When she resigned as prime minister in 2022 after her disastrous mini-budget, everyone thought Liz Truss would disappear. Not a bit of it. She’s earned more than $630,000 from speeches, has a new book out and is a favourite of America’s alt-right. So what’s next?
A few weeks after Liz Truss was unceremoniously bundled out of No 10 and became the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, I bumped into one of her Downing Street advisers. The shell-shocked aide was still struggling to process what had happened during her boss’s whirlwind premiership. “Liz is the only woman I know in politics who has absolutely no impostor syndrome whatsoever,” she said. “She could do with a bit more of it, to be honest.”
When Truss resigned in October 2022 after just 44 days in office, collapsing more quickly than an iceberg lettuce, the economy was in meltdown and the Tory party was in crisis. Britain was in mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth. All the old certainties had been shaken; the pandemic was still hovering. Rishi Sunak took over, promising to calm the chaos and restore trust in government, but the country is once again in recession and the Conservatives’ poll rating has not recovered. Many voters, who are paying the price in higher mortgage interest rates, remain as furious as the Tory MPs who look set to lose their seats at the next general election.
Instead of retreating after her resignation, Truss has gone on the offensive. She has doubled down on the ideological mantras that were behind the disastrous mini-Budget that led to her downfall. Last month she launched a new movement called Popular Conservatism, a contradiction in terms if the opinion polls are to be believed, particularly on the subject of Truss herself who has a net approval rating of minus 60.
Cheered on by the soap star Holly Valance and her husband, the property developer Nick Candy (who two days later announced he would in fact be supporting Labour at the election), Truss denounced the “net zero zealots”, the “wokeism” on the school curriculum and the idea that “in our corporate sector there seems to be confusion about basic biological issues like, ‘What is a woman?’ " She vowed to “galvanise our conservative forces” but Tory MPs could not help noticing that the abbreviated version of the name, PopCon, autocorrects on iPhones to “popcorn”, which somehow seems appropriate for an organisation that is only adding to the impression that the Tory party is turning from a political drama into a horror movie.
As Liz Truss: the Sequel goes global, the former prime minister has embarked on a world tour, promoting theories about the “deep state” that she says thwarted her every move in government. In a recent speech to supporters of Donald Trump in Maryland, she said that “the West has been run by the left for too long” and that conservatives like her were operating in a “hostile environment”. The Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the International Monetary Fund, the Economist and the Financial Times were all, she suggested, part of a sinister left-wing cabal promoting something called “wokeonomics”. “We have to understand how deep the vested interests of the establishment are, how hard they will fight and how unfairly they will fight in order to get their way,” she said. “That is what I learnt from my time as a government minister and my time in No 10.”
Next month she has a book out called — with incredible chutzpah — Ten Years to Save the West. The subtitle in the UK offers readers Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room. In the United States, the strapline promises that she is Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism and the Liberal Establishment, a surprising pitch for a politician who has always been a passionate supporter of the free market and international trade.
Her former cabinet colleagues do not know whether to be angry or amused. One senior minister says, “She’s drunk the Kool-Aid and started to believe her own propaganda, which is always incredibly unwise. For her to crash the economy, destroy the Tory party’s reputation for economic competence, be expelled from office and then to express neither contrition nor self-doubt is frankly weird.”
A Tory strategist who worked closely with Truss in government is even blunter. “It’s f***ing insane. When she said she became prime minister and forces were out to stop her, it’s bollocks. She delivered a budget in complete secrecy with no civil service input. There was no one stopping her — that was the problem. She overrode the civil service, demonstrating the amount of power she had. She knows this is bollocks. Is she lying or has she had a breakdown in front of our faces? That’s what I can’t work out. Is she trying to flog her book and make herself relevant again?” The former PM is, this previously loyal aide says, “a complete and utter embarrassment. There’s no reason why Liz, who was a competent minister in many departments, needs to crash and burn. She’s chosen to make it so that if she comes back it’s as an anarchist rather than a stateswoman.”
The former cabinet minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who attended the launch of PopCon, argues that it is a noble thing for former prime ministers to continue to contribute to politics. “I admire both Liz Truss and Theresa May who, having been in government, feel they have still got an obligation to public life. I think this is very valuable for the body politic,” he tells me. “The ideas that Liz is generating are an important contribution to the discussions around how the Conservative Party should operate in future and PopCon represents views held by large swathes of the electorate that many people feel aren’t properly represented in parliament.”
