It’s quite unusual, the sight of a former prime minister for whom everything went wrong, explaining in public why she was right all along. In her defence, Liz Truss could have no precedent, as no one has ever flamed out as badly as she did.
“I knew I was right” isn’t exactly what she said at the Institute for Government event this week. She went much further, pacing with a witchfinder’s authority, giving shape to the lefty sleeper agents who have been poisoning the economic well since the beginning of the Thatcherite project. It’s compelling to wonder what her motivation is. If, as she plainly believes, the reds have seeped into every institution – including her own party – and will subvert every plan for growth, what’s the point of addressing us all? Surely something more decisive is called for, like a ducking stool?
Truss’s free-market fundamentalism is no longer a theoretical risk. She’s already crashed the stock market, the foreign exchange market and the bond market. She tested her proposition in exam conditions and discovered that the only way to make it work is to instantly reverse it. When she speaks, experts line up to ridicule her. Is she auditioning as leader of the opposition in a defenestrated, re-radicalised Conservative party? Where’s her self-awareness, her sense of shame? But, much more pressingly, when will we ever learn?
It’s been so intoxicating, leader after leader, to marvel at, analyse, and psychoanalyse their extraordinary behaviour, when the most any of that will tell us is what we already know: let’s not choose them again. The far more useful questions are what’s failing within government, in its surrounding institutions, and what other actors are at play. What end-of-days dishevelment has occurred to put Truss in any frame at all?
Rishi Sunak delivers part of the answer, with his plans to row back on net zero pledges. I had to check whether I’d slipped into a coma, or whether it really was only the weekend when he vowed his determination to phase out petrol and diesel cars, in defiance of the climate emergency-sceptic wing of his party who have seemingly, in the intervening three days, managed to change his mind entirely.
The most colourless prime minister, with an even mid-sized base of support from MPs relying on him for no more than their next quarter of employment, should be able to freeze out his predecessor. Yet Sunak’s cocktail of qualities is so rare – simultaneously inert and volatile, technocratic and fantastical – that he’s swinging blind at his own shadow. He doesn’t have time to put down his enemies.
The rightwing press, meanwhile, remains radicalised, and offers the illusion at each of Truss’s pronouncements that her critics are merely part of a pluralistic media ecosystem that contains just as many commentators who think she’s the opposite of a “failed, incompetent clown” (per the economist Danny Blanchflower). On the day of the speech, Sherelle Jacobs in the Daily Telegraph averred, outlandishly, that every past prime minister but Truss had wasted “into tragic figures”. She added: “There’s something slightly different about Truss. Perhaps because she wasn’t in office long enough to go mad.” There was a time when this proposition – that lasting only 49 days as prime minister was good, actually, because it left you sane to fight another day – would have been just too daft to admit into public debate.
Truss’s faithful crowd included Nigel Farage, David Frost, Patrick Minford and Matthew Elliott, grunting with loyal disapproval at any hint of criticism, but much more remarkably, showing absolutely no embarrassment on their own behalf. The severance of cause and consequence, the refutation of any responsibility for observable disasters, started not with Truss but with the post-Brexit brass neck of political rhetoric.
All these figures adopted a force mentality about leaving the EU as soon as it had happened: any observable negative effect was merely because we hadn’t left it hard enough. This position allows for no possible refinement, and no new information can modify it. Brexit, being the people’s overwhelming will, became the nation’s destiny. If any of these figures admitted their role as the architects of this plan, they’d have piped down as soon as the building started falling down. But they’ve framed themselves as something more like its priests, and their faith is all the justification they need.
In my naivety, I was surprised that the Institute for Government went along with the plan at all. For a similarly evangelical speech in Taiwan, Truss was paid £80,000 by the Prospect Foundation. The IfG purports to be a much more sober, impartial organisation; its explicit purpose is to “improve government effectiveness through research and analysis”. It’s no overstatement to call Truss the opposite of everything they stand for, and yet, still counting in old money, they must have been blinded to that by the stardust of her nanosecond in office. That is possibly the most pressing lesson of the week: reasonable people need to wake up.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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