Private Eye likes to remember Liz Truss as the woman who crashed the economy and killed the Queen, she having been appointed Prime Minister just two days before the monarch’s death on September 8, 2022.

If the second claim is Private Eye being, well, Private Eye then the first is unalloyed truth. Following Ms Truss’s mini-budget, stock markets went into meltdown and contributed to her becoming the shortest serving Prime Minister ever. She was in post for 45 days and was, famously, outlasted by a lettuce.

Today she’s an ex-MP as well as an ex-PM and she’s in Edinburgh for some political chit-chat as the second guest in Iain Dale’s now familiar Fringe interview series. And who’s here to see her? Not the host. He has been taken ill and we wish him well. His replacement is Matthew Stadlen, like Dale a presenter on radio station LBC. He proves a more than capable deputy, occasionally stepping up to sheriff when things turn towsy.

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Who else? Home-owners still smarting from the mortgage rate hike? Old classmates from Ms Truss’s days at Paisley’s West Primary School? Those still outraged by her appointment as Home Secretary of Suella Braverman, author of the now notorious statement that the UK is facing an “invasion” of illegal migrants? And are there any True Blue Trussite loyals clutching copies of the great woman’s book, Ten Years To Save the West? It did enter the bestseller lists but was reportedly outsold by The Ultimate Air Fryer Cookbook and Confessions Of A Fortysomething F**k Up. Ms Truss, for the record, turns 50 next year.

The answer is they’re all here, and drawn from across the age groups. Alongside the grey-hairs who can afford to take Monday afternoon off there is a notable number of young people though the over-riding impression is of a coach load of Guardian readers up from London for the festival and come to gloat.

If they expect contrition, they will have gone away empty handed. Despite the boos which greet her appearance on the stage – tiny, by the way: the EICC’s Lomond Suite has the worst sight-lines on the Fringe – Ms Truss is bullish and combative, in a commendably polite way. Fortysomething f*** up? Not to her mind.

“Rhetoric is not reality,” she says gnomically ahead of the session’s most ill-tempered section, on Ms Braverman’s “invasion” comments and the (now junked) Rwanda policy. Tommy Robinson and the ongoing anti-migrant violence gripping English towns and cities? Condemned utterly. The state of the UK’s prison and justice system? Labour is right, they’re in a dreadful position.

But it’s when we step back to take in the wider political landscape that the Truss world view comes into sharp and often lurid focus. The way she sees it the UK is in a state of decline in part because the last 14 years have seen a power grab by “left wing” institutions like, er, the Bank of England.

A “centrist Establishment blob” is now running the shop when it should be the elected politicians, and the civil service is part of the problem. As for what makes up said “blob”, it’s basically anything with a three- or four-letter abbreviation. Take your pick from: the BBC, OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility), IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies), ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) etc.

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Mr Stadlen makes mention of parallel universes somewhere around this point while reminding his guest that for the last 14 years the Conservatives have been in power, either alone or in coalition. Ms Truss has an answer for that, though: the Tories were hamstrung by the Blairite infrastructure put in place by the previous Labour government, and only a programme of radical Conservatism can overhaul it and set the country on the right path. And the way markers on this path? Low taxes, small government, personal freedom, the family and a belief in national sovereignty.

She pulls no punches in voicing her dislike of her successor as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and says she was genuinely upset and troubled by the criticism (and worse) she received from her own side. But there are loud guffaws when she is asked which Tories she still respects and she names Jacob Rees-Mogg, and noisy incredulity when she blames the premiership-ending market turmoil on another three-letter abbreviation – LDI. It stands for ‘liability driven investment’ and it was a crisis in the LDI market which mostly caused the mortgage rate rise.

She isn’t without her fan club, though. Voices are raised here and there in her support throughout the 75 minute appearance – ‘Bravo’ and ‘Hear hear’ are the ejaculations of choice – and my near neighbours are particularly effusive in their backing.

Regardless of the level of batshittery on display they give every pronouncement an ‘Uh-huh’ or a ‘Well said!’, and even break into loud applause when Ms Truss expresses her whole-hearted support for Donald Trump in the upcoming US presidential election.

She leaves the stage to fulsome applause, the audience unanimous at least in its appreciation of her self-belief and her all-round bottle.