Two massive comebacks were proclaimed last week: Liz Truss and Fawlty Towers. Truss returned to the political fray and John Cleese announced that he and his daughter will be making a new series of the renowned hotel sitcom. Exciting times! But both developments raise the same nagging question: can it be as funny the second time round?
Can the intensity of hysterical chaos be matched? Could such fast-moving and unexpected, cringeworthy yet compulsively watchable farcical consequences be brought about again? Both Truss and Cleese have been criticised for the brevity of their masterpieces – though, in running for two series of six weeks, Fawlty Towers long outlasted Truss’s tenure of power – but is it a mistake to try to add to something perfect? They may be the finest artists of calamity in their respective genres but are they unwise to compete with their former selves?
Truss is a huge admirer of her former self and heralded her return with a 4,000-word essay on that subject in the Sunday Telegraph. It’s classic Truss – a description of her leadership bid and disastrous premiership, written by the person at the centre of events that shook the country to its core, expressed in terms of astonishing self-justification and recrimination against those who failed to facilitate her wishes. By rights it should be a real page-turner. And yet, in Truss’s hands, it is very, very boring. The blandness of the text makes the outrageousness of what she’s saying almost unnoticeable. It reads like terms and conditions.
At least she admits she is “not the slickest communicator” and it’s not the only moment of self-deprecation in the article: “I am not claiming to be blameless,” she grants generously towards the end. “I had not established the infrastructure inside No 10 to best explain all that we were doing,” she says in the middle, in a persuasive bid for inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations That Send You to Sleep. And at one point she simply writes: “How wrong I was”, which I think would be a cracking title for the memoir I presume she’s bringing out, covered in warm quotes from Jacob Rees-Mogg and Suella Braverman plus a warning against operating heavy machinery immediately after reading.
The interesting thing about Truss’s argument is that she only really says one thing in her own defence, albeit over and over again. It’s that she thought, and still thinks, that her tax-cutting approach was right and would have worked if the country had stuck with it. This on its own, she seems to believe, redeems her myriad failings: that she started her plan too quickly, failed to communicate why it might work, didn’t secure the confidence of the civil service, the Tory parliamentary party, the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility or the City of London, let alone the country, for making her unmandated gamble, and that the consequences of these failures cost Britain dearly at a time of already sharply rising poverty. She doesn’t really deny any of these cock-ups – she just thinks they don’t matter much compared with having the right basic economic plan.
That won’t do at all. Merely thinking your plan is the right one falls a long way short of qualifying you to be prime minister. You have to think it’s right and then succeed in bringing at least some of it about and then, ideally, be proved correct. Prime minister is not primarily an ideas job – it’s about executing ideas and in this she could barely have failed more completely.
Truss is bitter because, from her point of view, she had a great plan but didn’t get the chance to push it through. She doesn’t acknowledge that we’ve still only got her word for it that it was a great plan (maybe history will somehow prove her right, but it’s not looking likely), or that she did get the chance to push it through: she was appointed prime minister. What better chance can there be?
She disagrees: “I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.” She was the outsider with only the seals of office and a large parliamentary majority to help her. Her radical approach, which she also confusingly describes as “a return to Conservative economics”, was too threatening to all the forces ranged against her. She mentions various names and groups: “the blob of vested interests”, “the instinctive views of the Treasury or the wider orthodox economic ecosystem”, the IMF, President Biden and “the Conservative parliamentary party”.
She rails against this villainous and obstructive orthodoxy, apparently unaware that getting things past opponents and convincing sceptics is the main thing prime ministers have to do. Also, she doesn’t seem to have considered that this obstructiveness wasn’t just capricious but sprang from a sincere fear that she was about to do something disastrous. Her special condemnation goes to the Office for Budget Responsibility, whose “static modelling tends to undervalue the benefits of low taxes… for economic growth, and overvalue the benefits of public spending”. Really? It presumably doesn’t think so. Once again, her sole point is that she was right. This remains unproved because, when she had her chance, she failed to convince anyone.
Her feeling is that she shouldn’t have had to: “I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted.” She sounds more like a priest than a politician. And what mandate? She was elected by some of the membership of the Conservative party, a small, self-selecting minority of the electorate. Any mandate was Boris Johnson’s, not hers. Her policy had neither won her a general election nor persuaded her colleagues. And it seems fanciful to think that it was informed excitement at her radical fiscal agenda that was the primary motive behind Tory members choosing her over Rishi Sunak.
Truss has few regrets, but would she do it all again? “I’m not desperate to get back into No 10, no,” she told the Spectator last week. Not a proper comeback then. Never mind. We’ll have to hang on for the post-Brexit Fawlty Towers and see how well an octogenarian Basil copes without any Spanish waiters.
