Polly Toynbee laments how her privileged background left her without redemption…

“…to live a well-heeled life on the left is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions always destined to fall short of ideals, social concern never enough, struggling to be good but inevitably never good enough. I hunted hard for any redeeming twig of a working-class branch of my family tree, without success. Confessing a background of privilege comes hard to the likes of us, who can claim no “merit”, no handy pulling-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps rugged path to our good professional jobs as writers, academics and teachers, set on our lucky way at a young age.”

Hardline centrist pundits who consider themselves to be homme sérieux have wasted no time in rushing to judgement on Liz Truss’s character and prospects:

• Failed stockbroker and former Observer editor Will Hutton set the tone when he lamented that “Truss prepares to form a cabinet populated by misfits, failures, ideologues, third raters and opportunists to manage one of the greatest economic and social emergencies since 1945. A titanic constitutional and democratic failure.”
• Anti-Brexit obssessive Ian Dunt tweeted “Her brain is made of rusty crankshafts and cobwebs and it’s going to doom us all.”
• Part-time amateur psychiatrist and columnist Matthew Parris opined that “Liz Truss is a planet-sized mass of overconfidence and ambition teetering upon a pinhead of a political brain. It must all come crashing down. She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work.”
• Peter Oborne opines “It is hard to think of a national leader less equipped to deal with the traumatic months ahead than shallow, vapid, empty, self-admiring Liz Truss.”
• Edward Luce, the FT’s associate tweeted his character analysis “Liz Truss is a charlatan who has bullshitted her way to Britain’s top job.”

“No vision, no charisma, no real plan: Labour has nothing to fear from Liz Truss” is the headline on Polly Toynbee’s article that will no doubt set the tone for many Guardian stories to come.

As Allister Heath pointed out this morning:

“It is astonishing that pundits with no understanding of economics dismiss the Prime Minister’s ability in this area: she actually worked as an economist for Shell (ideal in the current climate) and as an economic director for Cable and Wireless. The first accountant ever in No 10 – she holds the qualification from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants – she is more financially literate and comfortable with complex policy matters than almost all of those who patronise her. The fact that she is reflexively written off as lightweight, a dilettante even, is more a reflection of the bizarrely misogynistic and classist minds of some of her more extreme critics than of any objective reality.”

Britain faces challenging economic times, in Liz Truss we have someone far better qualified to address the nation’s troubles than are her opponents. Her enemies are likely to find out, not for the first time, they underestimated her.