The rumour is that Liz Truss likes to call herself “the Truss” while speaking to colleagues, a horrifying echo of when Sajid Javid started calling himself “the Saj”. Since there is no surer way to discredit a politician, indeed, human being, than to alert the public to their self-aggrandisement, it sounds almost too bad to be true. It might have been invented by a hostile colleague, trying to stain the Treasury secretary and also associate her with surgical dressings and muscle strain.

But is that reading too much into it? Could she simply be that bad? Javid, incidentally, denies the third-personning which, considering all the other rhetorical behaviour he’ll exhibit right out in the open, illustrates just how damaging a slur it is. Only one thing is certain: the constant stream of malevolent tittle-tattle, designed to discredit everyone, named and unnamed, is the only element of government business still functioning.

“The Truss” works in the overall picture: Liz Truss is one of the Britannia Unchained set, along with Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore, all – and I don’t say this lightly, I held Thatcher in no great regard – sub-Thatcherite free market fundamentalists in the slash, burn and deregulate style.

Their obsessions are tragically familiar in the post-Brexit world: they hate “statists”, a word they now use interchangeably with “Stalinists”, to the confusion of anybody who is actually listening for an argument; they love Singapore; they fixate upon the “gentleman amateur”, a fancy yet ultimately self-sabotaging attempt to reframe “posh people who know nothing” as a useful addition to government. You could read the book, of course; or, you could learn that Truss pleaded with the prime minister to stop pandering to the hard left – with measures such as taxation – from the podium of a fundraising dinner for a proposed Museum of Communist Terror, the brainchild Dan Hannan among other Vote Leavers. And that would tell you pretty much all you needed to know.

Cut taxes, reduce regulation, slough off all that boring rule of law the EU insists on (and which the UK played a huge part in writing), and Britons will be free to choose their own future: that was Truss’s core message. Like so many pro-Brexit voices, Truss deals in generalities so broad that it is pointless, and obscurely embarrassing, to critique them; it’s an essay by someone who hasn’t read the text, a recital by someone trying to fake ballet. It’s like seeing inside an anxiety dream, yet she doesn’t seem to suffer much anxiety over it.

Plainly, something peculiar happened to this wing of the Conservative party at the turn of this decade: they became transfixed by Ayn Randian notions of choice, freedom and fulfilment of individual destiny; they adopted that curious wide-legged stance; they made up names for themselves. It was all too much of a coincidence – when a bunch of people starts talking like the Mont Pèlerin set and standing like So Solid Crew, you can only surmise that they’ve all been on a course somewhere in Vermont, which ends with them chewing the bark of the Galbulimima and branding their buttocks with the initials of Friedrich Hayek.

I miss early-years Truss: the garden-variety Thatcher wannabe, who used to give us all a laugh by complaining that two-year-olds were running around nurseries with “no sense of purpose”, the one who wanted childminders’ regulations lifted so they could look after six minuscule children singlehanded because, honestly, this is childcare we’re talking about – if poor people can do it, how hard can it be?

I miss the days before this surfeit of confidence, when she tethered her stupid ideas to concrete real-life items, children, numbers of pairs of hands, GCSEs, and everyone could immediately see how ridiculous they were. I miss residual political honour, when even the daftest MP was protected by self-awareness from stupid borrowed narratives about statism and enslavement. I miss Westminster without this fake American accent.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist