August 16, 2024 - 10:00am
Liz Truss is nothing if not a political animal. That such a creature is now so harried and pursued exposes some of the vulnerabilities of British institutions in the 2020s. To look back on Truss’s career up until 2022 is to see a political everywoman on the make, who trimmed her sails to catch the prevailing wind. She loved gossip and was a serial leaker. She had a few worked-out ideas but knew when to drop them. Her vanities, her intrigues, her peccadillos: all came as standard.
Her post-Downing Street life has carried on in a similar vein. She wrote her memoirs, went on the lecture circuit, and griped about her successor. Yet for making fairly ordinary interventions since leaving office, she finds herself personally insulted and scandalised in a way that was once out of bounds. It’s regularly implied that she is mentally unbalanced, and in illustrations she has now taken on an almost demonic aspect. Some of the criticisms are even more grave: that her presence in public life is part of a new age of shamelessness. Inevitably, there have been calls for her to be investigated.
The latest ambush came earlier this week. At a book event in Suffolk, members of the Campbellite Led By Donkeys group secretly installed a mocking banner — featuring the words “I crashed the economy” beneath a picture of a lettuce — which was unfurled while Truss was on stage. “That’s not funny,” she said flatly, before ripping off her mic and leaving.
It used to be the convention to treat ex-politicians as part of the furniture, even if they had been figures of scandal and failure. Jeffrey Archer has found second life as a sort of wayward uncle to the nation. John Major is now an elder statesman. Four years out from his election defeat, Gordon Brown was given no less a brief than to save the Union; by 2022 he had been commissioned by Keir Starmer for a virtual rewrite of Britain’s constitution. With Truss this pattern breaks.
Modern British society — pious, philistine — can pursue its enemies with a relentless hatred. Truss is among the few real members of the establishment to encounter this — and from her own peers, no less. It is one thing to combine against outsiders who would tear down the political system. It’s quite another to apply these same methods to an actual member of the political class, if a slightly unruly one.
This oddly frenzied attack on one of its own shows a set of ruling institutions that is losing its capacity for subtlety, irony, coordination, or even collective omerta. A more confident governing class would have condescended to a figure like Truss; this one, bizarrely, feels it has no choice but to go to the mattresses.
Truss’s treatment is revealing in another way. It shows a new inability on the part of Britain’s rulers to pick their battles. For the kind of people who enjoy Led By Donkeys, Truss is a strange choice of villain. She stands for liberal capitalism, not blood and soil. Politicians like her want to carry out economic and administrative reform while preserving liberal institutions. They prize Nato and defend free trade. In adding a populist tinge to a basically Thatcherite appeal, Truss was offering exactly what Britain’s governing classes have been claiming to want for the past 10 years: some reconciliation of populism with conventional politics.
Whatever mistakes she made in her 2022 mini-budget were those of a market liberal. It took some imagination to see in Trussism a sort of alt-Right challenge to social order (“She fired a permanent secretary!”). This was an establishment that went rogue on her, not the other way around.
In exile, Truss has had to make recourse to the oldest political trick in the book: forgoing the establishment and putting oneself directly before the people. In this she has found success. As a seasoned politico she has a good lizard sense of how to draw a crowd, and can turn a demagogic phrase. Like Jeremy Corbyn, she has a genuine following and her refusal to simply be bullied out of public life is admirable. But it remains strange that someone like Truss ever found herself driven to such a course.
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SubscribeCreature, Lizard. You’re perpetuating what you describe in the article.
https://www.politico.eu/article/the-dirty-little-secret-no-politician-will-admit-there-are-no-cost-less-ways-to-go-for-growth/
This seems rather confused.
Led By Donkeys are certainly not part of a ‘governing class’ having a go at Truss. Strange use of mafia metaphors, and an incorrect ‘forego’ for ‘forgo’.
Plus it’s more than a stretch to characterise the LBD prank as a ‘frenzied attack’.
Politicians don’t actually understand anything, they don’t study anything, they are definitely not experts. (In terms of running a country there are even a bit ‘thick’.)
Instead of being clever themselves, they have clever experts and clever speechwriters. Each expert has a pet belief, an axe to grind. Some experts are corrupt – knowingly or unknowingly. Why waste time on the failed politicians? A pointless exercise.
You start with implied ‘all politicians’ and finish with ‘failed politicians’. Which is it? Churchill a failure? Thatcher?
There is the saying about all political careers end in failure, but in fact good politicians can change their country and the world for the better.
Churchill, in my opinion, was not a politician but a leader – especially effective when leadership was needed. Apart from things related to wars, I don’t think of Churchill as anything – except perhaps that he was a good writer (about wars).
