Liz Truss

Leadership you can Truss.

How an Empire ends U.K. Politics

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“”I am a fighter, not a quitter.

—Truss to the House of Commons. She resigned as Prime Minister the next day.

“”Holding the world record for the fastest prime ministerial speedrun, Liz Truss managed to keep her claws in the country for only 44 days, and in that time managed to trigger a complete economic meltdown so bad that it basically killed the Queen.

—Big Nibbles

Liz Truss (b. Mary Elizabeth Truss) (1975–), AKA "Mis(s) Trust" or "the nation's substitute teacher", is a former Member of Parliament (MP) and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She became the leader of the governing Conservative Party on 5 September 2022 succeeding Boris Johnson and being appointed by Queen Elizabeth II the following day. She is the last Prime Minister sworn in by Queen Elizabeth II and the first Prime Minister sworn in by King Charles III. On 20 October 2022, Liz Truss announced her resignation, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. She was succeeded by Rishi Sunak.

Her politics has shown a steady rightward trend, from the Liberal Democrats, republicanism, and drug policy reform in her youth, through support for the European Union, to current right-wing positions under Theresa May and Boris Johnson and later as Prime Minister. She has been viewed as being part of the libertarian right as of 2022. As a result she has become known for her frequent U-Turns, so much so that she has been nicknamed "la Girouette de fer" (the Iron Weathervane) by the French media.

Life and early career

Truss began her political career as something of a centre-left firebrand. Her parents were on the left, in particular her mother Priscilla Truss, who was a prominent member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; her father John Truss was a mathematics professor who has been described by The Guardian as "left-leaning". Truss was born in Oxford, and also spent part of her childhood in Paisley, Scotland, and Leeds, England. In Leeds she attended Roundhay secondary school, which she has attempted to portray as a tough, inner-city school, but was actually in a leafy, Conservative-voting suburb.

She attended Merton College, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and was active in student politics in the Liberal Democrats, where she spoke out in favour of the abolition of the monarchy — something that would prove problematic when Queen Elizabeth II died a couple of days into her premiership. At the same time, she advocated for cannabis legalisation. She also showed an interest in the classical liberal economist Friedrich Hayek, who would perhaps remain a more lasting influence.

However, she joined the Conservatives in 1996. In 2000 she married Hugh O'Leary, an accountant whom she had met at a Conservative Party event; their marriage would survive an 18-month affair she had with party worker Mark Field.

She unsuccessfully contested a solidly Labour seat in Yorkshire in 2001, and after a hunt for a better seat, was elected for South West Norfolk in 2010.

As an MP

She started out as an economic right-winger, calling for low taxes and deregulation as founder of the Free Enterprise Group of MPs. She also co-wrote a pamphlet entitled Britannia Unchained, which blamed Britain's economic failures on workers being too lazy.

She held a junior role in the education department, and became environment secretary in 2014.

She argued for Remain in the Brexit referendum, but later did a U-turn to become a firm advocate of Europe getting to fuck.

She was briefly Justice Secretary under Theresa May. There she was criticised for failing to defend the political independence of the judiciary after the Daily Mail called them "Enemies of the People" for upholding the law about Brexit.

She then was moved to chief secretary to the Treasury (a junior role to the Chancellor of the Exchequer), which was seen as a demotion for her failings at the Justice department.

Truss supported Boris Johnson's leadership bid in 2019, and became international trade secretary and then foreign secretary, where she had to deal with the debate over the post-Brexit status of Northern Ireland, and the war in Ukraine. As international trade secretary she advocated for a reduction on tariffs on foreign steel imports, which would have damaged what remains of Britain's steel industry, but she was overruled.

Selection

The Conservative Party leadership selection process has two parts. Firstly MPs vote in a series of rounds of voting to eliminate all but the last two, then the last two go to a ballot of party members. In the latter, she beat Rishi Sunak by 81,326 votes to 60,339. For reference, the UK had a total population of 67 million in 2020, with somewhere around 46-48 million eligible voters, so Truss was elected with less than 0.2% of the electorate.

Premiership

The lettuce won.

“”Liz Truss has already secured her place in British political history. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She blew up her own government with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and she had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.

