www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-you-feel-sorry-for-liz-truss-
Much of that sort of infatuated love is almost indistinguishable from wounded narcissism: the desperate need to have our insecurities assuaged. We imagine that, if only they can be persuaded to love us back, the beloved will solve all our problems. We yearn not to know the beloved fully, but for the beloved to know and understand us as nobody else does. We ask them to validate our most cherished ideas of ourselves. And that, of course, sets us up for disappointment.
We abase ourselves before the beloved, and the beloved grows inexplicably crueller. As Yeats warned:
“
Never give all the heart, for love
Will scarcely seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss.
This is what happened to Liz. Her pash on the market was unrequited. It did not love her back. The market took from her everything she had to give – the bonus cap, the tax breaks – and then it said, roughly: ‘Seeya, loser.’ And it did so, like a cruel bad boy in a teen movie, in front of everybody.
The market didn't love her back, because it doesn't love anyone back. It is an impersonal, collective, often marvellous but entirely unsentimental system for exploiting opportunity and allocating resources. You might as well fall in love with a thunderstorm or a man-eating tiger. And here she is, now, broken-hearted and alone, having pushed away the friends who tried in vain to warn her off her unsuitable infatuation. She tries to front it out, to find scapegoats, to insist, against all the evidence, that she had the right basic idea and it was just the execution that was wrong. Back in the bedroom in her head, she’s singing brokenly along to Liza Minelli: ‘Maybe this time…’
On a psychological level, I think that’s how to understand the story. And it is indeed a matter for sympathy. It’s a reminder of how too human and silly, like us, people in the highest office can be. But it’s certainly not a reason to keep this too human, silly creature in power for a moment longer.