Londoner’s Diary
Liz Truss’s book “Ten Years To Save The West: Lessons From The Only Conservative In The Room” is out next week. While the book aims to teach lessons and set out a plan for the future, is also essentially a prime ministerial memoir and therefore merited a considerable vetting process from the civil service. Pity the poor Whitehall mandarins who have been bogged down with the manuscript in recent months, sifting through relevant chapters of the book in search of accidental leaks or national security breaches. “At least David Cameron waited a few years,” says one Whitehall wag whose department was run by Truss in the middle of 12-year career in government.
Because Truss’s spectacular crash-out from government happened only 18 months ago, any revelations in her book about colleagues still serving in government could easily become big news. The convention, under the so-called Radcliffe Rules that guide post-government memoirs, is to avoid any such compromising material – will Truss the maverick be adhering to such “deep state” mantras? Not likely. To prove her self-appointed title as “the only Conservative in the room”, Truss will need to blab about what the other people “in the room” were saying, not least her successor Rishi Sunak. The already embattled PM could do without explosive headlines from the book about what he said in X Cabinet meeting or what his real position was on Y policy. He should be so lucky.
Bin-fluencer
#BinDayIsComing pic.twitter.com/28bfHx9i3I
— Count Binface (@CountBinface) April 6, 2024
We doff our caps to the indefatigability of Count Binface, the mayoral candidate who wears a bin on his head and promises to “take out the trash and teach the Tories a lesson they’ll never forget”. He is trailing way behind the frontrunners Sadiq Khan and Susan Hall, but Binface remains resolutely optimistic. Inspired by an Evening Standard front page from November in which Hall vowed that she could beat Khan, Binface has made his own version of the cover and posted it to X.
