The lettuce could have done a better job than Liz Truss’s Ten Years to Save the West
“What the actual fuck?” was Liz Truss’s response when Michael Gove told her he’d decided to betray Boris Johnson and stand himself for Tory leader. Those who read her new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West, may have a similar response.
Truss went from a comprehensive school in Leeds to Merton College, Oxford, from Shell PLC to parliament and then to Number 10. This may suggest a degree of intellectual and political capacity. There is, however, no evidence of either in her political memoir.
Right wing commentators are, unsurprisingly, predisposed to like Truss’s robotic defence of the free market. Although The Telegraph newspaper’s description of this turgid text as a “Riotous Romp” is bizarre by any partisan standards.
In contrast, Andrew Rawnsley of The Observer called it a “whingeing, unintentionally hilarious and scapegoating rant”. But there is more to say about this cliche ridden, selfish exercise in self-justification.
Truss cheerfully reveals her own incapacity to grasp basic facts. She decries the money spent on bat bridges over a new road through her constituency. Truss appears to imagine bats wandering around looking for little bridges to crawl over. A quick google search would have told her that “bridges” are metal structures which help bats to navigate their way over high-sided traffic.
And Truss is desperate to drop the names of the rich and powerful. She muses on how Joe Biden remembered her “blue eyes” even though both wore Covid masks on their only previous meeting. Now, I’m not sure what Truss’s mask looked like, but mine only covered my mouth.
Truss confronts all challenges, whether big or small with the same blinkered, martial zeal. China? Freeze it out of the world economy. Vladimir Putin? End the lily-livered appeasement. Badgers? Cull them. Truss apparently relished leading a badger cull, describing how she shouted down a walkie talkie, “Go out there and deliver—you can do this! This is important for the country!”
The country needs dead badgers. Lots of them. Presumably because badgers undermine the West.
The “West has lost its way”, its institutions are riddled with appeasers and cowed by lefty “agent officials” who’re determined to allow tyranny to thrive. The Conservatives have also lost their way, propelled by short term political popularity, lacking the grit and resolve necessary to resolving difficult questions.
Even the country has lost its way. “When a society becomes rich enough, there is a risk that it becomes decadent and stops trying so hard,” she writes. As an explanation for the decline of British capitalism, this is somewhere between unconvincing and total pants.
Truss describes how the antidote to all this insidious “woke” nonsense lies with bold politicians—she uses the words bold and boldness 29 times. We need more politicians who are instinctively anti-establishment, natural disrupters—more Liz Trusses in fact.
In 2012 Truss was appointed as a junior minister in the Department for Education, where she recalls senior officials regarded her as a naive junior minister of little consequence. She set about proving them right. In all her ministerial jobs Truss courageously took on various blobs and vague “vested interests”—and she lost every time.
Truss positions herself as one of the right wingers trying to pose as anti-establishment. There are so many these days it’s a wonder there is anyone left running the establishment. The problem for the aspiring Tory “disrupters” is that their party has been in office for the last 14 years—and for most of the last 100 years.
The much-lamented decline of Britain as an economic and political force on the world stage has occurred under Conservative administrations. Successive Tory governments have completely failed to reverse the long-term lack of growth in the economy and the decline in public services.
So, to pose as anti-establishment means identifying the establishment as someone else. It’s the green zealots, those pesky Trots in the civil service and leftie education experts with their childish rainbow logos. It’s the “watermelon” NGOs—green on the outside, pink on the inside—and CINOs—Conservative in Name Only.
Truss particularly hates the environmentalists and their “unstoppable bandwagon”, or “juggernaut”. She rebukes those Tory MPs at the Cop26 climate conference who were too busy taking selfies with Greta Thunberg to discuss policies. Who knew?
Truss had so many enemies, but very few friends. She is always outside looking in, never in the loop, without a clue about what was really happening. She is “blindsided”. She “hadn’t realised quite how the legal establishment works”. She “was in a minority of one, yet again”. The Treasury “should have warned” her.
But Truss was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her one lucky break came when she stood for the Tory leadership against the only Tory MP even less popular than her—Rushi Sunak. And that stroke of luck, as her husband warned her, ended in tears.
Today, Truss clearly wants to ingratiate herself with Donald Trump. She decries those who sneer at him and right wing populism more generally. The truth, Truss tells us, is that political parties do need to be popular.
Unfortunately for Truss, so do their leaders. Truss complains repeatedly that she was not given a fair chance to implement her policies, policies for which she had zero democratic mandate. She was elected by an unrepresentative white, old, and rich Tory party. Those whose lives were torn apart by her ideological fanaticism for free markets never had a chance either.
Truss’s 44-day premiership was a potent symbol that the Tories have run out of credit and out of touch with reality.
Liz Truss, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room (Biteback Publishing) April 2024
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