—The Economist, Leaders, "The Iceberg Lady", October 11 2022

Truss responded to rising fuel costs with a massive program of public sector borrowing to fund a subsidy of fuel prices, without trying to raise any additional money from a tax on energy companies and leaving it to the national debt and ultimately taxpayers to pick up all the bill.

The massive borrowing plan was followed two weeks later by a plan to ward off a recession with massive tax cuts (primarily for the wealthy) funded by government borrowing. British financial markets responded immediately and extremely negatively to the supply-side economics scheme: the British Pound dropped to a 37-year low, government bond rates rose (making borrowing more expensive), and the London Stock Exchange fell. The plan received a denunciation from the International Monetary Fund, who called on the government to re-evaluate. The widespread negative reaction of markets caused the Bank of England to take the unusual step of announcing that it would temporarily buy unlimited amounts of government bonds in order to stabilize the market. Art Laffer, author of the napkin-based Laffer curve, however did endorse Truss' plan. Who would have thought that someone would so quickly show that Boris Johnson was actually an icon of stability?

As PM Truss employed a number of figures linked to various secretive and extreme neoliberal think tanks and lobby groups, adding to her long-term relationship with the Institute of Economic Affairs. Her senior special adviser Ruth Porter worked for the IEA and Policy Exchange (which received money from Exxon and called for new laws against Extinction Rebellion). Her chief economic adviser Matthew Sinclair and interim press secretary Alex Wild were both employed at the TaxPayers' Alliance. Her political secretary, Sophie Jarvis, was head of government affairs at the Adam Smith Institute (another extreme neoliberal, minarchist organisation).

In the end, the "libertarian jihadist" approach of Truss that won over the largely older and affluent 172,000 members of the Conservative Party worked out as poorly as one would expect in the real world. During the summer of 2022, IEA member Mark Littlewood (who, after the Conservatives confirmed Truss as party leader, also predicted that Truss would be "the most radical British Prime Minister in over a century") predicted that there would be "fireworks" during Truss's term as she implemented the "supply side" economic so-called reforms that the IEA types desired at "breakneck speed". He certainly wasn't wrong — the "fireworks" tanked the market and the pound, necessitated the need for an emergency intervention from the Bank of England, and subsequently created a mutiny within the Conservative Party. Truss attempted to abruptly U-turn from her libertarian policy disaster and fire a sacrificial lamb (Treasury chief Kwasi Kwarteng) in an attempt to right the ship, but it was too late. On 20 October 2022, Truss resigned, a mere 45 days into her prime minister career. Her successor was Rishi Sunak, the runner up in the September 2022 Tory selection contest that Truss won.

Post premiership

Truss tries to convince Americans to follow her path of failure at the 2024 CPAC.

In early February 2023, Truss made her first major foray into politics since her premiership by writing a reflective article for the Daily Telegraph. Predictably, the article was less about soul-searching and more about blaming everything but the content of her policies. In the article, Truss claimed that she saw the leadership election as a mandate to deliver her bold (and disasterous) supply side economics at maximum speed, and implied that, when it comes to evaluating the impact of budgets, she put more trust in the forecasts of activist organizations, such as the IEA, over independent fiscal watchdogs such as the Office for Budget Responsibility (which in her view "tend(ed) to undervalue the benefits of low taxes and supply-side reforms for economic growth, and overvalue(d) the benefits of public spending.") Naturally, the failure of her policies was actually the fault of a "very powerful economic establishment", as well as the supposed failure of Tories to "make the arguments for a lower-tax, more deregulated economy".

One critic saw this column as proof that many Tories, despite the disaster of Truss's premiership, still clung onto "voodoo economics" fantasies such as the Laffer curve. The critic also noted that many Tories, including Truss, seem to fail to realize that the "very powerful economic establishment" that brought Truss down happened to be the exact free market that they supposedly idolize.

Still unrepentant about her budget disaster, in February 2024, Truss launched a campaign seeking to "galvanise" Britain's "secret Conservatives" and fight back against the "left wing extremists" she claimed had taken over Britain's institutions. This campaign was named the "Popular Conservatism movement". At the time of the launch, opinion polls suggested that Truss was one of the least popular politicians in the country.

