- Liz Truss is Britain’s shortest-serving PM. She resigned 49 days after she entered office.
- Truss announces new book – Ten Years To Save the West, suggesting she will soon return to public life.
- She blames her failed premiership on a lack of support for Conservative ideas.
- She will be remembered for her disastrous mini-budget that led to a sharp fall in the value of the pound as markets panicked.
- Truss went into hiding causing more panic as it appeared the government had no idea what it was doing.
- Then came the U-turns, the painful media appearances, and then a fracking vote that ended in chaos – and ended her premiership.
Liz Truss has written a book about her catastrophic 49 days in office
Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss, has written a book about her 49 days in office. And no one is really sure why.
This country has endured more than 13 years of Tory governments, experiencing years of austerity, economic turmoil and social divisions, and on top of that, we now get to hear the thoughts of the woman who sent the markets into meltdown amid a spiralling cost of living crisis and standards of living in apparent freefall.
Liz Truss – the woman who was outlasted by a lettuce, the woman who almost crashed the economy, resigned from office less than two months after she entered it.
Many are wondering if she could really have enough to write an entire book and if she does, why on earth would she want to remind anyone about her time in office? This is the leader who recorded the lowest-ever prime minister approval rating in the history of Britain.
‘Ten Years to Save the West’
Her book sounds like a disaster in the making. According to an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Truss blames a lack of “support for Conservative ideas.”
A lack of support for Conservative ideas?!
What on earth does the former prime minister mean a lack of support for Tory ideas?! She was a Conservative prime minister in a Conservative government in a country that has voted Tory for four consecutive general elections. So far, that’s 13 years of support for Conservative ideas.
According to the Guardian, the book is being touted as a warning against authoritarianism and the threat from “fashionable ideas propagated by the global left.” She makes it clear she blames “the global left” for ruining her time in office.
In her Mail on Sunday interview, she suggests that ideas like “redistributionism, business being bad, the anti-growth people like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil” have dominated politics over the last decade.
She goes on to warn of persistent low growth and argues that Western culture is “being questioned, even basic things like human biology”.
Liz Truss complains about the liberal left:
“If you look at the knots in which people tie themselves in western politics about whether somebody with a penis is a man or not, it shows how effective unfortunately these people have been.”
She then goes on to complain about taxes being too high and the government being too big:
“We are not going to get a dynamic economy if half of every pound spent is being spent by the government.”
So what’s a ‘small government’?
Right-wing Conservatives like Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman believe in a ‘small government’ – which means they don’t fund public services (exceptions made for the military, the police etc.)
Another factor of small government is the idea that politicians cannot do anything about the economy. They want the public to view it as an all-powerful thing that cannot be controlled by our direct influences, and that all that can be done is reduce taxes and pray it all turns out okay in the end.
“It’s fitting that a vote on fracking destroyed Liz Truss’s government. It sums up the self-harm of prioritising free-market principles above all else
The New Statesman
With that being said, when Truss came into office, she did a load of big-C Conservative stuff, causing the economy to have a meltdown. A contradiction that left the party’s economic credibility in tatters.
Despite what she says, Truss had all the support for Tory ideas. It wasn’t a lack of support for Tory ideas that derailed her premiership, but instead the impact of her ideas that triggered her downfall.
Mini-budget: disaster strikes
The infamous Liz Truss mini-budget will go down in British political history. She wanted to overhaul the high-tax, high-spend approach that she had accused Rishi Sunak of adopting during his time as Chancellor. She ordered the newest occupant of No 11 – Kwasi Kwarteng to remould the economy.
The Guardian recaps the mini-budget disaster, saying:
The mini-budget was pencilled in for Friday 23 September, the final sitting day of the Commons before recess. Labour’s autumn conference would begin two days later and Truss thought the statement would “blow them out of the water”, leaving the opposition facing uncomfortable questions about whether they would support this tax cut or that.
Kwarteng’s team privately feared that the size of the statement was ballooning. At first, it was a vehicle to implement Truss’s campaign promises of reversing the planned national insurance and corporation tax rises. But new measures kept being added at Truss’s behest: investment zones, scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses and – most controversially – abolishing the top rate of income tax.
This last measure had been discussed by Truss and Kwarteng over the summer, but they had not intended to announce it so soon. Truss was keen to use the honeymoon period that she thought would be afforded to them to “go big”, but there was disbelief among Tory MPs when the details emerged.
Jitters had already set in because of the refusal to formally badge the announcement as a budget. This was a deliberate tactic taken by No 10 because doing so would have involved the Office for Budget Responsibility producing its own analysis and forecasts on the plans. Truss viewed the OBR as part of the “economic establishment” and had already sacked the most senior civil servant in the Treasury, Tom Scholar.
The Guardian’s Aubrey Allegretti Senior political correspondent
Over 26 minutes, Kwarteng delivered the budget to the Commons, with many MPs silent, looking shocked by the news.
Soon after the mini-budget was announced, the pound had fallen to a 37-year low.
Following the fallout from the mini-budget, the markets went into a frenzy. It sparked a run on the pound and fears of sharply higher borrowing costs. Worse, it precipitated a crisis in the UK pensions industry.
It all ended in chaos, as much of the British public predicted
Kwarteng was soon sacked, the Tory-supporting newspapers turned on the PM: the consensus was her time would be soon up.
Despite her writing a book about her as leader of the country, Liz Truss should never have been given the keys to No 10. She simply doesn’t know how to lead.
Amid the market turmoil, Truss went into hiding for a few days. She reappeared to deliver a few awful interviews and then sat ghost-like in the Commons as her new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt tore up her plans and began the many, many u-turns her government will be remembered for.
Truss should never have been PM
The media, think tanks and the Tories have been feeding extreme right-wing nonsense on this country for years. It’s how someone like Liz Truss, who was always too incompetent for No 10, gets elected as PM in the first place.
Her mistake ended up being, accidentally, the biggest reaction to right-wing British politics in decades. It’s not that you can’t feed the British public right-wing nonsense, it’s about knowing how to pace yourself. You’ve got to drip-feed your nonsense, not ram it down our throats.
The final act that called time on Liz Truss’s premiership was a Commons vote on fracking. MPs were unsure if it was a confidence vote, there were accusations of MPs being manhandled and crying. The Tory whip Wendy Morton and her deputy Craig Whittaker, tried to quit on the spot – it all ended in chaos, as much of the British public predicted.