“They didn’t seem to understand,” writes Liz Truss on page 250 of this unstoppably self-serving reworking of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right, “that the UK was heading towards an economic cliff and that I was seeking to conduct a handbrake turn to avoid driving off the edge.” The scene is Birmingham, 30 September 2022, just before the self-described Brian Clough of prime ministers gave her keynote address to what turned out to be a divertingly catastrophic Conservative party conference.
The then prime minister is livid about how a cabal of Cinos (pronounced “Chinos” – Conservatives in name only) and other blob-adjacent political invertebrates were trying to nobble the week-old mini-budget she devised with her chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng. By means of this reform, a new globally competitive post-Brexit Britain would emerge. This “unchained Britannia” would be unconstrained by planning regulations, free to frack as never before and able to explore the North Sea for oil despite the ululations of virtue-signalling eco-zealots and the rest of the anti-growth wokerati. This would be a Britain where the super-rich were less hamstrung by corporation or inheritance taxes, and in which the 45p income tax rate (what she calls here the “anti-success tax”) would be little more than a bad memory.
