It was self-indulgent, whinging. Dull in places while completely batty in others. All the usual insults will be hurled at former prime minister Liz Truss for her essay defending her short time in Downing Street, published today. Perhaps it would be better for her to retire gracefully from public life and let some ambitious young revisionist historian in the 2060s make the case that she was treated unfairly. Except she still has one key card to play. Events are gradually showing that she was right along: Trussonomics, or whatever it will be called next, is gradually winning the intellectual argument.
There won’t be many people in the Conservative Party welcoming Truss’s return, and certainly not in the government. Her successor Rishi Sunak and his team were probably hoping that the voters would have completely forgotten who she was by now. The last thing they need is to stir up bitter arguments about personalities or ideas. The outlook for the party is already grim without bitter internal rows. Even so, the essay was a sober, well-argued reflection on her brief time in office: honest about what went wrong, as well as her own personal failings. Most importantly, it pointed the finger at the civil servants, the Bank of England, and the ‘left-wing economic establishment’ who rounded on her free-market radicalism with a fury that was both unexpected and lethal.
Truss’s essay won’t resonate because of the fluency of her language or the power of her rhetoric. She isn’t Boris Johnson. But her argument has something else going for it: a ring of truth. Even in the few months since she was so brutally evicted from office, the British economy has clearly gone into a steep decline. We are close to a recession.
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