The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back.

The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up this very afternoon. I’m interested, as I expect we all are, to see how she develops there the arguments that her piece for the Telegraph set out.

The gist of her case there was that, though in hindsight she might have worked on selling the ‘optics’ of her policies better, she was basically right all along. It was only the economic naivety and left-leaning groupthink of the Treasury, the OBR, ‘large parts of the media and wider public’, the parliamentary Conservative party, almost every academic economist and the international money markets that did her down. My colleague Kate Andrews has elegantly dissected that article in more detail and with more economic expertise than I could aspire to – but it strikes me as worth pulling focus a little to look at the general shape of the thing.

Here is an argument of the form that the theory was right, and that the real failure was that of reality to conform to it. That’s an odd thing to see coming from a Tory. It’s a shape of argument that traditionally belongs to the utopian left – communism, as was ruefully remarked, being the ‘right idea, wrong species’. And that shape of argument goes with conspiratorial thinking. When reality fails to conform to the theory, the problem is not that the theory is wrong but that its courageous proponents have been hindered by saboteurs. In communist states these were ‘class enemies’, kulaks or ‘bourgeois elements’. In Truss’s article, these slots are filled by ‘the economic establishment’, ‘the media’ or that catch-all bogeyman ‘The Blob’.

Conservatism in this country has long been associated with an accommodation to reality as we find it.

The right, whatever its shortcomings, was for many years resistant to the seductions of this way of thinking. Otto Von Bismarck, whom I think we can safely call a creature of the right, is credited with the observation that politics is the art of the possible. Conservatism in this country has long been associated with an accommodation, even if a reluctant one, to reality as we find it. Sometimes that reality is an electoral one: we’d like to do X, they say, but public opinion won’t wear it so if we’re to be able to remain in power to do anything at all, we’ll have to do Y. At other times that reality is an economic one: we’d like to do X, but we really can’t afford to so we’re going to have to do Y.

That is, or was, the great virtue of mainstream conservatism. But, ever since the party split over a version of Brexit borne aloft on winged unicorns, many of its leading lights have plunged into great swamps of unreality. Only yesterday, the Sunday Times carried an article aspiring to get ‘inside the minds of frustrated Leavers’ and asking: ‘How would they fix Brexit?’ Inside the minds? Lasciate ogni speranza… As it becomes clearer and clearer that this quixotic project has given us a national slow puncture, the rejoinder that its partisans give to its critics is identical to the rejoinder that hardcore tankies give to critics of communism: ‘It’s never been properly tried.’

The problem isn’t that you can’t simultaneously diverge from European regulatory standards and bask in the profits of frictionless free trade. The problem isn’t that it’s legally impossible to have a Schrodinger’s border between Northern Ireland and the Republic that exists only when you want it to. The problem isn’t that stopping freedom of movement and having a large and flexible labour market are incompatible aims. The problem isn’t that you can’t simultaneously be Singapore-on-Thames and a worker’s paradise. The problem, rather, is that the glorious opportunities of our emancipation have not been seized. We just haven’t believed hard enough. Our Remoaner MSM and the perfidious Europeans have snuck round the back of our glorious racing car and stuck a banana in the tailpipe.

But, yes, petulant anger at the refusal of reality to accommodate itself to our pet theories is by no means confined to the right. Just look at the eminently avoidable stew Nicola Sturgeon got into over her doctrinaire assertion that there’s no real-world difference worth recognising between transwomen and natal women, even as public outrage grew at a male-bodied double-rapist being housed in the female prison estate. Keir Starmer is continuing to try to fudge just the same issue.

In the wilder wider world, we see the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking that can’t really be pigeonholed into any old-fashioned political position. Those who see the hand of Bill Gates, or George Soros, or Israel, or lizard-men, or the Deep State behind vaccines, or mass immigration, or the Great Reset, or the Ukraine war, or the collapse of Bitcoin, soon head so far off the traditional political map that it’s hard to place them anywhere. They have lit on a big explanatory idea that ends up being impervious to disproof. Reality, were they to look steadily at it, would be a constant disappointment to them.

In other words, I think the big new divide in politics is not between left and right, or liberal and conservative, but between boring old members of what’s sometimes called the ‘reality-based community’ and those fired up with ideas that work best when kept well clear of reality. One of those ideas that only works when kept well clear of reality, incidentally, seems to me that Liz Truss returning to the political frontline would be a vote-winner for the Tories.