It was short, but it wasn’t sweet. Indeed, Liz Truss’s speech to the Tory party conference, with its central prescription of difficult medicine for a sick patient, was deliberately designed to make a virtue of the unpalatable.

The bitter tang of political cod liver oil was in evidence aplenty, not least when she attempted to justify the 11 days of market meltdown sparked by her Chancellor’s “mini-Budget”.

“As the last few weeks have shown, it will be difficult,” Truss said. “Whenever there is change, there is disruption.”

To those who suffered the gut-wrenching anxiety of suddenly soaring mortgage costs (average two-year deals went up to 6 per cent today, the highest since 2008), that very word, “disruption”, may stick in the throat. Just as Kwasi Kwarteng dismissed the turmoil as “a little turbulence”, here was the PM making a rise in household bills sound like a delayed Tube train. The warning that we should all buckle up for more months (or years) of disruption is unlikely to go down well.

Perhaps the biggest blunder of the past fortnight has been to turn the Bank of England’s interest rate rises into “Tory interest rate rises”. With even bigger increases due next month, that damage could be indelible.

Yet just as Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” was actually a mega-Budget, this mini-speech (at just 35 minutes) had a big message at its heart: chaos is good for you. Like the right-wing economists she adores, the idea of “creative destruction” is key to her worldview that the economy needs a radical shake-up of unfunded tax cuts to trigger growth.

Although many focus on the Government’s trickledown economics, Truss is actually driven by trickledown politics: the belief that support for radical small-state solutions will trickle down from the lofty think-tank world to the millions who voted for Boris Johnson’s muscular One Nationism. She boasted that “we are now in a new era”, but but several of her own MPs may have heard that as a new error.

Although she attacked critics who “taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC to dismiss anyone who challenges the status quo”, the opinion polls suggest that many of the public actually quite like the status quo of stable interest rates and a state big enough to help them out.

Truss’s ersatz Thatcherism resulted in a checklist of all the different varieties of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. We had the “sound money” of the early Mrs T years (without mentioning her heroine hiked taxes to avoid borrowing) and “there is no alternative”. We also had the tax-cutting of late-vintage Thatcher, as well as the “enemies within” rhetoric.

The audience certainly came alive when she tried to define her own enemies as the “anti-growth coalition”, a point helpfully underscored for her by the Greenpeace protestors who tried a bit of creative disruption of their own.

In what has been a markedly defensive conference, going on the attack against Labour, the Lib Dems and others as being the roadblocks to growth could perhaps help her unify her party and blunt the Starmer poll lead. The key difficulty is that in talking about “growth, growth, growth”, she only highlights the lack of it there has been under Cameron, May and Johnson.

Unfortunately, Truss undermined the argument of her own backstory. When she complained that the Glasgow and Leeds of her youth in the 1980s and 1990s had been dominated by boarded-up shops, “families struggling to put food on the table”, and “low growth”, it felt more like an indictment of Thatcherism than a tribute to it.

It’s worth remembering that for many of the public, they still don’t really know who Liz Truss is. If she survives and if growth does arrive, they may come to have a grudging respect for her “I’m not slick but I’m a grafter” approach. For all her problems, she still has the power and patronage of being in No 10.

She did have some neat encapsulations of the enduring power of the Tory message of low taxation (“I believe you know best how to spend your money”). Possibly the best passage was when she described being a young northern woman belittled by others. “Being female, not fitting in…Determined to change things..so other people didn’t feel the same way,” was a useful explanation for her own political motivation.

So this wasn’t a terrible speech and, after the dire week her party has had, that in itself may feel like a small triumph to her allies. But its thinness of content, let alone rhetoric, felt distinctly un-Prime Ministerial.

And of all the governing party conferences I’ve attended over the years, this was indisputably the most chaotic. The Tory gathering in Blackpool in 2003, when the plotting against Iain Duncan Smith infected every bar and corridor (and led to his ousting a few weeks later in Parliament), was at least a bloodbath conducted in Opposition.

The strangest thing of all about Birmingham 2022 was the almost wilful desire of a PM and Chancellor to ruin their own event. Party conferences, with guaranteed TV airtime, are meant to be a showcase. Yet the tax U-turn, the Cabinet squabbling and freelancing, the shambolic media performances by those at the top, meant the party smashed its own shop window to the voters.

Some suggest that the huge opinion poll deficits have left the Tories behaving like they are mentally already in Opposition. But that’s not quite right. They feel like a party so drunk on power and in office for so long that they have forgotten the basics of keeping the public onboard.

The fundamental risk is that she fails to connect not just personally but politically. Her promise of more upheaval may not appeal to an electorate battered by Covid, global inflation and war in Europe.

Truss and Kwarteng’s dedication to disruption reeks of the ideological privilege of the financially comfortable, of those who have never put their own money or mortgages at risk. Their radicalism risks sounding like a pose that others will end up paying for.

When John Major was facing double-digit inflation and high interest rates, he famously said: “if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.” Truss’s message – change “will be difficult but it will be necessary” – sounded uncannily similar. The deep fear among some Tories is that her unpalatable medicine will result in another reminder of Major: a 1997-style landslide for Labour.

Truss’s lack of oratorical skills meant that at the end of her speech, the audience seemed unsure whether she had finished. Judging by this, she thinks she’s only just started.

Minutes before the PM got up on stage, Tory chairman Jake Berry declared that Truss would be “our biggest asset” at the next general election. One Tory MP immediately texted me: “Has he joined the Labour Party?” On the basis of this speech, it’s easy to see what they meant. Truss’s defiant disruption has rapidly turned into Starmer’s secret weapon. It’s unclear how long her party will tolerate that.

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