Liz Truss's eyes still shine with a bright, self-righteous fanaticism, as if backlit by an idiot’s lantern
Why the radical right still loves a failed prime minister
Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images.
Liz Truss is the most disastrous and unpopular leader in modern British history. Mortgage holders and small businesses still loathe her for sending interest rates through the roof. Her short, catastrophic premiership is routinely compared unfavourably to the shelf life of a lettuce. (A comparison first made by the bright leader writers at the Economist to give credit where it is due.)
When Labour wins the next election, its triumph will be in part the result of the public’s reaction against her vast and dogmatic economic folly.
If you were Liz Truss, you might retire from public life. At the very least you would apologize and hang your head in shame.
If readers expect contrition, however, they have yet to learn that being on the radical right means never having to say you are sorry.
Truss’s demotion from national leader to national joke has not embarrassed her in the slightest but sent her deep into the swamp of paranoid conspiracism.
Her autobiography, bizarrely titled Ten Years to Save the West, as if the fate of liberal democracy depended on the advice of an epic failure, shows that, despite all she did to this country, her eyes still shine with a bright, self-righteous fanaticism, as if the sockets are backlit by an idiot’s lantern,
Chutzpah used to be defined as murdering both your parents and asking the court for clemency because you are an orphan. In Truss’s case it is using the power of the prime minister to crash the economy and then claiming she was a powerless victim of the liberal elite.
Her writing is as lacking in self-awareness as it is powered by self-righteousness.
At one point she says in all innocence that, when Boris Johnson resigned in the summer of 2022, her agent encouraged her to join the race to be prime minister, as the campaign might be good for her profile.
But she reports that he then wisely added “it would be for the best if I came second”.
Later she informs us that during the leadership campaign she “frankly lost trust in many of my erstwhile ministerial colleagues who were supporting my opponent [Rishi Sunak].
“They had spent the last six weeks not just attacking me but seeking to undermine my plans, saying my agenda was unworkable."
Truss never stops to think that the few people who will finish this book will believe that her agent was right, and it would clearly have been for the best if she had never been prime minister.
Nor does she contemplate the possibility that her agenda was indeed “unworkable”, and was proved to be unworkable when her unfunded tax cuts and fuel subsidies sent the price of gilts shooting up, the value of the pound crashing down, and caused a crisis in the pension industry for good measure.
And yet, and yet…Mock her as much as you like. Please don’t hold back on my account. But you cannot dismiss her.
There are two reasons why Truss is still dangerous. The first lies in the strength of the right-wing clique that brought her to power.
It is true that Liz Truss did not become prime minister by winning over Conservative MPs. As with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party, Truss’s career illustrates the danger of expecting leaders who do not have the support of a plurality of their colleagues to function in a Parliamentary democracy.
But she still beat Rishi Sunak with the votes of 57 percent of Tory members.
And with the honourable exception of the Times, the Tory press was all for her. “In Liz We Trust”, said the Express “Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Woman”, cried the Mail. “Liz Puts Her Foot on the Gas”, cheered the Sun.
Kwasi Kwarteng set off a market panic as he put Truss’s ideas into practice in the mini budget of September 2022. The reaction of right-wing papers was not one of alarm, however, but of adoration.
“At last”, gushed the Daily Mail, “a True Tory Budget”. A Daily Telegraph commentator said it was “the best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver”.
Meanwhile the Truss premiership allowed the voodoo economics of the US-influenced (and in all probability US-financed) think tanks to finally impose itself on this luckless country. The Centre for Policy Studies welcomed the mini-budget saying it was “exactly what we would have hoped for”. The Taxpayers’ Alliance called it “the most taxpayer-friendly budget in recent memory”.
Robert Saunders of Queen Mary University made the unarguable point that Truss was not an aberration or some alien figure that had appeared from nowhere to take over the Conservative party.
Follow the money that cascaded in from party donors, he said, and “the Truss premiership begins to look less like the personal failure of a flawed individual, and more like a systemic disaster for which the party bears collective responsibility”.
