Liz Truss rewrites history as she blames everyone — except herself.
Liz Truss seems to be using her memoirs to rewrite history and shift the blame for the catastrophes of her short-lived administration. Her aim, perhaps, is to become a flag-bearing hero for the disgruntled hard right.
“I don’t think I’m that bad at politics” - Liz Truss, 2024
Queen Elizabeth, it seems, was a source of sound advice until the very end of her reign.
Two days before her death, as she appointed Liz Truss, she urged the new Prime Minister to “pace yourself.”
Forty-seven days later, Truss was gone, ending the shortest, most chaotic administration in British political history.
When she resigned, her approval rating was just 9% — the worst ever recorded by any modern UK party leader.
Yet to read Truss’ memoir is to enter a parallel universe, where a visionary genius was cruelly brought down by jealous conspirators lurking in the shadows.
Riveting as it may be to get the inside story on so tumultuous (and short) a premiership, it feels at times like an exercise in self-delusion, in which the former Prime Minister declares herself blameless for the crises that cascaded around her.
Her curse, she maintains, was that she had “responsibility without power”, even though her critics might point out she had the power to crash the economy in just a few days.
Now, because she has a book to sell, Liz Truss tours TV and radio studios, rewriting history to present herself as an innocent victim of a shady deep state.
Truss describes a pitiful time in Downing Street, living in a flea-ridden flat, sitting on furniture scavenged from the government estate, while waiting for her own to arrive — an order that could not be fulfilled before she was evicted.
Her husband tried to order groceries, only for Ocado to dismiss it as a hoax.
The first two weeks of Truss’ government were lost to the mourning period for the late Queen, whose “pace yourself” advice was quickly forgotten.
Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget scrapped the highest rate of income tax and the cap on bankers’ bonuses, along with reversing planned tax increases. All paid for with borrowed money.
It was, says Truss, “probably my happiest moment as Prime Minister.”
It was during this brief period of joy that the pound began to slide, eventually falling to a 37-year low against the US dollar, and Government borrowing costs began to soar. The markets, for so long the touchstone of Conservative administrations, couldn’t make Kwarteng’s sums add up.
But this was not his fault, insists the Prime Minister who would later sack him. Instead, it was Kwarteng’s ministry, the Treasury, as well as the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility.
Pro-remain and pro-China, according to Truss, and “more interested in balancing the books than growing the economy,” which some might feel is the point of economists.
As Britain tumbled into economic catastrophe, it seems the Prime Minister and her Chancellor stood dumbstruck.
Pension funds were on the brink of collapse, the Bank of England throwing billions at the markets to keep them afloat. Meanwhile, in Downing Street, Truss and Kwarteng were trying to get their heads around Liability-Driven Investments.
“We didn’t fully understand what was happening” Truss now says, admitting to the BBC’s Chris Mason “we were sitting on a tinderbox.” He pointed out that her response was to set fire to it.
Few of us really understand how pension funds work, but most have the humility to realise they’re probably not cut out for the job of Prime Minister.
Truss studied economics at university, and continues to portray herself as a high-flying economic visionary who alone understood the radical actions necessary to shock a Covid-weary economy back to life.
Yet at the precise time when such skills might have saved the nation further economic turmoil, she appeared incapable of grasping the mechanics of the markets she had supposedly mastered.
We know what happened next. Kwarteng was sacked, accurately predicting his sacrifice would not save Truss. Jeremy Hunt arrived and undid almost all the mini-budget’s measures.
Mortgage rates rose sharply, as thousands of deals disappeared overnight. One broker told me she was watching the deals vanish one-by-one from her screen as she tried to secure loans for her clients.
But none of this, apparently, was Truss’ fault.
Her opponents “tried to undermine me in an underhand fashion.” I would have got away with it, if it weren’t for those pesky economists, financial markets and the basic political reality that while Tory activists loved her, many Tory MPs did not, and would not support her core economic policies.
The only failing Truss appears willing to concede is that she is “not always good” at turning her big ideas “into something for wider public communication.” A genius, perhaps, but one operating on so stratospheric a level it’s impossible for ordinary people to keep up.
She is right to point out that she had set out her low-tax dash-for-growth strategy while running for the Tory leadership — the measures were not a surprise, even if the speed of their introduction was.
During that leadership campaign, Rishi Sunak repeatedly warned Truss’ plan would tank the economy — a rare example of accurate foresight from a leader even more embattled than Truss.
Her administration was, famously, outlived by a salad vegetable, yet she denies she now needs to earn the right to be heard, to account for the events of Autumn 2022 before pontificating on the future.
“I don’t believe there is such a thing as right to be heard. I believe in free speech.”
Such is her belief in free speech that she has been willing to share a platform with pretty much anyone, smiling alongside Steve Bannon, saying it “would be good” if Nigel Farage joined the Conservative Party.
Liz Truss is backing Donald Trump as well — not, you sense, because she admires him or likes his company, but because it fits a wider strategy.
Liz Truss says she’ll run for Parliament again this year, but her ambitions appear to stretch beyond those of a humble back-bencher.
Her book, and her promotional tour, appear part of an attempt to carve out a place as a flag-bearer of the hard-right.
Her misadventures seem to have prompted little self-reflection, but merely pushed her further down a rabbit hole, and into the embrace of Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon.
The cover of the US edition of Truss’ book calls her a leader of “the revolution against globalism, socialism and the liberal establishment.”
With the election result looking all-but certain, angry right-wing commentary could be her next career move.
Despite her very public failure, many will cheerfully accept her rewriting of history, and embrace Truss as a hard done-by hero rather than a politician who was promoted far beyond her abilities, and rather quickly found out.
“Things had not worked out as I had hoped” — Liz Truss, 2024
