It was self-indulgent, whinging. Dull in places while completely batty in others. All the usual insults will be hurled at former prime minister Liz Truss for her essay defending her short time in Downing Street, published today. Perhaps it would be better for her to retire gracefully from public life and let some ambitious young revisionist historian in the 2060s make the case that she was treated unfairly. Except she still has one key card to play. Events are gradually showing that she was right along: Trussonomics, or whatever it will be called next, is gradually winning the intellectual argument.

Her argument has something else going for it: a ring of truth

There won’t be many people in the Conservative Party welcoming Truss’s return, and certainly not in the government. Her successor Rishi Sunak and his team were probably hoping that the voters would have completely forgotten who she was by now. The last thing they need is to stir up bitter arguments about personalities or ideas. The outlook for the party is already grim without bitter internal rows. Even so, the essay was a sober, well-argued reflection on her brief time in office: honest about what went wrong, as well as her own personal failings. Most importantly, it pointed the finger at the civil servants, the Bank of England, and the ‘left-wing economic establishment’ who rounded on her free-market radicalism with a fury that was both unexpected and lethal.

Truss’s essay won’t resonate because of the fluency of her language or the power of her rhetoric. She isn’t Boris Johnson. But her argument has something else going for it: a ring of truth. Even in the few months since she was so brutally evicted from office, the British economy has clearly gone into a steep decline. We are close to a recession. Interest rates have carried on going up. Wages are falling in real terms at the fastest rate in a generation. Inflation is stubbornly high. Taxes are rising to record levels – yet none of the extra money ever seems to improve public services. The workforce keeps shrinking. Investment is falling. The trade deficit has ballooned to extraordinary levels. A few people might believe that without Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget everything in the economy would be humming along perfectly well: but it is not very plausible. Instead, it is becoming increasingly obvious that something has gone badly wrong. And that, surely, is the point Truss is making.

Neither Sunak’s centrism, nor any of the alternatives offered by the liberal-left (or indeed by the ‘economic establishment’) have anything to say on that. They can tinker around with investment allowances for industry, but no one thinks that will have any more than a marginal impact. Or, like the Labour Party, they can plan a ‘green energy giant’ creating lots of well paid ‘green jobs’ – although given the US and the EU are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars and euros at the same projects it is hard to see how a relatively small country like the UK can compete. Or they can fiddle around with more devolution, or more training, or tweaks to the welfare system. That has all been tried for years and has mostly made things worse.

In reality, it will take more time, and probably a Labour Government, or perhaps even two, for Truss’s arguments to sink in. But the blunt truth is that the UK economy needs radical reform, and some combination of lower taxes and less regulation will be the only way to achieve it. Eventually the argument will be won – because with every year that passes it will become more and more obviously true.