Book review: Truss diatribe is underdeveloped, contradictory, and offers little insight

During the recent UK election campaign, Liz Truss was the invisible woman, both weirdly familiar and completely unknowable and getting a sense of who she really is from this book is also difficult

Liz Truss departing Conservative Campaign Headquarters in London after she became the new Conservative party leader and the next British prime minister in September 2022.

• Ten Years to Save the West 
• Liz Truss 
• Biteback, £20 

It's definitely better than what the lettuce wrote. 

The strange thing about reading Liz Truss’s semi-memoir, semi-polemic is the sense of secondhand embarrassment, a sort of squirminess I couldn’t shake throughout.

For political anoraks on a downer after the excitement of the UK and the French elections, there is a way to keep the party going — by finding out just exactly why former prime minister Liz Truss lost her seat in a historically safe Conservative constituency, South West Norfolk. 

From a majority of over 26,000 in the last election, Truss was beaten to the seat by just 630 votes, losing out to the Labour candidate.

During the campaign, she was the invisible woman, both weirdly familiar and completely unknowable. 

Sky News attempted to track her down but failed. Footage of her at the count showed that familiar set jaw of a person determined not to show her feelings, one we know so well from her disastrous time at the UK’s helm.

In a sort of post-covid dream sequence, Liz Truss arose as if from nowhere to become prime minister of the UK. 

She had been a minister for 10 years, but as she admits, largely without impact. 

Her fall was much faster than her ascent, with her 44-day premiership the shortest in history, leaving massive mortgage interest rate rises and a new monarch in her wake.

This book, Ten Years to Save the West, isn’t sure what it is. 

A memoir would have been far more interesting, with little details about how Downing Street functions (not very well — there are no domestic staff, and Ocado thought her husband’s order to 10 Downing Street was a prank) and what happens in the background of a monarch’s death providing a taster of the fascinating book this could have been. 

It runs in chronological order through her upbringing in a leftwing household, brief stint as a young Lib Dem, then her rise through the Tory Party ranks and botched attempt at introducing a radical budget and ends with her ouster from Downing Street, but rather than memoir it is presented as a polemic and a plea to ‘real Conservatives’ to help her save the West.

From what, precisely, is the question she fails to answer.

Former prime minister Liz Truss departs after losing her Norfolk South West seat to the Labour Party, at Alive Lynnsport in King's Lynn, Norfolk, during the count in the 2024 UK General Election. File picture: Jacob King/PA 

In this diatribe against civil servants, technocrats (the Brexit-era bogeyman word ‘expert’ is noticeably missing, almost as if find and replace had been used to insert technocrat everywhere she really wanted to say expert), ‘unaccountable elites’ (mainly judges), ‘wokeism’ ‘radical environmentalism’ and ‘leftism’, Truss identifies a cabal determined to work undemocratically against the will of the people.

Said will of the people — embodied by Truss herself, even when she contradictorily admits her policies are bound to be “unpopular” — is vague. 

She is against taxes, ‘wokeism’ and the ‘leftist agenda’, and virulently anti-China and anti-Russia.

She hits out at all the tropes of the far right — NGOs, quangos, human rights lawyers, international organisations, the environmental movement, and even ‘trans activists’ — but fails to identify which Western values she is so keen on protecting, besides free markets and free speech. 

Her definition of free markets, however, involves major protections for British manufacturing, something she seems unaware that her idol Margaret Thatcher more or less destroyed.

In her foreign policy, there is some sense of the old-fashioned Conservative. 

She makes some reasonable points about protecting Western values from undemocratic China and from terrorist states like Russia and Iran. 

Her take that these dictatorships have been emboldened by international organisations is not entirely wrong, but her enthusiastic endorsement of Trumpian Republicanism is yet another failure to follow her own logic to a conclusion.

Part of her book tour has seen her on stage with some of America’s foremost conspiracy theorists at a CPAC event last March. 

Much of this book shares common ground with Project 2025, the latest wheeze of the American right, which is purportedly aimed at dismantling state bureaucracy, but with an ultimate impact of utter political destabilisation. 

By allying herself with pro-Russia Trump purely on the grounds of being against taxes and wokeness, she contradicts the most sensible of her foreign policies.

Getting a sense of who Truss really is from this book is difficult. 

She’s matter of fact about the humiliation she felt at being unceremoniously defenestrated by her party after her disastrous mini-budget, but sees this as a victory for a cabal of leftist plotters in the UK Treasury, rather than a failure of her political nous. 

She has a rather childish view of being in charge — apparently, it’s quite difficult to ‘get things done’, even when you’re the boss — who’d have thunk it?

With the Tory clown car back in the garage for now, it’s unlikely we’ll see Truss back in electoral politics any time soon. 

But, given the meeting of minds she’s had with some of the most destructive forces in Western politics and her own overweening ambition, it’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of her.

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