To anyone who's seen Liz Truss's interviews or speeches, the idea of her going on a "charm offensive" might seem like a joke. Yet this is what she's currently doing to win over her Conservative Party critics. Early word has not been positive, but the Prime Minister has managed it before, whether in private meetings to secure the ERG's backing for her leadership bid, or when she was first elected as the MP for South West Norfolk in 2010.
Then, she was opposed by a group of rural party members who saw her - remarkably, given her current political persona - as a Cameronite "wet". One of them, Steve Brame, later told the Guardian that “People say that she’s not very good at presenting herself. But at that particular meeting, when well over 200 [people] were asking her some personal questions, and a lot about where she thought she wanted to go, she came over extremely well.”
We've seen this dynamic before with Gordon Brown and Theresa May: rumours of barnstorming speeches delivered to private audiences of fellow party members, followed by agonising awkwardness in public. It certainly hasn't calmed the markets, which seem to be caught unawares by every new policy announcement - and no wonder.
For all her current beliefs are conservative boilerplate, there is a hole at the centre of Truss's persona and ideology. When she chooses - or is forced to - seek the public's consent to govern at an election, it may prove to be her undoing.
Truss's youthful activism has drawn more attention than any Conservative Party leader since William Hague, albeit for the exact opposite reason. Hague's albatross was always that clip of him at sixteen, making a speech at the 1977 Conservative Party conference that one could easily imagine him giving unaltered in 2001. It made him look like an ideologue, unchanging and prematurely fogeyish, the opposite of Tony Blair's flexibility and modernising tendencies.
For Truss, the footage that haunts her shows her calling for the abolition of the monarchy at the 1994 Liberal Democrat conference. The journey from youthful liberal to mature conservative is one of the oldest cliches in political commentary, and the fact that the teenage Liz Truss held political stances that Prime Minister Truss rejects is unremarkable. What makes the clip fascinating is what we don't have, which is an idea of how she got from one point to the other.
Most politicians who have been on such a journey prepare road-to-Damascus anecdotes to satisfy public curiosity. These have the benefit of making the candidate look pragmatic and open-minded, the opposite of the "Tory boy" image Hague never managed to shake off. Ronald Reagan's journey from New Deal Democrat to Goldwater Republican is one whole books have been written about, but he was able to encapsulate it in a pithy slogan, one still heard amongst American conservatives: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left me".
As an actor, Reagan knew the power of a good story. Sometimes even he was taken in by his own narratives; he infamously told Simon Wiesenthal that he was present at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, despite never leaving the USA during World War II. Yet a false story is still more of a political asset than no story, which is what Truss is lumbered with.
Rather than a spinner of tales, she appears fictional herself. Many noticed that her outfit at the recent party conference matched one worn by Emma Thompson's fascist Prime Minister in Russell T Davies's science fiction drama Years and Years. The television parallel that kept coming to my mind, though, was Father Ted Crilly at the Golden Cleric awards, reeling off a longer and longer list of people who'd wronged him over the course of his career.
Even Richard Nixon restricted his enemies list to people and organisations; as Truss's spread out to include unions and 48% of EU Referendum voters, you started to wonder whether anyone in the country would be spared. Listening to this, and seeing Truss's odd, suppressed smirk as she told security to "get them removed" after a Greenpeace protest, it's easy to feel disturbed. The petty vindictiveness that can be funny in a sitcom priest is less amusing in a Prime Minister.
Yet there is a helplessness at the core of Truss's authoritarianism. Her lack of a narrative, a persona, may not trouble an ideologically sympathetic crowd. Once people start asking questions it becomes obvious that, as Gertrude Stein famously observed of her childhood home, there is no there there.
Truss's only attempt at a public charm offensive was her disastrous tour of local radio stations. Grilled about everything from the collapse of the pound to local issues she clearly hadn't been briefed on, Truss delivered the longest silences the BBC has broadcast since Radio 3's last John Cage season. The autocratic confidence she displays in front of a Conservative audience was replaced by a crippling indecision.
Similarly, the most devastating moment of Joe Lycett's appearance on Laura Kuenssberg's Sunday morning show - in which the comic delivered heavily sarcastic support for the then-leadership candidate - wasn't anything Lycett said, but the expression on Truss's face when she heard his applause and cheering. She adopted a broad, mouth-agape grin, the same grin she had in her infamous "pork markets" speech as she waited for people to react. In that moment, she believed she was being hailed.
This is the only environment where Truss can thrive: the world of dreams. In the same way that Downton Abbey was eerily well-timed for the start of the Cameron years, the first true culture of the Truss era might be Make Me Prime Minister, Channel 4's watch-through-your-fingers reality contest where members of the public compete to become "Alternative Prime Minister". Will the show's eventual winner feel any more real than our actual Prime Minister, dressed as a fictional Prime Minister, giving a speech to an audience who seemed to be mostly in the Land of Nod themselves?
All this nothingness, this substantial lack of substance, results in situations like the one at her most recent PMQs, where she "absolutely" reaffirmed her pledge not to cut public spending. Less than two hours later, a spokesperson backtracked on that commitment.
If this happened to Thatcher, Blair or Cameron, you could easily guess which statement reflected their actual plans, because they had public personas rooted in their personal beliefs. Truss has neither. She appears unconcerned by this, but her allies are already running out of patience.