The spirit of Liz Truss, ridiculous but relentless, still stalks British politics | Rafael Behr
We need to talk about Liz Truss, although there are reasons not to bother. The prime minister who failed faster than any previous holder of the office has much to say about her dismal record, but nothing insightful. She cuts a pitiful spectacle padding out the schedule at rightwing conferences, chasing attention and relevance with an addict’s fervour.Last week, Truss was at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, sharing the big lesson she learned in government. It was that British institutions have been captured by a leftist doctrine and that they “hate western civilisation”. She couldn’t possibly counter this threat from No 10 because supposedly the real power was wielded by a well-financed “globalist network”, operating through such engines of anti-democratic subterfuge as the International Monetary Fund and the World Health Organization.Truss believes these nefarious forces authored her downfall. They taught her that gradual reform is impossible. Only a “Trump-style revolution” will do. This is her routine spiel. Indeed, it was the theme of her paranoid, self-pitying memoir-cum-manifesto, Ten Years to Save the West, published last year. Her disquisitions on the topic go unreported in her home country. She made more headlines last week from a two-month-old cameo appearance in a promotional video for a whiskey brand launched by a bare-knuckle fighter with a conviction for violent assault. (How that endorsement advances the restoration of western civilisation was unclear.) But a thorough summary of the CPAC speech was dutifully published by Tass, Russia’s main state news agency. Their report led with the claim that “globalists are trying to control the political process across Europe”.It is standard practice for Russian news channels to weave selective quotes from western politicians into tendentious propaganda, except there is no need to take Truss’s words out of context. She narrates the west’s slide into godless decadence without an edit. She provides the frothy conspiracy theories that Kremlin-friendly bots amplify on social media, and hallmarks them with the authority of a former prime minister.A British audience knows the caveats to that status: Truss was ousted within 50 days; a lettuce had more staying power. But the title stands. She really did rise to the top, and not through some freak system malfunction. She played and won the Westminster game by its rules. She had multiple ministerial briefs under three prime ministers. She persuaded a clear majority of members of Britain’s venerable establishment party to make her their leader.Colleagues who suspected (or knew from experience) that Truss was unhinged stayed silent or endorsed her candidacy once her momentum looked unstoppable. Client journalists who had benefited from her notorious indiscretion, and looked forward to ever greater intimacy with power, colluded in the fiction of her fitness to govern.Even now, when the former prime minister’s name is a byword for economic incompetence, Conservatives are euphemistic in contrition. When invited to apologise on behalf of her party for the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, Kemi Badenoch has said only that she wants to “draw a line” under the episode.The obstacle is not a residue of loyalty but a continuity of belief. The dogmatic engine of Trussonomics – that tax cuts always pay for themselves by stimulating enterprise to generate growth – is still an axiom of mainstream Conservatism. So is Trussite suspicion of the public sector as a redoubt of bureaucratic socialism.Badenoch, like Truss, backs a Maga-style revolution to rip chunks out of the government apparatus. She has spoken enthusiastically about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, adding that Doge methods are not “radical enough” for the bloated British state.The fact that Musk’s purgative rampage through Washington has failed to produce the advertised cost savings doesn’t deter imitators. Nigel Farage has announced the creation of a mercenary Doge “unit” to hunt down waste in the councils that Reform UK won in last month’s local elections.This exercise serves a double function. First, Farage will scapegoat any local officials whose duties can be branded under the rubric of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Second, he will overstate the expense of such schemes, generating improbable nationwide savings to justify tax cuts in a Reform manifesto. Trussonomics will be rehabilitated and rearmed with imported US culture war rhetoric.Farage was once a fan of Truss’s economic policy. He praised her fiscal farrago as “the best Conservative budget since 1986”. The year harked back to the heyday of Thatcherism. These days Farage has to be careful about fetishising the Iron Lady. His party’s electoral base lives in Labour’s former heartlands, so he is a convert to the cause of industrial nationalisation. He now shakes his magic money tree to the left as well as the right.The Tories lack such ideological elasticity. In any case, Badenoch doesn’t seem interested in economics. She is more animated by the crusade for free speech. This, like the demonisation of DEI, is a fixation borrowed from the US right. When JD Vance declared that European democracy was more imperilled by censorious liberals than by Russian military aggression, Badenoch admired the US vice-president’s deployment of “truth bombs”. Here, too, she is on the same page as Truss, who told last week’s CPAC audience that free-thinking dissidents from Keir Starmer’s Britain find refuge in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. (Orbán is Europe’s foremost admirer of Vladimir Putin. He has suffocated independent media and political opposition.)It is hard to know how much of this derangement is conviction and how much is cupidity. There is money to be earned bad-mouthing Britain on the ultra-nationalist lecture circuit, but it is also easy to self-radicalise in that milieu.It is also hard to know how receptive a UK audience is to US conservative manias. Much of the UK right dwells in a US-coded online hallucination of Britain where criminal hordes of migrants have turned city centres into no-go areas and liberal thought police harass law-abiding white Christians.The danger is not that millions of voters will recognise the bleak dystopia as a factual representation of their country, but that it resonates as an allegory of national decline. It is not the complaint that Britain is in bad shape – dilapidation and economic strife are self-evident – but the cultivation of despair by projecting hard problems through a facile, conspiratorial lens. It is the insinuation that existing democratic institutions are not merely failing to make life better but maliciously orchestrating misery.This is the nihilistic cynicism that vaporises trust, corrodes civic culture and makes simple, authoritarian solutions attractive. It is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears and grist to his digital disinformation mills.Perhaps we should be grateful to Liz Truss for playing the archetype of unwitting accomplice to tyranny – the “useful idiot” of cold war parlance – so ineptly. She contaminates any cause she touches.That is why the British right shuns her. But social ostracism isn’t ideological repudiation. The current Tory and Reform leaders are embarrassed by association with Truss, not because they despise what she says but because she looks ridiculous. Her offence was not the grift, but its exposure in ways that might discredit more skilful practitioners. She is not too extreme, only artless in applying the camouflage. She is the crumpled, discarded packaging from a product that, rewrapped, could be delivered once again to Downing Street.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
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