THE Right Honourable Elizabeth Truss MP, Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service, resigned yesterday in less time than it takes to boil an egg.

Her farewell speech, delivered in an autumnal Downing Street empty of the supporters who cheered her into office 44 days before, contained a mere 202 words.

Not one of them was “sorry”. Nor, as with her predecessor, was there any mention of why she had to go.

A stranger to this saga might have imagined that sheer bad luck had brought about her downfall. In reality, it was her disastrous mini-budget, with tax cuts for the richest at the expense of the poorest, that dealt a fatal blow to her premiership.

The chaotic aftermath, which saw the pound’s value plummeting and the cost of borrowing soaring, looked inevitable to everyone bar the Prime Minister and those closest to her.

To the end, she refused to acknowledge that it was not the implementation of the policy that was at fault, but her entire small-state, low-tax, light-regulation philosophy. She wanted the market to decide, and it decided – that she, and her ideas, were not up to scratch.

While her time in office has been brief, the damage wrought by Ms Truss will not be mended easily.

Rising interest rates, for which her market gamble was responsible, have added to the burdens of hard-pressed families and business.

She has damaged the economy, and the country’s reputation for stable government has been shredded.

For all that she has been a calamity as Prime Minister, let us not pretend that Ms Truss’s departure can alone draw a line under this miserable period. Nor does she bear sole responsibility for the state the UK is now in. The UK’s slide happened, in the way of such things, gradually, and then suddenly.

For much of the period, and for the past 12 years certainly, the decline has happened on the Conservative Party’s watch. It is from its squabbling ranks that a new Prime Minister – the fifth in six years – will be chosen.

No one should assume this will be a smooth process, or that it will bring a speedy halt to the tumult. Boris Johnson, incredibly, is said to be weighing his options.

Replacing the Prime Minister who broke the economy with one who broke the law would be a bad joke too far, even by the standards of this grim farce.

It is within the rules of parliamentary democracy that a party should be able to replace its leader, and the country’s Prime Minister, without holding an immediate General Election. It happened with Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson.

The new prime minister, who will assume office a week today, may consider that the last thing the UK needs is the uncertainty of a General Election. That would be a mistake.

There is no speedy return to normal from here. Our democracy requires wholesale resetting and renewal of the kind only a General Election can bring.

Little wonder that First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, together with her counterpart in Wales, and leaders of the Opposition parties, are demanding an election.

The new prime minister should not make the same mistake as the one now heading into ignominy. They must listen, they must learn, and above all they must put the needs of the UK first and call a General Election.