It was Winston Churchill who remarked, according to legend, that: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” And so he did, at some length, and with his customary eloquence (six substantial volumes to be exact). His monumental achievements in power helped the process along, it’s fair to say. In the case of Liz Truss, there is little she can do to change the verdict of history on her nasty, brutish and freakishly short time in office. Her ludicrous memoir merely confirms that fact.
She was, is, and will forever be a national embarrassment, her only exceptional talent being an astonishing lack of self-awareness. It’s not a useful trait in a politician, and it’s a highly unattractive one in an author. She is just as much hard work on the printed page as she is off it.
This might have been an opportunity for her to explain her political journey from anti-monarchist Liberal Democrat to moderate liberal “Cameroon” Tory to hard-right ideologue. She might have explained how she went from fervent pro-European and Remainer to Brexit Ultra. She could have usefully, if awkwardly, drawn the logical conclusion that follows from her admittance that she went too far too fast in her tax-cutting agenda – which is that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak got the right timing. Had Truss concentrated on working with the Bank of England in getting inflation down first, and then turned her attention to modest but headline-grabbing tax cuts, she might well still be PM now; she and her party in a far better position, too. Instead, her memoir comprises one giant whinge, punctuated by nonsensical sub-Thatcher stuff such as “you either believe in low taxes stimulating economic growth or you don’t”.
In short, her book – part gossipy, cliche-ridden memoir, part shouty polemic – is worth reading only as an exercise in political pathology. She says: “I could write a whole book identifying what went wrong, complaining about the unfairness of it all and justifying the choices I made. Maybe I will write that book one day.”
That is probably the most breathtaking claim in the entire 300 pages, a sadly characteristically topsy-turvy sentence.
To enter the world of Liz Truss through the portal of Ten Years to Save the West – the title gives a big clue as to its author’s oversized ego – is to go through the looking glass to a world where nothing is as we remember it, where she did nothing wrong, where everything that did go wrong was someone else’s fault. It is an upside-down, inside-out place full of make-believe and strange people, though none so odd as Truss herself.
Think of this unconvincing autobiography as not so much “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as “Liz’s Adventures in Blunderland”, where a petite, blonde woman falls down a rabbit hole into a paranoid, fantasy land of her own design; one where her long-suffering husband, tagging along for the ride, warns her it will end in tears, and she is surrounded by grotesque phantasmagoric ogres such as Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Michael Gove and the permanent secretary to the Treasury. Liz even meets the Queen, a frail kindly old lady who advises Liz, presciently, to “pace yourself”. (We might have been better off if she’d declared – metaphorically of course – “off with her head!”) Inquisitive as Alice, Truss imbibes from the bottle of poison “UNFUNDED TAX CUTS: DRINK ME”. Perhaps, like Alice, Truss thought that “if one drinks much from a bottle marked ‘Poison’, it is certain to disagree with one, sooner or later.” But she went ahead anyway. A more contemporary reference would be “FAFO”.
As Truss herself, with characteristic lack of self-awareness, concludes: “The whole experience as prime minister had been quite surreal and my resignation seemed like just another dramatic moment in a very strange film in which I had somehow been cast. Things had not worked out as I had expected”.
Indeed not. Despite a towering parliamentary majority, a mostly slavish press, and the same quasi-presidential powers enjoyed by all her predecessors, she portrays herself, tiresomely, as a victim; the collapse of her administration after 49 days akin to a heroic national tragedy. In truth, it is a familiar narrative, one that Truss has been tediously and energetically promoting almost since she effectively pushed herself out of power through sheer spirit-crushing incompetence.
It is an “explanation” that handily accords with the current fashion on the hard-right for theories about a malign shadowy “globalist” anti-democratic cabal that rules the world and prevents radical figures such as, erm, Liz Truss from taking power: “In many cases, reforms I wanted fell victim to vested interests and the leftward drift of our national institutions and political culture.” As usual, she blames the economic crisis that she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng inflicted on the country on the very people and institutions that might, had she not ignored them, have saved us from that disaster and saved her job. In reality, far from being a victim or being controlled by the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, Truss pretty much did whatever the hell she liked regardless, gambled on a huge unfunded series of tax cuts, and suffered the consequences. Truss says this amorphous establishment had her “at gunpoint” by somehow triggering a “market meltdown” unless she reversed her policies, and she was caught in a “game of Tetris when you start losing control and the pieces are getting closer and closer to the top”. Obviously, journalists, so successful at guiding capitalism (I speak facetiously through long experience), were also “hungry for political drama”.
