In the lead-up to the launch of The Liz Truss Show – the hot new YouTube series from Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister – one phrase was repeated time and time again: “They tried to silence her.” Turns out they didn’t need to, because Truss was perfectly capable of doing that herself.
Episode 1, she tweeted, would be available on Friday at 6pm. Except, on Friday at 6pm, it was nowhere to be seen. By 6.05, with still no sign of it, her faithful began to grow itchy. “Where’s your show?” they tweeted at her. A few more minutes passed. “FFS Liz get your act together,” sighed another.
By 6.20 it was starting to look like Truss had as much grasp of YouTube’s upload procedure as she did of the British economy. Two minutes later, someone else tweeted: “Could this be the Deep State in action?” and I honestly cannot tell you if it was a joke.
But then, miracle of miracles, The Liz Truss Show finally appeared. At 7pm. Presumably because Liz Truss still hasn’t worked out how to change her clocks back from British summer time.
So, an inauspicious start. But at least it was immediately followed by one of the most barking mad opening monologues in recent memory.
“You’d have to be watching the fake news BBC to not know that Britain is going to hell in a handcart,” Truss began, sitting in what appeared to be a cupboard furnished with the sort of books that pubs buy by the metre.
The theme of the monologue was clear: Britain is in desperate trouble. “Small businesses are dying. Big businesses are leaving … people are having to pull their own teeth out,” she groaned.
We live in a crime-ridden, socialist, Islamist dystopia. If they made Yes Minister today, she said, Humphrey Appleby would be “a radicalised trans activist”. Worse still, the British people don’t realise this because the media, with their “Gail’s bakeries and gated residences”, refuse to tell them the truth.
At this point it became painfully clear what The Liz Truss Show actually is. Blanked in her own country to such an extent that ITV Racing didn’t even recognise her last time she went to Goodwood, Truss is now pinning her future on being embraced by the American right.
Her opening monologue was nothing more than a laundry list of Maga stereotypes about the British. The woman longs to become Donald Trump’s Lord Haw-Haw, or at least a version of Lord Haw-Haw who looked and sounded like a bucket of spanners had just dropped on his head.
Monologue done, Truss started to interview her guests. The first was Matt Goodwin, billed as “Britain’s No 1 Substack”. We’ll have to assume he was there because, for an abnormally long amount of time, the camera never left Truss’s face.
At one point, as soon as Goodwin started talking, the camera lingered on her for a full 40 seconds. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent 40 seconds looking at Liz Truss wordlessly blinking and gulping, but it’s a genuinely disturbing sight. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
After a brief chat with a second guest – a podcaster in a “FREEDOM” T-shirt – it was on to the former Brexit party MEP Alex Phillips, who inevitably frothed on about immigration.
The most notable thing about her interview was how it ended, cutting off abruptly just as she started along a dodgy road about how to “encourage” legal migrants to leave the UK. Whatever could have happened? Did she say something that was beyond the pale, or was it that darn Deep State silencing her again? We may never know.
To think, this whole endeavour exists purely because Liz Truss wants America to love her, even though the only thing that America knows about her is that she held her own book upside down on Fox News once. And so she’s resigned to this, ranting in a shoebox on the internet, like the first person to die in a disaster film. It’d be tragic if it wasn’t so deeply stupid.
Episode 2 of The Liz Truss Show will be aired next Friday at 6pm. That is, assuming that Liz Truss has figured out how clocks work before then.
