by Most PPM memoirs are a multi-volume snoozefest. Liz Truss published the first in history that could accurately be described as a “romp”.
After spending 49 days in No. 10 – she notes that she was evicted before her furniture could be delivered – Truss details with speed and good humor the twists and turns that destroyed her small budget and forced her out of office. It is one of the farces in which the whole set falls apart; and the hero, so ignorant as to be almost innocent, brushes the dust from her shoulders and says, “I have done nothing wrong!”
The author describes his “normal style” as “completely forward”. The audiobook should have the Yakety Sax soundtrack. For all the laughs, though (Dominic Raab, when leaving his Chevening residence, left protein drinks in the fridge with “Raab” written on them), historians have a lot to choose from. If you think Truss was just a liberal, the only lesson is that she should not have been elected Tory leader. If you think, like me, that she was fundamentally right – that Britain is declining because we have forgotten how to generate wealth – then she needs to think seriously about how and why she failed. Greater forces were at play than eccentricity.
The Truss Thesis is that left-wing ideas born in the 1960s are the values of the establishment – from civil servants to business people, from charities to teachers – and as a result, whoever is in government, the ideology same still in power. Describing her pre-PM career through agriculture, education, justice and trade, she shows how educational horror theories (not facts, emotions) were introduced, along with policies environment that raised the cost of widening one of its local roads to. provide a “bat bridge” (to her knowledge, no bat has ever used it).
The Tories have failed to push back against this nonsense because many of their MPs believe it, as shown by their reluctance to destroy our regulatory framework after Brexit. Truss’ colleagues tended to retain EU rules, including a “Meursing Table” of commodity codes which lists “504 different classifications of biscuits”.
The eagle-eyed will see a contradiction in spending: I always wanted to save money, wrote Liz, but when she was justice she argued for more investment in prisons and at the foreign office rush to prevent the sale of an attractive embassy in Tokyo. (“The whole exercise of selling the family money was driven by the Treasury’s miniaturized attitude.”) Indeed, Rishi Sunak’s strongest argument against Truss she the pseudo-conservative, willing to unbalance the books and blow up the economy in an orgy of unfunded tax cuts – unleashing a wild budget in September 2022 opposed by the people who left disappear at the Bank of England and the IMF.
But the interesting point is not whether Trussonomics was secure or not. It is because of the “power of the administrative state and its influence on markets and wider policy” that she had no chance of implementing even relatively mild fiscal reform. Trus certainly didn’t expect how ruthless they would be in pushing back in every way available to them.” The men in green suits who once ensured that socialism was unthinkable in Britain are now to do the same for conservatism, and Karl Marx will be disappointed that it was the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, who ultimately told Truss that she had to quit – explaining. that now I meant “the price the markets wanted”.
It was a coup. Thus, a cabal of capitalists overthrew one of the most pro-capitalist governments in memory, suggesting that capitalism has little future.
The prime minister’s job comes across as almost impossible, given the bare basics. Truss had to do her own hair and makeup (probably took half a day). There was no doctor on the spot to take care of her health. And the inhabitant of No. That may seem trite, but Ten Years to Save the West – a surprisingly presumptuous title from someone who spent 10 minutes in office – makes the powerful point that a modern PM is treated “like a President but nothing like the kind of institutional support for it. the office we would expect in a presidential system”.
Her husband, Hugh, apparently predicted that her time in office would end in tears, and she “helpfully” recalled him as she exited. But for all the laughing at Truss, I admire her ability to rise above it, roll up those gorgeous Chanel sleeves and get back to making the argument for freedom. If anything, his humiliation has bolstered his ego.
Ten Years to Save the West is published by Biteback for £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
