Liz Truss's unoriginal, unedifying and outdated plan for 'Growth. Growth. Growth'

After the prime minister’s October 5 speech to her Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Jay Elwes commented in The New European: “When Liz Truss speaks, it is with all the warmth of the talking clock.”

Quite.

Her delivery, he went on to note, “has a Terminator-like, halting awkwardness, a leaden, tone-deaf quality that brings to mind someone beating a carpet.”

Indeed.

And then there’s the content. Can there be anything more unoriginal or unedifying than Ms Truss’s favourite subject and seemingly favourite word: Growth. Growth. Growth.

She wants to “grow the pie”, she says. (It prompted chef and food writer Jay Rayner to ask how one might “grow” a pie.)

Along with that half-baked display of culinary knowledge, Ms Truss insisted on several repeat-the-word-three-times moments in order to sound like her heroine and role model, Margaret Thatcher.

That is another problem. Ms Truss is out of date. Thatcher’s time was half-a-century ago. The economy of Britain and the world faced different, …