Government debt at record levels. A deputy prime minister under investigation by the standards watchdog. Reform UK 15 points ahead in the opinion polls. A summer in which hatred of migrants has become normalised. Politicians competing with one another to appear more authoritarian.

But hey, things aren’t all bad. Because at least we still have Liz Truss. The country’s most abject prime minister. Liz of the 49 days. Radon Liz. Because she is both a gas and inert.

I fell in love with her the day she was unable to find the door to let herself in to her own leadership launch. And then tried to leave via a first-floor window. You can’t buy that sort of genius. Comedians spend a lifetime trying to perfect that level of timing. We should enjoy her while we can. We won’t see her like again. Hopefully.

In years to come there will be many books written about Truss. Was she ever fully human? Or some kind of semi-sentient being who somehow blagged her way into Downing Street? Maybe we will never know for sure.

She is certainly one of a kind. Most people with her spectacular level of political failure would have wanted to crawl under a rock and never come back. But Liz has no self-awareness. No shame. She will turn up to the opening of a fridge. No invitation is ever refused. In her mind, the problem was not that we got too much Liz, but that we never had enough.

Truss is like a cockroach after the nuclear apocalypse. Long after the rest of us are all dead, she will still be insisting she was right all along. That has become her shtick. Her USP. All she now has to offer is her insanity. The Madness of Queen Lizzie.

And thankfully for the gaiety of the nation, there is no shortage of people willing to indulge her because they know she’s guaranteed box office. Just not in the way she thinks. All it requires is for the audience to suspend its queasiness about someone so obviously unwell and damaged being used in this way. Much like a Victorian freak show.

Liz’s latest outing into the real world came this week on the Master Investor podcast presented by Sky’s Wilfred Frost. You can only imagine the laughter in the production office when it was suggested getting the prime minister who crashed the economy and sent the markets into turmoil on the show.

Just as well that Frost is more than capable of keeping a straight face. As is Truss. There again, she is yet to realise she is a national treasure. A living piece of performance art. A starring role in her very own Truman show.

The questions started softball. Was Liz enjoying life? She was. Very much so. Never been better. Life as an ex-prime minister was surprisingly fun. Not least because she got to do gigs like this. And what about the state of the nation? Obviously that was all fairly terrible. Growth was near stagnant and the Labour government had ruined everything. As had every Tory government except hers. Because all other Tory prime ministers had been closet Blairites. It never once occurred to her that she might have been the problem. That one of the reasons the economy was struggling now was the fallout from her budget.

“I really enjoyed your book, Ten Years to Save the West,” said Wilf. Apparently seriously. If so, he is in a select club of one. The five people like me who also read it did so entirely for the lols. It’s quite something to have written a book in the style of extraterrestrial AI. And still manage to miss the point. A psychiatrist might suggest the book be interpreted as one long, desperate cry for help.

But this was apparently the signal for the interview to become largely delusional. First, Liz got to tell us that the real reason she had supported remain was that it was the best way of securing a Brexit victory. Worryingly, I did wonder if she might have a point. Anyone finding themselves on the same side of the argument as Liz has to wonder if they have thought things properly through.

Now, Radon Liz moved closer to the microphone. Almost conspiratorially. “They were all out to get me,” she whispered. “Every single one of them.” The Office for Budget Responsibility. The Bank of England. The judges. The civil service. Her own MPs. All the other MPs. That weird-looking bloke sitting upstairs on the 87 bus. Everyone had it in for her. The whole of the UK was out to destroy both her and the whole of the UK. Like some wild Hegelian dialectic implosion. Marxists every one of them.

Frost started to look a bit nervous but he was in too deep now. Way too deep. Soon we were on to the mini-budget. “Loads of people think I was right,” Truss insisted. Who were those people? She couldn’t say. If she were to name them then they would be targeted by a secret cabal of 60 million people she called The Blob. No one had told her about liability driven investments. Everything had been a trap and she had fallen into it. The prime minister without power.

But was there anything she might have done differently now? Maybe take things a bit slower. Not make huge tax cuts when you knew you couldn’t make spending cuts. Liz looked horrified. That would have been to succumb to the orthodoxy. Make her a rule taker not a rule maker. Frost passed her a couple of Valium to calm her down. After a few minutes the benzos started to kick in. “It was the LDIs,” she repeated over and over again. “Even the Financial Times says so.”

“Er … they don’t,” Wilf corrected her. And you were still responsible for everything that happened. I wasn’t, Liz slurred. Blob. LDIs. OBR. Nothing had been her fault. No one would ever take her alive. Top of the world, ma.