Liz Truss risks further damaging Tory chances at the ballot box with her attempt at redemption - Andrew Vine

Instead, they display a skin thicker than that of a rhinoceros in believing they can brazen out humiliation or public opprobrium to continue exerting influence.

They seem to think that given a few weeks or months, outrageous behaviour or calamitous mistakes can all be argued away and history rewritten to rehabilitate their reputations.

Look at Boris Johnson for proof of this, behaving as if he is still Prime Minister, and not an ex-Premier who had to resign in disgrace. There he is on American television, doing his well-practised impersonation of statesmanlike gravitas, lecturing the West about failing to offer enough support to Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Or The Duke of York, endlessly agitating for a return to royal duties, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his association with a convicted paedophile makes that unthinkable, and the very notion of it offensive to ordinary standards of decency.

But the public figure who really takes the biscuit for shamelessness in trying to claw back shattered credibility is Liz Truss.

At the weekend, the shortest-serving – and arguably most disastrous – Prime Minister in British history attempted to argue that the actions that saw her abandon office amid economic chaos after just 49 days in power had, in fact, been the right course for the country.

This is beyond parody, yet it was all delivered with a completely straight face by a politician who seems to have no grasp of the damage she did to her country and innumerable lives.

Here was a premier who in a few short weeks sent the financial markets so haywire with plans for unfunded tax cuts that the Bank of England had to intervene to prevent pension funds going bust, which would have wrecked the future for retired people, leaving them facing old age in penury.

She sent mortgage costs soaring, and destroyed the dreams of those hoping to buy their own homes who suddenly found that lenders withdrew offers.

There had to be an emergency statement in the Commons to try to stabilise the economy as every other mature democracy in the world looked on aghast at the spectacle of Britain in financial turmoil.

The Government is currently still trying to repair the damage inflicted by Liz Truss, and the price for doing so will be paid by us all for years to come in increased taxes and cuts to public services.

Yet none of it was her fault, apparently. According to her, the plans she had were just what the country required to prosper in the years ahead, and all would have gone swimmingly had she not been thwarted by “the left-wing economic establishment”.

The sheer effrontery of this is jaw-dropping. It is an insult to all those worrying about money as a consequence of increased mortgage costs, or whose prospects of buying a home are now more distant than they were before the catastrophe of the Truss premiership last autumn.

What she has said is an utterly shameless – and frankly delusional – attempt to rewrite history.

The only proper course of action for Ms Truss would have been to issue a grovelling apology for the damage she did, and then devote herself for the foreseeable future to good causes in her safe seat in South Norfolk. Instead, she is attempting to cast herself as the prophet of radical economics, a visionary brought down by malign forces.

The really worrying part is that there are those within the Conservative ranks who will swallow this, and that could spell trouble ahead for the Prime Minister and the Chancellor as they try to put the economy on an even keel against a backdrop of mutterings from backbenchers that they should listen to at least some of what Ms Truss has to say.

Whether Ms Truss realises it – or cares – she also further jeopardises her party’s already slim chances of reelection by her self-aggrandising attempt at redemption.

From the day Rishi Sunak took office, it has been clear that the more distance he could put between his own stewardship of the economy and Ms Truss’s the better, in the hope that the public’s memories of her turmoil would fade at least a little.

The electorate might already be unwilling to forget what she did by the time the next election comes around. By reminding them for the sake of her own ego, Ms Truss does her party as big a disservice as she did the country.