A final Brexit disaster from Lettuce Liz Truss

Thank God for JD Vance. A liar, a misogynist and an all-round scumbag he might be, but he’s certainly doing his bit to get Kamala Harris elected as president of the United States.

Last weekend, just as a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump threatened to swing the race for the White House back in the Republicans’ favour, up popped Trump’s running mate to admit his willingness to promulgate racist lies – or, as Vance put it, to “create stories” – in order to get media attention. It backfired spectacularly, and Harris’s poll leads have widened.

Undeterred, Vance then made another remarkable admission on Wednesday: that the US economy might crash if he and Trump were elected on November 5. It’s a hell of a campaign slogan: Vote for us and risk economic ruin.

Vance, who has never met an insane conspiracy theory that he didn’t embrace, then explained that any such crash would have nothing to do with Trump’s policies, but to the spiking of bond yields by the left-leaning global elite in an act of revenge. “You saw this… [with] Liz Truss in Britain,” he claimed. “She came in, she had a plan and the Bank of England I think made a lot of mistakes – maybe intentional. Interest rates shot through the roof and it took down her government in a matter of days… That’s one of the things we’re going to have to fight against when we win.”

“We’re just like Liz Truss” is another brilliant vote-winning slogan (for the Democrats). And Vance’s refreshing candour comes at a time when Lettuce Liz is back in the news on this side of the Atlantic. Truss is being accused of a “Brexit blunder” that will delay the replacement of Britain’s Border Force fleet until 2030 and cost £300m rather than the budgeted £50m.

The Times’s Matt Dathan says the error came when Truss, then trade secretary, failed to exclude the construction of civilian ships from a list of contracts that had to be opened to global competition. This occurred when she signed Britain up to a government procurement agreement with the World Trade Organisation, after we left the EU.

Instead of quickly and cheaply replacing the five cutters and six patrol vessels that are used to monitor Britain’s borders and pick up migrants in the Channel, the whole project has returned to the drawing board and delays and costs are piling up. Meanwhile the Home Office has been forced to charter private patrol boats, costing Britain £36m last year.

Characteristically, Truss is blaming someone else – in this case, her hapless predecessor Liam Fox. But since this disaster happened on her watch, it seems entirely fair to add this £250m to the £18,660 severance pay she got after 49 days as prime minister, the £126,500 she is allowed to claim a year as a former PM and, of course, the £30bn fiscal black hole created by her kamikaze mini-budget (Truss acolytes insist the figure is far less, and probably blame Liam Fox for everything).

All of this means that if the 49-day PM lives for another 49 years, she’ll have cost the country a grand total of £30,256,192,660. That would pay for a lot of winter fuel allowances. If Trump and Vance are eager to take her, could we have our money back please?