that there is an economic orthodoxy, relating to the era of nonexistent interest rates, which needs to be broken. It is defeatism dressed up as statecraft. William Hague, who is the clearest-minded Tory establishment figure currently writing, says that ‘the idea that a low-tax revolution can allow a breakout’ from our ills has been ‘tested to destruction’. In fact, no government this century, including Liz Truss’s, has tested it. Our current situation reminds me of the mid-1970s, when the clever people agreed that the answer to inflation and industrial strife was prices and incomes policy. J.K. Galbraith wrote in 1975 that ‘pay and price curbs will be a permanent feature both in Britain and in every other industrial nation’. Yet they vanished in less than a decade. There is a great prize awaiting the politician who can lead us away from the current consensus, but it almost certainly won’t be Liz Truss who wins it.

It is good to see the BBC at last waking up to unrest in Iran. It has decided that public revulsion there at the death in custody of Mahsa Amini makes it a good story about woman power. Perhaps it is emboldened by the fact that Barack Obama has at last admitted he made a mistake by not supporting Iranian dissidents during the ‘Green Movement’ of 2009, an event hardly touched by the BBC. It is one of the greatest mysteries of western media coverage and diplomacy in the past 40 years that Iran has been let off so lightly, despite its persecution of its women and minorities, its sponsorship of international terrorism and its hatred of the West. Our main media interest in Iran has been to show our own governments in a bad light. The unjust imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, for example, got its headlines as a way of attacking Boris Johnson. While in free countries the Corporation complains vociferously about any restrictions, it has been very low-key about how Iran restricts its reporters and forces women ones to wear head coverings there. Even now, as it reports the rebellions taking place across the country, and Iran is supplying kamikaze drones to help Russia’s indiscriminate killings in Ukraine, the BBC has never sought to inquire why western powers still want to save the JCPOA, which in effect normalises its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

A consistory court in Salisbury has granted a Dorchester church a ‘faculty’, as church law calls it, to remove a memorial. The monument commemorates John Gordon who in 1760 was, says the inscription, ‘signally instrumental in quelling a dangerous rebellion’ in Jamaica: ‘A large body of Negroes whom his bravery had repulsed finally yielding to their confidence in his humanity.’ The court acknowledged the monument’s historical importance, but held that it ‘described in words of admiration an act of violent suppression against an enslaved people using clearly racist language. It was entirely inconsistent with Christianity’s foundational understanding.’ Is that correct? Surely ‘Negroes’ was the normal, neutral word then used. More important, it can be argued that in a country where and at a time when slavery was lawful, it was the duty of the authorities to suppress a violent slave revolt. Since John Gordon did so by inspiring the trust of the slaves, moving them to other islands rather than killing them, he probably deserved to be honoured for his mercy, which may well have been inspired by his Christianity. As for ‘foundational understanding’, what about Moses? At God’s orders (see Numbers 31), he led the Israelites to kill the Midianites. ‘Wroth’ with them for sparing the Midianite women, he ordered them to kill them, but allowed an exception: ‘all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves’, i.e. make them your sex slaves. Yet this same Moses is crucial to Christianity’s foundational understanding, since God chose him to receive the Ten Commandments. Should his statue, carved by Michelangelo, be removed from the Medici chapel?

If you are over 75, you may be tested for your Abbreviated Mental Test Score (AMTS). If you score less than 9/10 you will be referred to the memory clinic. Questions include ‘What year is it?’ and ‘Who is the monarch?’. A medical friend points out that until last month, you could have thought that the year was, say, 1955, but still have got the monarch’s name right. No longer. Expect entries to the memory clinic to soar.