Arrant nonsense. International investors, who care not one fig about what the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, thinks, started selling sterling-denominated assets during Kwarteng’s mini-Budget speech for fear of inflation and the British being unable to honour their vast debts while this strange deluded premier and her sidekick were in charge. There was no conspiracy driving global market forces; they are powerful enough on their own. The crisis only got worse when Kwarteng made some self-satisfied quips about there being more of this sort of stuff to come. These are the facts. She and Kwarteng (who by all accounts tried to warn her that she might be sacrificing her premiership) crashed the public finances, collapsed the pound, set interest rates spiralling, caused chaos in the pensions and mortgage markets, and risked an economic slump. Her party, and the country, found tax cuts for the rich unacceptable in the middle of a cost of living crisis. It was not simply that Truss got the PR a bit wrong, as she concedes. Her own hubris, and not a globalist conspiracy, is why there were no experts to protect her, why her own MPs and the Tory press turned on her, and why she quit before she was ousted.
Ironically, almost every page of Truss’s book shows just how unsuited to, and unworthy of, office she was. As has been well noted, her reaction to the death of Elizabeth II wasn’t a reflection of the monarch’s global stature and unique contribution to the nation’s unity and cohesion, but a slide into self-pity – “Why me? Why now?”
She disdained the perks of office, as if she couldn’t comprehend the bigger picture and she deserved better. No 10 was just full of fleas left over from Boris and/or his dog, and a place where Ocado couldn’t deliver her ration of white wine. She is upset that she didn’t have a flunky to run out for cough medicine in the middle of the night, and there was no one on hand to tend to her hair and nails. The sense of self-entitlement is pervasive and dispiriting.
She is upset that she didn’t have a flunky to run out for cough medicine in the middle of the night, and there was no one on hand to tend to her hair and nails
The reality of her failure is something that Truss can evidently never accept, even if she were temperamentally able to. By rights, she should have quietly slunk away. By now she could be making plans for life after frontline politics, staying as quiet as possible, as Anthony Eden did after the Suez debacle, and indeed her former ally Kwarteng is now doing. But Truss cannot do that. The key to understanding Truss is to always remember that she is still only 48 years of age. She took office at a younger age than most of her predecessors, and left it before she was 50 (an age she turns in July of next year) – younger than anyone in centuries. What’s she supposed to do with the rest of her life? She’s unqualified or disqualified for any big roles in business or international organisations (head of the IMF! Can you imagine?).
She obviously thinks being the backbench member for South West Norfolk for another two decades or so is beneath her, and attending the yearly service at the Cenotaph until a time when people don’t recognise her isn’t going to keep her busy. To avoid being an shameful footnote in it, as Churchill explained about his own mistakes, she has had to rewrite history, reinvent herself as populist martyr, adopt increasingly extreme positions, attempt to place herself as an ally of Trump, make it big in America (where they are less acquainted with her history and shortcomings), and place herself, improbable as it seems, at the head of a worldwide conservative movement. Maybe then she might make a kind of comeback – she’s not ruling out another go at the leadership, either, as if Captain Smith had miraculously survived the Titanic disaster and wanted to have another shot at getting across the Atlantic in record time.
Hence her excessively disparaging comments about Biden – though one of them, predictably, is another self-own. At the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, Truss “bumped into Joe Biden again. He remembered our meeting at the White House, telling me he’d never forget ‘those blue eyes’, even though we’d both been wearing Covid masks.” Of course, Truss would have been taking Covid restrictions a bit far if her mask had actually covered her eyes. But maybe, unsighted, that is why she, stateswoman and former foreign secretary, mistook Jill Biden for Brigitte Macron (“I hope she didn’t notice”). Like most politicians, Truss enjoys adulation, and in the States she can leverage and make money out of her relatively obscurity and technical status as “former Conservative prime minister” in a way that will remain impossible in the UK for many years to come.
It is thus also no accident that the subtitle of the US edition of Ten Years to Save the West reads “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment”. There’s no doubt who she thinks is at the spearhead of that “revolution”. We can only hope that Truss is as deeply deluded about that as she is about everything else.
Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room by Liz Truss is out now, it costs £16.99 at Amazon