Today, 80 years from WW2, Thatcher would be called a bully, an autocrat and a fa*cist. In her time the ‘f’ word was not used because of the proximity of the war. Perhaps she was the best politician we have ever had. But that is only one.
Politicians are always “of their time” though. In 1938, Churchill was regarded as a washed up has-been, but the war was his time to shine. Thatcher had to be the way she was to sweep away the dismal socialism that infected Britain during the 1970s.
I think you’ll find Thatch was called all those things back to 80s too – wrongly in my view although I was no fan. Churchill’s greatness was because of how much he respected and supported Parliamentary democracy despite immense challenges.
But the point is not all politicians are malign. Most are trying hard to make a positive difference. The job is much harder than folks think. Some deserve serious criticism, but a drift to cynicism won’t improve anything.
Truss has no substance at all. She made a complete mess of being PM by making very elementary mistakes and not listening to advice. She is basically reactionary and transactional in everything she does. Such people should never have extensive power because they have no sense of considered judgement or perspective. Put there by a tiny number of activist conservative members, themselves largely disconnected from reality, she was a disaster waiting to happen. Anyone with a smidgen of insight and empathy would recognise that now is not the time to be out there; instead it is a time for reflection and re-evaluation. Unfortunately her psyche is such that she cannot comprehend that, so is bound to be a figure of ridicule for some time to come.
As for Alastair Campbell, there is another, different, but equally deplorable individual.
” Put there by a tiny number of activist conservative members” and removed by a far tinier number of Tory MPs, who have mostly now reaped the whirlwind by losing their seats.
c80k Tory members voted for her. Tricky that isn’t it.
‘Equally deplorable’? I don’t think Truss provided the propaganda to lead Britain into an illegal war.
I think it adds insult to injury to compare Truss to Campbell. She made some mistakes, but they didn’t result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the laying waste to an entire region of the world. She doesn’t have the Himalayan conceit or titanic bombast of that grotesque man either. Or the visceral, uncontrollable rage. Campbell is sui generis.
I would grant you she’s probably not Attila the Hun if that’s any consolation.
Well, good to see you share my view of Campbell, anyway – although I think equating him to Attila the Hun is a bit over the top. Attila at least had some strategic nous.
Sorry, so what elementary mistakes would you yourself not have made, one asks oneself? I make no claims to know but you are exceptionally cruel to one whom I doubt you even have tried to evaluate her phsyche. Are a phsychiatrist with definite knowledge about Ms Truss? I only query because you seem to know, if so perhaps you could advise our new govenment!
Quite right. The hysterical hatred and misreprwsentation if her 49 daysis undersrandable from the Sunak-ite libvy, byt his spiteful dismantling of her good policies was simply djsgraceful. The mystery is that to this day most journos, or all in eg the Times, persist with abusing her in every article, presumably to please Lord Sunak and his Spadz. Inflation , her fault. Collapse of sterling ( for 3 days) her fault. Mortgage rises, her fault. And that’s it. All nonsense, of course. So we then had 35% rise in corporation tax, free child care instead of her simple reforms, no fracking, and no 1000 EU laws cancelled, including the Nutrient Neutrality Act.
The Bank of England made a profit from their operations in the gilts market, although this was mainly at the expense of British pension funds.
How on Earth this humourless woman from ” behind the green baize door” ever became a North Norfolk MP is a mystery to me. Aside from being dismally untalented, with all the charisma windswept Fenland, the average North Folk conservative would have expected to find her filling the post shoot lunch port decanters.
Ah but therein lies the real problem – the Tory membership. Not only did they select her in Norfolk, 80k of them voted for her to be PM in the leadership race.
A bit of an aside, but due to the inability of the left to understand/tolerate “irony”, I expect its use to be added to the definitions of “terrorism” and “hate speech” within the next year or so.
Can Government sponsored book burning be far behind?
Good grief, do you two ever leave the front door? Or sit shaking all day at your keyboard?
Two points overlooked by those who herald PM Truss as a liberal free market capitalist. Firstly, the issue that troubled the financial markets was her writing a blank cheque to shield the British people from the volatility of the energy markets. She wanted the nanny state to pay for the price rises. Secondly, she did not cut expenditure to finance her tax cuts. Instead she hoped she could get away with the increase in government borrowing. It will be interesting to see what happens when the markets react to Starmer and Reeves doing the same in order to finance above-inflation pay rises.
As for the antipathy against her, she was elected by members of the Conservative Party against the wishes of Conservative MPs, who mounted a coup against her.