He does not, however, agree with Truss that there is a liberal establishment in Whitehall seeking to thwart the will of elected politicians. “I don’t think there’s a deep state. I don’t think there are any conspiracies because the British state isn’t clever enough and the civil service is far too leaky for there to be some great panjandrum running everything.”
Is she lying or has she had a breakdown in front of our faces?
Truss has never been gripped by self-doubt, nor afraid of courting publicity. She is the only cabinet minister I have interviewed who asked for a selfie at the end of the conversation, which she promptly posted on Instagram. On a trip to Australia as trade secretary, she kicked aside a tight schedule of ministerial meetings to ensure that there was time to get herself photographed on a bicycle holding a Union Jack umbrella against the backdrop of Sydney Harbour Bridge. David Jones, a Conservative MP who backed her for leader, said after she resigned, “She’s a fighter, not a quitter. She will simply continue.”
Even by her standards, though, her diary since leaving Downing Street has been frenetic. At the same time as preparing to launch a new political movement and writing a book, Truss has been busy on the lecture circuit. According to the House of Commons register of members’ interests she earned more than £300,000 (about NZ$631,000) for speeches last year, most of them abroad. In February 2023, she received £65,751 for a speaking engagement in Mumbai, as well as flights and accommodation for her and a staff member. In March she was paid £6443 for a speech in Tokyo and in May she earned £80,000 for a four-hour event in Taiwan. In June, she collected £32,000 for speaking in Switzerland and participated in a discussion in Dublin for which she was paid a further £32,000. In August, another £32,000 came in for an event in London. In October there were speaking engagements in Houston and Washington for which she received £16,172 and £15,834. In December she got £30,000 for speaking at a conference in London.
Sometimes it is easier for former prime ministers to get a hearing in other countries than their own. But it is Truss’s recent foray into Trumpland, when she visited the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, that has provoked the most controversy, even among her allies. “The very basis of western civilisation is being undermined,” she claimed. “In Britain we are one of the few countries that still has a Conservative government but the left did not accept that they had lost at the ballot box. Instead they’ve been weaponising our court system to stop us deporting illegal immigrants, they’ve been using the administrative state to make sure that conservative policies are thwarted and they’ve been pushing their woke agenda through our schools, through our campuses and even our corporations.”
As well as declaring to a half-empty hall that conservatives needed a “bigger bazooka” to blast through the left-wing establishment, she turned on her own tribe. “There are too many Conservatives who have gone along with some of these left-wing ideas,” she told the delegates dressed in Make America Great Again regalia. “In Britain we call them Cinos — Conservatives in name only. In America you call them Rinos — Republicans in name only — but it’s the same tendency. It’s people who think, ‘I want to be popular. I don’t want to upset people. I don’t want to look like a mean person. I want to attend nice dinner parties in London or Washington DC. I want my friends to like me. I don’t want to cause trouble.’ Well, what those people are doing is they are compromising and they are triangulating and they are losing the argument.”
Some MPs pointed out that it is the job of politicians to be popular so they can win elections, but Truss insisted she would fight for “conservative values… even if it’s not popular, even if people say they don’t like it, because I know it’s right”.
To the horror of her colleagues in parliament, Truss then cosied up to Nigel Farage, the erstwhile Brexit Party leader, and bantered with Steve Bannon, the political strategist who is accused of whipping up the Capitol rioters in 2021. She said she would welcome Farage back into the Conservative party to “help turn our country around”. And she stood silent as Bannon described Tommy Robinson, the leader of the far-right English Defence League, as a “hero”. Instead of challenging him, she invited Bannon to come to Britain and “sort us out” after he had fixed the US. Sajid Javid, the former Chancellor, was among many Conservative MPs who were appalled by her failure to tackle Bannon over Robinson, tweeting, “I’d hope every MP would confront such a statement head on. Liz should really know better.”
One source close to Truss suggested that she did not properly hear what Bannon had said, but other allies admitted it had been unwise to agree to a televised interview with a controversial alt-right provocateur in the first place. “He’s well informed but a fruit loop,” argues one MP who is generally supportive of Truss. “I would advise Liz to be very cautious about dealing with him. I don’t want him coming here. I don’t think he can sort out America and he certainly can’t sort out Britain.”
A former adviser to Truss believes she is rapidly undermining any credibility she has left. “I don’t have any personal animosity towards Liz, but like most people who worked for her I was pretty disturbed by her appearance at CPAC. I find it unrecognisable from the person that many of us worked for. A lot of what she’s saying about Russia and China is right, but she’s never going to get a hearing because everyone sees her ranting and raving about conspiracy theories.”
