Liz Truss at the Channel 4 leadership debate (Victoria Jones/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)I met Liz Truss at university, and I mentioned it in a column, in which I said she owned an anorak and read a book. This column is a sequel to that column, in which I beg you: please don’t ask me about Liz Truss. I don’t know anything. I have no idea if she dated a man called Malcolm (not his real name).
Here is the nothing I know. She was there. She had A-levels and a face. She was called Liz Truss. She was a Liberal Democrat then and, because you can only be known for one thing at 19, that was all she was. I am sure I spoke to her, but I can’t remember anything she said back. I have tried, for money. I wish she had told me exactly what she thought of the Maastricht Treaty. She didn’t or, if she did, I didn’t listen. I was too drunk. If I really try, I can summon her flattened cadences, but that is probably from Newsnight. We did have lunch 10 years ago. She chided me for leaving too large a tip for the waitress. That’s my smoking gun, and it’s about me, not her.
I suspect that you, who have not met her, probably know more about her than I, who have. There may be a truth there. Or not. But I do know that I am tired of the concept of the politician’s personal journey, which I am asked to contribute to for Truss: a narrative which anticipates their destiny. Its purpose is to turn a politician’s life into a drama, so we can identify, or be amused, or appalled. It easier to buy them as a package, and we may think it is comforting to do so, but it isn’t.
It’s interesting — often it’s too interesting, look at Stanley Johnson’s parenting — but it isn’t helpful. It is usually untrue, or at least misleading. Donald Trump, for instance, isn’t a successful businessman. He’s a grifter who inherited a fortune from a psychopath. Sometimes it is only a disguise, and so more shocking when it shrugged off. Boris Johnson isn’t a wit who made Britain happier: he is an autocrat by instinct, an incompetent, and a liar.
To place faith in people because of who we dream they are, gilded by the glib recollections of those who met them, is lazy, simplistic, and dangerous. It drags us into a realm that feels more monarchy than social democracy: hagiography and myth.
Are they kind? Are they brave? Are they decent? If you want the answers — and you need them — don’t read the personal journey. Read their real politics: their actions. If we had, for instance, read more on Johnson’s mayoralty than his myth, his premiership would have made sense to us before it happened, and it will be the same for Truss if she wins. It’s all out there, in a language that is harder to decipher than a newspaper profile. Read her contributions to Hansard and her policy documents; read her chapter in Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity. The meat, if you want it, will be there. I did sell our matriculation photograph to a newspaper, but I can’t do more than that. I still have it. Get in touch.
In other news...
America’s largest modern house, The One in Los Angeles, which looks like a series of badly stacked concrete trays on a hilltop, sold for $141 million, not the $300 million the developer sought. I’m not surprised. I stayed in a £40 million house near Ascot for a newspaper feature once, and it was horrible: incoherent, meandering, occasionally frightening.
No house with 14 bedroom suites and matching bathrooms can be coherent. It’s a bad hotel, not a house, and as such, it had no heart. I lived in it for two days. I got lost. When I put my teacup down, I couldn’t find it again. I got a cold from sitting in the jacuzzi on the roof listening to the M4.
At the top of the central atrium, there was not a chandelier: there was a smoke alarm. Large houses are over-rated. Move to Claridge’s. They do it better.
