Liz Truss’s unassailable self-belief is now embarrassing – and dangerous
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I really try not to think about her. Once a month, though, she enters my thoughts when I pay my mortgage. Why is it so much? Oh, yes, because of that insane month or so when Liz Truss was actually the prime minister and tanked the economy. That time is already a blur: her detached gawky delivery, the strained jokes, her unassailable self-belief even as the markets were so clearly spooked by her unfunded tax cuts that lenders began rapidly withdrawing mortgage offers. It all floods back. Queen Elizabeth II died just after meeting her and everything paused but there was utter turmoil after the “Kami-Kwasi” budget.
A normal person may have disappeared for a while; they may have reflected on their mistakes. But watching Truss rock up to the King’s Coronation, she clearly felt absolutely entitled to be there as she emanates that aura of never really seeming to know where she is. What holds many women back from power is our fear that we have got above ourselves somehow. Truss does not suffer from imposter syndrome. Even now.
She is not one for apologies or any niceties. She did not shake Rishi Sunak’s hand when she bounded on stage after she won the leadership election. She did not thank her husband when she left Downing Street. She has never said sorry for her policies, which caused chaos and hardship.
It is said that her reforms were meant to be a shot of adrenalin into the heart of the economy. Think Pulp Fiction where John Travolta revives a comatose Uma Thurman but this time with a different result. The patient has a devastating seizure.
Maybe the elderly Tory membership thought Truss represented modernity with her addled Beyoncé quips and wacky old Instagram. She was a meme long before she ascended to such heights. Remember the dazed grin on her face when, in 2014, she declared to the Tory conference: “In December. I’ll be in Beijing opening up new pork markets”.
But she has been in politics a long time and was not seen to have stabbed Boris Johnson in the back so, somehow, she got the job.
Having started off in a Lefty CND family, Truss once referred to her student days at Oxford by saying: “Some people have sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – I joined the Lib Dems.” She was then a republican who wanted to legalise cannabis. And now? She has come full circle, turning up at CPAC sitting next to Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, spouting far-Right conspiracy theories while staring down the camera into a half-empty room. What a spectacle – and a sign of how low her party has sunk that they do nothing while she carries on like this.
Supporting Donald Trump in a room full of nut jobs, Truss blamed everyone else for her own failure. She was brought down by the deep state, by quangos, by people who live in north London townhouses who have north London dinner parties. Oh, and the IMF and the Bank of England. Truss is now spewing the usual far-Right nonsense to people who no longer believe in the fundamentals of democracy, who believe that the election was stolen from Trump and the storming of the Capitol was just fine. This is dangerous and embarrassing stuff and no former PM should go near it. Is her ambition still so great that she must reinvent herself in this way?
Not only is Truss an ex-PM but she is a sitting MP and, therefore, she is still accountable. Yet, she sat next to Steve Bannon and failed to challenge his rant in which he hailed Tommy Robinson as a hero. Look, we can quibble with definitions of Islamophobia all we like and I take Kemi Badenoch’s point about keeping our freedom to criticise aspects of any religion but is anyone going to quibble about Tommy Robinson’s overt racism?
What is an MP doing staying silent while sat next to someone praising him? At least Sajid Javid challenged her writing on X (formerly Twitter), saying: “I’d hope every MP would confront such a statement head on. Liz should really know better.” Oliver Dowden gave his anaemic defence, saying maybe she hadn’t heard the words.
As the party implodes around them, certain Tories have decided to inflame tensions rather than calm them down. This is deeply irresponsible. Truss, we have always been told, loves ideas and thinks she is edgy, styling herself as both an insurgent and a disrupter. She was a Remainer who seems to believe in the small state and personal freedom – but who is she now?
There is something absent about her. Asked by an aide whether it felt surreal to become prime minister, she said: “My whole life has felt surreal.” In her world, then, there are no real consequences and she can just move onto the next pork market of dodgy philosophies.
Perhaps it does not matter that we are laughing at her. Perhaps she had no credibility left to blow so she decided to pitch in with the far-Right and perhaps we should not expect the Tory party in its current state to disown such people. Let them line up with those who spread discord and hate.
But those that put Truss in power should remove it from her because, yes, she really ought to know better. But she still doesn’t.
