Back in what now seems like the distant past – August – a biography of Liz Truss looked to be a well-timed book for the Tory shires Christmas market. Two of the maddest months in recent history later and Out of the Blue by the Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole, and James Heale of the Spectator became a joke social media meme, with a fake image showing the cover at a hugely knocked down price doing the rounds.
You have to feel for the biographers, whose rushed book originally had the subtitle: “The inside story of Liz Truss and her astonishing rise to power”. Yet despite their speediest efforts, their subject had already passed into history. With publication brought forward, the subtitle now reads, with a good deal more pathos: “The inside story of the unexpected rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss”.
It’s hard to imagine that there is much appetite for knowing more about Truss. Even her most ardent supporters could probably do with knowing a little less. But here it is, nonetheless, a 300-leaved lettuce that was past its sell-by date before it reached the shelves.
At the outset, the authors warn with becoming self-deprecation that the reader should not expect a Robert Caro-type experience. This is not a work of meticulous research and many years of studied reflection but, instead, lively journalism writ large, with all its benefits and drawbacks.
The basic story of Truss is by now well established: the geeky, outspoken daughter of a couple of leftish Cambridge graduates, who fell for the contrariness of libertarianism at Oxford, became a Tory and rose rapidly up the party ranks to become prime minister. It’s the familiar narrative that is retold here, albeit with some wit, insight and a well-informed ear for the telling detail.
Cole has long been rumoured to have been the recipient of Truss’s leaks when she was a cabinet member – Dominic Cummings was explicit in this accusation. So while it isn’t an authorised biography, you sense that Truss herself has been the source of a fair amount of the information in the book.
If so, it’s certainly not a hagiography. Truss emerges as a determined but fundamentally limited character, possessed of a fierce temper – she once told an aide that they “should have been shot at birth” – but not a great deal of managerial skill. One of the first things she did when she became prime minister was to banish nearly all chiefs of staff and directors of communication from cabinet meetings, so as to stop leaks.
But there were leaks anyway, from ministers – just like Truss herself had done. And the presentational disasters that befell her premiership were almost certainly exacerbated by the absence of communications people who, as one veteran Tory puts it, “would have been able to warn of a giant train wreck coming”.
What the government – and indeed the nation – needed after Boris Johnson’s disruptive stint in office was a period of undramatic competence. What the Tory membership voted for instead was someone who was drunk on the thrill of disruption. One of the many strange elements of the Truss story is that she has always maintained that she is interested in outcome, not process.
Seldom could a prime minister have been more wrong about herself. When she voted against putting cigarettes in plain packets, the outcome of reduced lung cancer and ill health wasn’t the key matter to her. What counted was the principle (or process) of freedom of choice.
Similarly, she wasn’t too concerned (or concerned enough) about what cutting taxes would do to the nation’s finances because she believed that tax cutting was good in its own right. Had she thought more about outcome and less about the ideology of the process, she perhaps wouldn’t have been the shortest-serving prime minister in history.
Cole and Heale conclude that for a decade she “got away with trying to mix principle with pragmatism, alongside unashamed opportunism”, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. However, they do point out that anyone would have struggled as PM, because in spite of the triumphalism that followed, the Tory party has been rendered ungovernable by the splits that have opened up since Brexit.
Truss thought she could magic away all these troubles with growth, but all she was able to deliver was chaos.
Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and James Heale is published by HarperCollins (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