The businessman Iain Anderson, who supported Truss for the leadership and was appointed by her as the government’s first LGBT business champion, was equally disappointed. He recently produced a report for Keir Starmer having quit the Tory party in despair after more than 40 years. “I don’t think there’s anything Conservative about attacks on the so-called deep state,” he says. “Conservativism is about economic competence and stability, not trashing British institutions. In business, people are just nonplussed.”
The Labour Party cannot believe its luck. At prime minister’s questions on February 28, Starmer chose to focus on Truss, suggesting the Tories had “become the political wing of the Flat Earth Society” and been taken over by the “tin-foil hat brigade”. “In search of fame and wealth, she’s taken to slagging off and undermining Britain at every opportunity,” he said of the former prime minister before asking Rishi Sunak, “Why is he allowing her to stand as a Tory MP at the next election?”
The prime minister tried to turn the tables by referring to the Labour leader’s support for Jeremy Corbyn, hardly a flattering comparison for Truss. Privately, many Conservative grandees see a parallel between Corbyn and Truss. In an echo of Peter Mandelson’s suggestion that the Labour left should be put in a “sealed tomb”, one veteran Tory MP says the Truss era “needs to be sealed in a box and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. This is all very dangerous for the Conservative Party and also actually for Liz as well. She’s nuclear fissile material and the parliamentary party is incredibly wary of her.”
She’s nuclear fissile material and the parliamentary party is incredibly wary of her.
Those who know her best say Truss appears increasingly isolated at Westminster. She has fallen out with her old political friends and rarely speaks to Kwasi Kwarteng, who was her chancellor, or Thérèse Coffey, who was her deputy prime minister. “It’s sad really. I think she’s being manipulated,” says one former aide. Another senior Tory detects a “narcissistic” streak in the lack of contrition. “It’s all self-interest. The rest of us are here trying to do the right thing by our country and she’s there busy finding pretend enemies. There’s a kind of mania to her behaviour and people are taking advantage of it.”
David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, says he refused to back Truss for the leadership despite agreeing with many of her free-market ideas because he thought she would “give low taxes a bad name”. He is convinced that her time in government and her recent interventions prove him right. “You can’t blame the actions of the international markets on the ‘deep state’,” he says. “One of the effects of the Tory party fragmenting is each piece becomes an echo chamber on its own. Liz Truss is becoming a travelling echo chamber, but the trouble is she’s going to groupings further and further to the right. She is travelling ideologically as well as literally. They all think of themselves as heirs to Margaret Thatcher but Thatcher would be spinning in her grave. She knew how to bridge the divides within the party rather than exacerbate all the factions.”
A former special adviser who worked with Truss thinks the trauma of her ejection from office has driven her further to the right on cultural issues. “The analogy is with people who have been cancelled. They tend to double down and become even more extreme in their views. There’s something about that sense of being publicly repudiated that pushes people to become more defensive. It’s about human psychology.”
David Gauke, the former chief secretary to the Treasury, has known Truss for almost 30 years, since before they were both elected as MPs. He thinks she must continue to harbour political ambitions. “She’s still young; she’s trying to carve out a role for herself,” he says. “Despite the humiliating period in which she was prime minister and that ending so spectacularly badly, she’s convinced herself and is now trying to convince other people that it wasn’t her fault. I think it’s a combination of trying to rationalise what happened to her but also a sense that her race isn’t run. There’s a widespread expectation of a very heavy defeat at the next general election and an expectation from many that the party will move decisively in a rightwards direction, and in those circumstances there’s a place for people like Liz Truss to be very influential.”
Even Truss’s most avid supporters do not think she could return as leader, but they hope she could be a king or queen-maker in a future Conservative contest. Many believe the energetic return of Truss is part of a wider political shift. “It’s the Faragisation of the Tory party,” a former Downing Street strategist says. “Liz can see which way the wind is blowing. Farage could end up as the next leader but one. If Kemi [Badenoch] or Suella [Braverman] becomes leader then in he will come, and Nigel Farage isn’t anyone’s deputy.”
Amber Rudd, the former home secretary who sat around the cabinet table with Truss, is baffled by her new identity and alliances. “She’s so certain of herself. For most women it’s ‘on the one hand or the other’; for Liz it’s become ‘this is my truth’. I don’t think she was like that for the first 10 years or so [after she was elected]. I think she really did change. Everything got smashed up over Brexit, the guard rails were broken down and she reinvented herself. I think the 2010 Liz Truss would be surprised by the Liz Truss of 2024.”
Written by: Rachel Sylvester
© The Times of London
