Liz Truss’s memoir, Ten Years to Save the West, first penetrated the nation’s consciousness with her reflections on the death of Queen Elizabeth II. “Why me?” the former prime minister wrote. “Why now?” It was actually pretty funny, the depth and shamelessness of her narcissism; so funny, in fact, that I felt that, somewhere along the line, she had been stitched up by an editor. Fair play; I too would stitch her up in that job. It’s hard to be your best, most generous self towards a person you hold personally responsible for the fact that your mortgage is now 100% higher than it used to be.
But a kinder, more mature person would have at least scribbled in the margin: “Are you absolutely sure you want to connect yourself, who served for 49 days, with the death of a monarch who served the nation for 70 years?”
As more of the book was serialised in the Daily Mail, however, it became clear Truss had no one to blame but herself. Enlivening self-awareness in Truss wouldn’t have been possible. And if anyone had taken a red pen to the more egregious moments of grandiosity and self-regard, the book itself would have ceased to exist, collapsed into a jumble of ands and buts and the odd “this is fucking serious”.
In Truss’s account of her time in office in late 2022, everyone is wrong apart from her, which I think we knew, but her analysis of what motivates them to be so very wrong is fascinating, riveting even. Foreign Office officials are “salivating” over the idea of rebuilding a relationship with Europe, as if that’s the kind of thing a greedy hound would want. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned of a £72bn gap in the public finances as a way, among other reasons, of taking its “revenge for being sidelined over the mini budget”. Yup, sounds right – notoriously emotional, the OBR, always making up crazy numbers in its quest for vengeance. When the governor of the Bank of England warns the prime minister that there may be an adverse market reaction if she appoints a person with no Treasury experience to the position of permanent secretary to the treasury, “it wasn’t wholly clear if the governor’s warning was a forecast or a threat”. Think it through, Liz! If the Bank of England’s governor could tell the markets what to do, he definitely would have told the stock market, the foreign exchange market and the bond market not to all collapse at the same time. But we are not in the thinking-it-through game.
President Biden, meanwhile – and I’d forgotten he did this, chapeau to the man – said on a visit to an ice-cream parlour in Oregon: “I wasn’t the only one that thought [the mini budget] was a mistake.” His motive? “Clearly, the Biden administration didn’t want a country demonstrating that things can be done differently.” Sure, yes, the man must have been petrified. Imagine the unstoppable force of popular will if everyone in the US realised at once that, using only the simple measure of taxing rich people less, their public finances, too, could be as wrecked as ours.
The OBR was wrong, by the way: it revised that funding gap down by £28bn the following spring, and this “staggering” wrongness merely proves that Truss was right all along, having created a hole of only £44bn. So that’s OK then.
By 20 October, the wrong-headedness had sadly spread, and now everyone from the backbenchers to the whips, to her husband and Suella Braverman wrongly thought that Liz was getting it wrong, and the only person who thought she should remain in post was her daughter Liberty. Thank goodness rightness can be passed on through the generations, but it was too little (one 13-year-old), and a lot too late (Truss had already decided to resign).
That she is still talking at all is a bit of a riddle, but the fathomlessness of Truss’s self-belief is the greatest mystery of modern politics. I doubt we will ever see her like again, but it’s the hope that kills you.
