Liz Truss is, by a country mile, the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister in history, in office for only forty-nine days. The Economist magazine (15th October 2022) calculated that the Truss premiership had “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce”, and the Daily Star newspaper proved that an actual lettuce could stay fresh throughout her entire term of office. (Harry Cole and James Healey wrote an excellent Truss biography, Out of the Blue.)
Truss has written a new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room (subtitled Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment in the US): “I could write a whole book identifying what went wrong, complaining about the unfairness of it all and justifying the choices I made. Maybe I will write that book one day.” But this isn’t that book.
In Ten Years to Save the West, Truss blames the collapse of the economy on everyone except herself. But in other respects, this is a particularly solipsistic memoir: when Queen Elizabeth II dies, for example, Truss asks: “Why me? Why now?” (Today’s episode of the Media Confidential podcast compares that reaction to newspaper editor Bob Edwards: when his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce hit a pedestrian, Edwards supposedly complained, “why does this always happen to me?”)
Summarising her premiership, Truss writes: “The whole experience as prime minister had been quite surreal and my resignation seemed like just another dramatic moment in a very strange film in which I had somehow been cast. Things had not worked out as I had expected.” That final sentence brings to mind Hirohito’s famous understatement, when his country surrendered in 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Truss has written a new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room (subtitled Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment in the US): “I could write a whole book identifying what went wrong, complaining about the unfairness of it all and justifying the choices I made. Maybe I will write that book one day.” But this isn’t that book.
In Ten Years to Save the West, Truss blames the collapse of the economy on everyone except herself. But in other respects, this is a particularly solipsistic memoir: when Queen Elizabeth II dies, for example, Truss asks: “Why me? Why now?” (Today’s episode of the Media Confidential podcast compares that reaction to newspaper editor Bob Edwards: when his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce hit a pedestrian, Edwards supposedly complained, “why does this always happen to me?”)
Summarising her premiership, Truss writes: “The whole experience as prime minister had been quite surreal and my resignation seemed like just another dramatic moment in a very strange film in which I had somehow been cast. Things had not worked out as I had expected.” That final sentence brings to mind Hirohito’s famous understatement, when his country surrendered in 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”