Most former premiers pursue a semi-standardised retirement plan: a lucrative speaking tour, followed by a generous book deal. What comes next is either a corporate directorship or the start of a new foundation.
Even Truss—who was in power for only 45 days—can get a book deal and be paid to give speeches to right-wing American think tanks.
In December, Truss joined the growing ecosystem of podcasts hosted by failed politicians, offering an alternative to Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, George Osborne, and Ed Balls.
We shouldn’t be surprised.
Truss has been appearing on right-wing podcasts for the last two years, trying to rehabilitate her public image. Her show is the next logical step in her transformation from a laughingstock—even within her own party—into a legitimate dissident voice.
Instead of attributing her failure to her fellow Tories or, heaven forbid, her own incompetence, Truss portrays herself as the victim of the “blob”, a deep state she identifies with her ideological opponents.
Michael Gove coined the use of “the blob” to describe the civil servants he felt were working against his education reforms, which included producing a copy of the King James Bible for which he wrote the foreword.
The critique of the permanent administrative state in Britain is nothing new. Tony Benn did it best, drawing on the experience of political civil servants undermining his work in the Wilson government.
With even a little acumen, Truss would have been able to beat the blob. Because she didn’t, we must now bear witness to her desperate search to assign responsibility for her disastrous tenure in 10 Downing Street to her political enemies.
It was The Economist that started the joke that Truss’s premiership might not outlive the average supermarket lettuce. The Daily Star was soon on the story with one of its staffers setting up a live feed of a lettuce wearing googly eyes and a wig.
Getting almost everybody to mock you, regardless of their political allegiances, is a rare feat. If Keir Starmer is now “the most loathed PM on record”, perhaps that’s because the public has forgotten about Truss. Nevertheless, her gone-in-the-blink-of-an-eye government still casts a long shadow over pensions and interest rates.
Truss blames that notoriously left-wing institution, the Bank of England, for her downfall. And she’s not wrong.
She spooked the financial markets because her proposed tax cuts seemed both illogical and ideological in equal measure.
Truss could have avoided the disaster with a basic strategy. Had she made a pro-growth case for how her tax cuts would pay for themselves or argued for more spending cuts, her time as premier might have been longer.
The prime minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proceeded with such blind hubris that it was palpably idiotic, and the markets rebelled.
They didn’t bother to make an argument for austerity because they knew it was a hard sell for the public. Nor did they persuade the people who mattered that deficit-financed tax cuts were the way to go.
Truss could also have rescinded the central bank’s independence before announcing the tax cuts.
Because she did none of these things, we now have the pleasure of witnessing her reborn as the most obnoxious type of talking head.
Once upon a time, Liz Truss was a right-wing Liberal Democrat supporting republican demands to abolish the monarchy and even called for the legalisation of cannabis. The only consistent strand running through her politics from then until now is a kind of libertarianism.
Since reinventing herself, she has found plenty of friends and allies on the national populist right.
Former Trump strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon has embraced her as a fellow “outsider” ousted by the deep state.
Far-right American blogger Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, appeared on her show, making his usual case for corporate autocracy over the liberal politics of the blob. Yarvin’s solution to the problem is to return to direct rule by a monarch.
Apart from a handful of big names, Truss mostly platforms minor figures from UK broadcasting and right-wing social media. They may have fans, but it’s fair to say that Charlotte Gill and Mike Graham are hardly Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Steve Bannon.
Whatever their stature, all the guests Truss picks are meant to reinforce her new narrative. The problem is that it never fully coheres. Trussism is a muddle of culturally conservative, nationalist and libertarian politics.
Reform UK candidate Matt Goodwin, himself a former centrist academic, came on her show to talk about the threat a “new elite” supposedly poses to the interests of a culturally conservative, nationalist working class.
Goodwin was a centrist critic of populism for many years before “going native” more recently. Alas, his own bid for office failed miserably against Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer.
Another guest on the Liz Truss Show was Tudor historian David Starkey, who has sparked outrage multiple times with his comments on race. Starkey reassured Truss that Tony Blair had ruined the British constitutional order.
The current right-wing fantasy is that Blair’s New Labour project killed off traditional Britain after coming to power in 1997.
It used to be that the right complained that the 1960s had destroyed the old order. Now the right claims it was really the 1997 election, because it ushered in a modicum of constitutional and social reform, combined with slightly higher public spending. Either way, this blame game grossly oversimplifies a gradual transformation that took place over many decades.
Truss has announced plans for a “British CPAC”, modelled on the US Conservative Political Action Conference. Scheduled for this July, the annual event is intended as a rally for pro-Trump conservatives from all political parties.
Somehow, the former premier thinks she will improve her public standing by turning herself into a lightning rod for national populism. This self-reinvention campaign doesn’t end there, though.
Just like British CPAC, The Liz Truss Show is a vain attempt at reflating the bubble in which her conservative reputation was secured. Although this seems like a dead end, the political project she defends is far from dead.
The Truss legacy is still with us in the form of the steep interest rates that exposed many middle-class Conservative voters to a harsh reality after years of insulation from public spending cuts.
The financial pain inflicted on pensioners and mortgage holders did more to destroy the Tories’ credibility than a decade of austerity.
The Truss moron premium, as economist Dario Perkins dubbed it, is still very much with us. It’s one of the driving forces behind the collapse of two-party politics and the rise of Nigel Farage, who very much approved of the Truss budget at the time.
Indeed, Reform UK was pursuing Trussonomics until recently, with Richard Tice and Farage pledging billions in unfunded tax cuts. Only after the party had absorbed more Tories did Nigel Farage pivot to back a fiscally conservative strategy of cutting spending to make tax cuts more affordable.
Unfortunately, the disaster of Truss’s government has only strengthened the case for austerity. The Tories squandered a period of cheap debt to fund tax cuts by trimming social programmes. Now we can expect more of the same.
What’s easily forgotten is how Truss—an ex-Remainer by the way—built her reputation within the Conservative Party on trade policy. She talked up Brexit Britain and cut trade deals with countries around the world, while The Daily Telegraph and other right-wing papers cheered her on.
Before Truss became trade secretary, she was primarily known for talking up British commodities at a Tory conference years ago. Many of us still think of Liz as “the cheese lady” who spoke up for British pork.
As it turned out, the leftists who laughed at the cheese lady being elected PM by Conservative Party members were more in touch with reality than many Westminster journalists at the time.
If we were to list the guilty men and women of the Tory years, Liz Truss would have to be near the top, along with Boris Johnson and David Cameron, despite her extremely short tenure.
No one should ever forget it.
Photograph courtesy of Gage Skidmore. Published under a Creative Commons license.