You conveniently forget she unsettled the markets by removing any independent review of what she was doing. She knew the answer would be ‘this doesn’t stack up and is a hit and hope’ and she still pressed ahead as she knew best. ‘Into the valley charged the 500 hundred’, and the inevitable happened.
Judgment matters. She lacked it then tried to save herself by sacking her colleague. Integrity deficit to go with the poor judgment.
I’m no fan of Liz Truss, but nor am I happy that international money men were able to remove her. I’m perplexed that so many “lefties” seem happy about it.
“I’m perplexed that so many “lefties” seem happy about it.”
They are opportunists, they don’t act on principle. This is why hypocrisy is rife on the Left without consequences but a prima facie case for career destruction if anyone on the Right makes the same mistake to even a modest extent.
Not that sure who you might think ‘Lefties’ JR? I guess that could be a pretty big net you cast depending on your purpose.
But perhaps the real lesson is don’t elect a berk for a leader and don’t keep defending her, if you don’t want to gift Lefties a chance to repeatedly play that card. It is the ‘gift that keeps giving’.
Hey the vast majority of the Country were happy about it. Only a few embarrassed on the Right felt otherwise and they still defend because they don’t do wrong. It wasn’t Lefties who turfed her out of SW Norfolk.
As regards the Bond markets – no fan of their influence, but one has to deal with realities and be smart. She wasn’t.
True but now Rachel Reeves has done the same thing.
No she hasn’t. Whether she handles the balance as well as going to be needed still to be seen. Let’s see what her Spending Review and Autumn budget does. What she hasn’t done is rush an un-costed, un-checked plan out within her first few weeks.
Of course she has !
The likelihood is that the tax cuts would have increased revenues, so no spending cuts were needed. Britain is far along the wrong side of the Laffer curve. The parliamentary budget office had to be excluded because they’re clearly incompetent.
That sounds right
The problem is whatever you might think the money markets didn’t agree. That wasn’t the Treasury. This is why it’s so uncomfortable for sections of the Right. Hence they have to find a scapegoat and who’ve just fallen right into that.
I am not convinced by Liz Truss. Something is not quite right. I greatly admired her determination to fight the Anti Growth Coalition and make the case for capitalism against myriad squealing hodtile progressives. But she was a very bad general. Her troops all over the shop when she went into battle with the scheming powerful wounded Treasury and sim as * Bank. You cannot spend a summer talking about another terrifyingly large state bailout on energy – and then suddenly pile in with tax cuts a second later!! The tax cuts could easily have waited. Also, a true Blue Neo Thatcherite leader awould never have cut and run on election night without a speech. Wilderness Years beckon. Kemi will take the throne, eyes widen open.
I dare say there are some haters of Truss, (Hating is almost always ridiculously disproportionate and reflects more on the hater), but there are good reasons for not giving her a free pass now.
Politicians don’t all apologise when they make mistakes, but she certainly hasn’t. And not all ex-PMs criticise their successor as overtly, but she did having quickly made his inheritance much worse. Her flip-flop on Brexit, and of course chucking Kwarteng under a bus to save herself, also warrants continual holding to account for blatant personal interest and careerism first.
Judgment counts and when it’s so obvious the PM spectacularly lacked it when needed it’ll be a story for some time.
As Author finishes with – she can turn a demagogic phrase. We actually don’t need that and from someone who was entrusted with running the Country once she deserves considerable opprobrium for that alone.
Politicians don’t all apologise when they make mistakes, but she certainly hasn’t.
Your idol Blair made the worst and most consequential mistake of any British Prime Minister since Chamberlain at Munich. Don’t recall him apologising either.
It’s a very shallow article (and comments?) when the Truss Downfall doesn’t mention LDIs, something that she wasn’t told about by her advisors, and should have been.
Her mistake was to attempt to rekindle the North Sea Oil/Gas and the fracking industries, so offering some hope for the future.
On her removal, we went back to ‘normal’.
Re LDIs: not only was she not warned about them but I doubt the Treasury knew about the problem either – and if the BOE / Pension Fund regulators knew about LDIs it appears they did not understand fully the systemic risks.
Basically, the problem was a wave of forced selling triggered by markets moving through a particular level. Once Gilt yields moved beyond a certain point – in parallel with US and other bond yields – then the selling was self feeding. Because the UK had constructed this LDI doom loop (but the other countries had not) we saw the sell off. It would have made no difference if Gordon Brown or Winston Churchill had been PM. The sell off only ended when the BoE stepped in rather late in the day.
Similar if smaller episodes have occurred in the past. My suspicion is that the underling flaw is that the regulators are unable to get their heads around the idea that rules that are prudent at the individual company level can be grossly destabilising at the systemic level. Others might blame Investment Bank influence.