Also in February 2024, Truss appeared at CPAC, where she bizarrely tried to align with America's culture war. During her speech at CPAC, which was peppered with buzzwords from the American political right like "woke", she attempted to blame all of her woes on the supposed leftist infiltration of "the deep state". (Never mind that at the time of her speech, the Tories had been in charge of the British government for the last 14 years.) Truss also shilled for an upcoming book of hers (which likely was the real reason for the CPAC speech.) Truss later appeared with Steve Bannon in an interview on an obscure far-right network called Real America's Voice, where she agreed with an Islamophobic conspiracy theory of Nigel Farage that was repeated by Bannon, and said nothing when Bannon praised the thuggish Tommy Robinson (founder of the English Defense League) as a "hero". These actions earned Truss condemnation from across the political spectrum in the UK.

The above book, Ten Years to Save the West, was published in April 2024, and further demonstrated her post-premiership plan of shilling for the global populist right, particularly the wingnut welfare circuit of American reactionaries. The subtitle of the book (Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room) was even re-titled in the US to include Republican buzzwords, becoming Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment. The US edition featured an endorsement from Ted Cruz, and included an American media blitz featuring appearances on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and a Heritage Foundation book launch event. Still blaming everyone but herself for her premiership disaster, the gossipy and whiny book included several faux pas. For instance, in order to illustrate a point about the Bank of England, Truss pulled a quote from the Internet that was falsely attributed to a member of the Rothschild banking family and put it in the book. As this fake quote had long been used in antisemitic conspiracy theories, British Jewish community organizations complained about it to the book's publisher (who agreed to remove the quote from future editions).

She also thinks that Blair (not herself) was the worst PM in history. While Blair had some controversial policies to say the least he did create a new league of Blairies and ran for a generation. Truss lasted less than a lettuce. Take your pick.

She lost her seat of SW Norfolk at the 2024 general election. Her seat was previously considered a Tory safe seat, but she failed to campaign for it, and it seems many of her constituents rejected her personally.

Views

London protesters against Liz Truss' failure to criticize Saudi Arabia's war crimes.

Environmentalism

One of the first problems as PM was the rising cost of gas, due in large part to the war in Ukraine and disputes with Russia. Rather than respond in an environmentally friendly way (encourage fuel efficiency by funding home insulation, support green energy, transition away from gas), she proposed a series of measures to increase reliance on fossil fuels. She ended a moratorium on fracking and called for more gas and oil exploration in the North Sea, and the green levy (a tax on fuel bills which funds alternative energy) was suspended. Explaining this behavior, after graduating from university, she worked as an industrial economist for four years for energy conglomerate Shell plc, a company well known for greenwashing.

Human rights

She has shown herself slightly less crazy on human rights than some Conservatives, shelving Boris Johnson-era plans to abolish the Human Rights Act. Although even this may not have been entirely liberal, as there was widespread concern in the Tories over Labour MP's Stella Creasy's idea to introduce an amendment to the Tory bill that would create a constitutional right to abortion. Clearly that had to be stopped. And there were also fears that if they had a Tory Bill of Rights, they would no longer be able to blame Labour's Human Rights Act if courts ruled against them.

While foreign secretary, she failed to raise human rights issues with other governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states: when asked by Labour MP Chris Bryant to name one time she had raised human rights with a Middle-Eastern leader she was unable to answer.

However, while foreign secretary she was credited with getting British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe out of an Iranian jail, even if she failed to impose sanctions on the people responsible. So that's one person she helped.

Military

The Russian invasion of Ukraine proved a good opportunity for her to get her war on, and she was a keen supporter of Ukraine.

Are you saying something Liz?

The necklace.

In 2019 after becoming International Trade Secretary, Truss notedly wears a gold necklace with a large round loop on the front. This necklace has raised a few eyebrows, as it is a coded symbol in the kink BDSM community for a submissive person. However this has been dismissed as nonsense, because it is a generic necklace from the high class jeweller Cartier that her husband bought for her as a present.

References

British Prime Ministers

Chamberlain (Con.) - Churchill (Con.) - Attlee (Lab.) - Churchill (Con.) - Eden (Con.) - Macmillan (Con.) - Douglas-Home (Con.) - Wilson (Lab.) - Heath (Con.) - Wilson (Lab.) - Callaghan (Lab.) - Thatcher (Con.) - Major (Con.) - Blair (Lab.) - Brown (Lab.) - Cameron (Con.) - May (Con.) - Johnson (Con.) - Truss (Con.) - Sunak (Con.) - Starmer (Lab.) (incumbent)