After winning the record for being the only UK Prime Minister with a shorter lifespan than a lettuce - and perhaps one of the most incompetent ones although the last few years have made that quite a competition - Liz Truss is back on the scene with a new book soon to come out called…drum roll…"Ten Years to Save the West".
It sounds like it’s exactly what you would guess from a title so trite and overdramatic it’ll make your eyes roll right out of your face. Yes, despite the fact that the UK has had a ludicrously performing government of the right for the past 13 - unlucky for some - years, apparently it’s all those sneaky communists (?) that are ruining everything.
…the rise of authoritarianism around the world and the adoption of fashionable ideas propagated by the global left give us barely a decade to preserve the economic and cultural freedom and institutions that the West holds so dear.
Absolutely unsurprisingly it seems like it’ll contain a good amount of that favourite hobby of the modern-day Conservative cosplayer: heart-felt worship of Thatcher.
The Mail on Sunday shares an interview, which even they seem to feel is a bit of a wild one at times.
Sitting incongruously beneath a picture of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara bizarrely blended with Lord Nelson – a nod by Norfolk MP Ms Truss to the county’s most famous son – she launches a passionate defence of her own attempted revolution, which died when the markets crashed in the wake of her radical tax-cutting Budget.
Why was she such a failure? Not because, heaven forbid, she made any serious missteps in her short reign of power. It’s everyone else’s fault for not loving her ideas enough.
…the fundamental problem was there wasn’t enough support for Conservative ideas…
from, once again, a very much majority Conservative government she was part of.
Tin foil hat time:
…the ‘global Left’ were in control. ‘Ideas like redistributionism, business being bad, the anti-growth people like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil – those are the ideas that have made the running in the last decade,’ she says.
Yes, sure, everyone loves Extinction Rebellion and hates businesses too much. Those closet Commies are just….something something…such that it simply appears that people dislike ER and the British titans of business are getting unspeakably richer each day whilst everyone else sits in a cost of living crisis.
‘You’ve got the global Left which Biden is obviously a key part of, but also the global environmental movement, the Greta Thunbergs of this world, the anti-capitalist movement, and they have been very effective in pushing what is politically acceptable.’
I guess I missed the news that Greta is the current PM of the UK and that capitalism has been overthrown. Presumably the state now owns the means of production I’m typing this on. I mean, some would say that her desperate premiership did more than the rest of us combined to discredit free market economics and their animal spirits. They certainly didn’t like her; the crashing of the British economy being of course much of the reason she had to go.
She’s also actively campaigning for “a Republican” to win the next US election, which is perhaps a little surprising after the fuss her treasured Boris made about “allies and friends” getting involved in each other’s election campaigns.
Inevitably the typical new-levels-of-desperation-provoked Conservative fixation on US-style culture war issues raise their head. She’s apparently terrified that the West is about to be destroyed whilst “our culture is being questioned, even basic things like human biology”. We all know what that means.
Mainly that it’s probably only a matter of time before she starts a Substack and appears on multi-hour Qanon-adjacent podcasts to complain about terrible being cancelled was, albeit the kind of cancellation that involves “the left” mind-controlling you to choose to resign from literally running the country and write a book whilst earning £16,500 per hour for making speeches.