As it was Liz Truss provided a convenient scapegoat deflecting blame from elsewhere. There was also a desire to remove her for the reasons explained by others. Personally, I thought she was simplistic in her ideas and inept as a politician so I do not regret her departure but there is no doubt she shouldered blame that should have gone elsewhere.
The mid wits of the managerial class were threatened by Truss because she had real idea, that would have worked had they been implemented. In order to carry them out, she had to defeat the managerialists and, with the help of Sunak and his supporters, they were able to defeat her. That’s a tragedy for Britain.
If you mean the Bond markets are run by a managerial class then perhaps your thesis has some coherency at least. But I suspect it doesn’t and you are all over the place confused.
Truss’s tactics were faulty, but what I cannot understand is how anyone can fall for the argument that her failure amounted to a discrediting of free market policies.
There would have been no adverse market reaction to the Oct2022 mini-budget had Truss and Kwarteng not included within that budget the massive, Statist, ideologically left-wing cash bung that was the energy support package. It was the only stupid idea in an otherwise exceptionally sensible response to the decaying state of Britain’s public finances, the Sunak/Hunt government then threw out pretty much everything in the mini-budget except for this wholly stupid left-wing idea, and after that of course the public finances continued to decay and were still decaying at the time the Sunak government got the thrashing it richly deserved at the recent election.
And now we’re got an officially left-wing government instead of an unofficially left-wing government, it has just bunged billions in a ridiculous pay rise to the public sector and the unions, it is about to break it’s promises of no tax rises, and the public finances are going to decay at an even faster rate.
At this stage, the UK economy is being run by people who are insane. That’s what it’s called when you keep making the same mistakes but expect the outcome to be different next time.
She’s a woman who tried to take on the blob and failed. Those who caused her failure have to maintain the impression she’s loony. It’s classic Cultural Revolution tactics used by a political, educational and bureaucratic elite who would strongly denounce such an approach by anybody else.
Look the Blob is a fiction and a load of twaddle to excuse some Right wing folks of moronic thinking. But if it did exist you need to at least pick someone half sensible to go against it or you just look even more stupid.
Ever watch Yes Minister ? after 40 years it still exists
The “Blob” (Quangos, NGOs etc) does exist, created by Thatcher and enobled under Blair. It’s a parasitic stain on democracy. You already know this because it’s been pointed out to you on numerous occasions.
Liz Truss was a victim of the famous Peter Principle. She rose to the level of her incompetence, which was PM (which is not bad!), and unfortunately was found out. She was very bad at the politics of the job, tried to go hard too fast, and got removed. All very unfair, no doubt, but politics requires more skills and nous than climbing the greasy pole at a right wing think tank.
Her subsequent post-PMship has been marked by her inability to handle the situation gracefully. Again, no doubt very understandable on a human level, but if she was better at politics she would have treated the daft prank as a chance to show she was a “good sport.” She should have somebody write a series of lettuce related jokes, suitably self-deprecating, and deploy them in her speeches. Take the piss out of herself a bit. But she’s got no sense for politics, so she storms out.
Contrast Boris, who has had many a disaster in his career, but still trucks on based on his ability to be bumptious and not seem like he takes himself too seriously.
An erudite summation of the situation!
The vindictiveness and spite of the far-left elites can’t be underestimated.
Do you mean the folks of SW Norfolk her bounced her out of her seat? They all spiteful lefties?
The contortions some have to pull to absolve themselves of some complicitly in the disaster that was Mad Liz
Truss is the worst Prime Minister in British history by a considerable margin.
Her laughable stupidity combined with her completely unwarranted arrogance are obvious to all. If she doesn’t want to be made fun of then she should keep quiet and stop trying to justify her catastrophic premiership. Just go away!
But the main issue is of course how she became Prime Minister. The swivel eyed loons who make up the Tory party membership have literally no business choosing the party leader. Anyone who understands the British constitution knows that.
Well, that’s a turn up for the books – someone on the Left saying there was a worse PM than Thatcher!
The swivel eyed loons who make up the Tory party membership have literally no business choosing the party leader. Anyone who understands the British constitution knows that.
Eh? You should stick to insulting people and being thought an idiot. Once you start making substantive comments, you remove all doubt.
“The hounding of Liz Truss makes little sense“. It’s fun though.
Some people put up a rude banner, so Truss whined and ran away. Thatcher never whined or ran away, and Farage didn’t when physically attacked. Truss is a gutless nothing.
The nasty and wholly adolescent Left gleefully emboldened by Guardian newspaper journalists and editors.
It’s puerile!!!