Those forces will dominate the Conservative party after its defeat and drive it to the radical right. Indeed, in opposition the members, the think tanks, the press and the ideologue donors will become more important, for they will be all the party has.
In a sign of things to come, Truss is already allying with Nigel Farage, and even Rishi Sunak says he will not ban Farage from joining Conservative party.
Despite her failure, Truss remains a potent figure on the radical right because of her championing of revanchism, which is now its dominant emotion.
This isn't a book. It’s a 300-page wail of resentment at a world that will not do as it is told.
I have no problem with conservatives complaining about woke policies taking over institutions. Only a fool or liar maintains that progressive biases among supposedly impartial organisations are an invention of the right,
But the woke conspiracy Truss invokes is of a wholly different order. It is utterly fantastical.
To recap, Truss's unfunded subsidies and tax cuts panicked the bond markets. They would not lend to a country whose leaders lacked plausible means of meeting its debts. Or if they did lend they would demand an additional yield on government bonds, which became known in plain-speaking financial markets as the “moron premium”: the extra cost that comes with lending to a nation run by idiots.
In her apologia Truss, who still poses as a Thatcherite, no longer sees markets as an expression of the wisdom of crowds, but as a conspiracy to do her down.
“I came to realise there is no such thing as ‘the market’ in this sense. Rather, there are groups of influential individuals in the financial establishment, all of whom know and speak to one another in a closed feedback loop. The Treasury, the Bank of England, and the OBR are deeply embedded in these social networks and share the same beliefs in the established economic orthodoxy."
The markets were at fault for not seeing her financial genius. Financial traders were the world’s unlikeliest lefties. Even though she and Kwarteng fired the permanent secretary at the Treasury and cut out the Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility from policy making, they were still, somehow, responsible for Tory failure.
“The powerful vested interests there pushed back, made my life very difficult and ultimately got me fired,” Truss concludes.
Older readers may remember a time when Conservatives insisted on personal responsibility. You were not allowed to blame crime on poverty or your failings on a bad childhood. You were accountable.
But the case of Liz Truss proves that these morality tales were only ever for the poor. In her mind, the economy collapsed not because of decisions she made but because of “a sustained whispering campaign by the economic establishment, encouraged and fueled by my political opponents in the Conservative Party who refused to accept my mandate to lead”.
Trumpism is the end point of such conspiracism and revanchism, and Truss goes all the way down the line to the terminus.
She mutters about the “deep state” a Trumpian phrase she uses without irony or self-knowledge.
And even though her support for Ukraine was her redeeming feature during her time as foreign secretary and prime minister, she is now supporting the pro-Putin Trump and his allies in Congress who are denying aid to Kyiv.
Truss is finished. But the resentment born of failure and the fury at modernity ensures Trump is still very much with us.
If he delights Putin and wins in November, the UK and Europe will learn the hard way that the real threat to Western civilisation comes from Liz Truss and her friends.
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Best wishes,
Nick
I think gilts went down, not up. It was interest rates that went up. But I'm nit-picking ...
I’ve got $50 that says Truss couldn’t have described a Gilt before the chaos unleashed by her mini-budget and this links to a new theory I’ve come up with recently, look at those headlines you link too and see the ppl who wrote the stories underneath them, all from Tufton St or Tufton St aligned, these ppl & the Tory libertarian MPs who cheered her on exposed the fundamental issue for that kind of politics
If you’re a super-smart person who is a free market capitalist with an interest in how the economy works then you go into banking or other city related jobs and/or work as a senior executive in big business as that’s where the money is but if you share that kind of worldview but don’t have the intellect or smarts to cut it in that world then you go into working for the right wing think tanks and lobbyists or become an MP, so the problem that style of politics and that worldview has is the people who will be in a position to implement the agenda of the free market fundamentalists are by definition the stupidest ppl in that world, works out great for the smart ones cos they either get lucky ideologically (from their perspective) and a Thatcher comes along to implement their worldview politically or if instead they get a Truss or a Norman Lamont they just clean up financially by betting on the stupidity of ppl that they know are stupid because they’ve spent real time with them, they can’t lose
Sadly though the rest of us do