Citizen Truss

Spare a thought for poor Liz Truss. A prime ministerial stint so disastrous that the search function on Conservative Home has been set to show results for her name only before August 2022. What does one do when your time at the top is synonymous with calamity, you're a national laughing stock, and you were unceremoniously dumped from your formerly super safe true blue seat? Lesser mortals would retire to private life and reflect before re-emerging when popular memory has faded somewhat. But this is Truss we're talking about.

Between the 60s and the 90s, breaking America was considered the ultimate badge of success for waves of British bands. Since Thatcher, it's been a goal of many a politician too. Now Truss is a private citizen on a massive ex-PM's pension, she can make a bid for more fame and fortune over the water. And so she's been haunting the Republican convention in Milwaukee and grabbing a photo opp with Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee, James "JD" Vance. But, unfortunately for her, she's had to compete with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage for the limelight. So no audience with the Donald, but she did get to talk about shower heads. Her other substantive intervention was to criticise Joe Biden, and copying Farage's arguments, said his language was to blame for the assassination attempt on Trump. At least she hasn't gone around wearing a bandage on her ear.

What is Truss trying to accomplish? She published her ridiculous scaremongering book about the decline of the West. Gone all out on absurdist defences of her record. Notoriously hobnobbed with Steve Bannon, where she prattled about being a victim of the "deep state". We live in an attention economy, and for her to remain a player - seeing as any path back through the Conservative Party is closed (for now) - she has to hang out with other prominent right wingers and say (relatively) controversial things. Such as arguing her policies would have worked if it wasn't for those pesky Bank of England kids, or disavowing all responsibility for the general election catastrophe. But now she's out of politics, whatever attenuated constraints were on her have now evaporated. What we can expect are more efforts at hanging around with Trump, perhaps even taking on a job if he wins in November. The Tory leadership contest can expect unhelpful interventions and endorsements. More palling around with Farage is inevitable. Whatever she does, it's going to be excruciating and annoying because Truss enjoys enough profile to ensure the media will carry on following her adventures in attention seeking.

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