Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. When we have two beliefs that we are aware strongly conflict we have to resolve it. You can do that rationally, but there are strong mechanisms to do it in other ways.

Liz Truss believes, as most of us do about ourselves, that she is a decent, competent, smart, sensible person with good ideas. 1½ years ago she was humiliated to be told that she was a foolish, incompetent, naive person with bad ideas. This is a strong conflict.

So I think it's possible that she has grasped the populist idea that she was brought down by 'the blob' our 'the deep state' as a way of resolving this dissonance. For clarity, this means not that she's decided to adopt that idea to save face: she genuinely believes it.

(I also think this about Trump. I don't believe for a second that Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell or John Eastman believe the 2020 election was stolen, but Trump will have found the rejection more personal and maybe cognitive dissonance led him really to believe his Big Lie.)

Virtually no one thinks Liz Truss did a good job as PM, so the gap between her view of the world and everyone else's is very extreme, which - to preserve her fiction - only goes to prove how pervasive the blob is. Hence the grand/absurd claims in her book about western culture.

Reading about French culture in the late C19, I am struck by the number of progressives who sided with the populist demagogue General Boulanger in the 1880s and, when Boulanger was diminished, vaulted across to radical antisemitism a decade later in the Dreyfus Affair.

It happened very quickly for lots of people. From liberal, secular, republican politics to virulent, militaristic, ultra-Catholic antisemitism in a decade.

But this seems to be a way that people are radicalised at the moment. I am concerned, as a remainer, about the constant mockery of the Brexiteers.

(I'm not exempting myself. I find it hard not to pounce on yet another Rees Mogg self-own, etc.) I worry that this mockery drives them to more extreme face-saving explanations for Brexit's failures.

That the civil service 'blob' never gave Brexit a chance. That remainers sabotaged it. That secret forces are pulling the strings (we all know the groups the conspiracy-minded like to imagine). That their undermining of Brexit is proof of how good and dangerous an idea it is.

And that could drive people towards hard right demagogues like Nigel Farage or Richard Tice. Or indeed, oddly, Liz Truss. Is it possible that a large hard right faction might form in the UK, in part because becoming a fascist felt less embarrassing than admitting you were wrong?