Liz Truss is back. The ex-prime minister hosted a new current affairs show last night on Just The News, a multi-platform outlet. She’s not the first ex-PM to try her hand as a TV star. After Harold Wilson resigned, he briefly compered Friday Night, Saturday Morning, a BBC chat-show, which was considered a failure. Liz’s debut performance was a mixture of invective, self-justification and political brainstorming.
She opened with a barrage of bitter rhetoric.
‘Britain is going to hell in a handcart,’ she announced, before adding coyly, ‘despite the valiant efforts of a certain prime minister in 2022.’
She laid into the ‘fake news BBC.’
‘When they’re not lying about Donald Trump, they’re covering up sex criminals in their own midst.’
She accused the Green lobby of wrecking middle England.
‘Steel towns, mill towns and car towns are being killed off by eco zealots.’
Dredging up a familiar news story, she attacked the health service. ‘People are having to pull their own teeth out because they can’t get a dentist.’ And she laid into Islamist migrants who are ‘raping our children.’
‘These crimes had been covered up by the authorities.’ She offered to reveal how ‘these evil-doers are working to do the same thing in America and Europe.’ This promise went unfulfilled. But perhaps she’s saving the story for later episodes.
Her guests agreed with everything she said and the show felt like a bank holiday book-club or a gripe session at Wetherspoons
Her interviewees reinforced everything she said. Professor Matt Goodwin noted that the Labour party and the Tories can barely muster 35 percent in the polls between them.
‘The traditional centres of power in this country are collapsing but they haven’t realised it yet.’ He accused establishment politicians of spending the last three decades ‘repudiating their own nation to win more status for themselves for other members of the global elite.’
Liz broke in and highlighted the gulf between the voters and the establishment.
‘Keir Starmer is polling at 15 per cent. He’s the most unpopular prime minister in history. But you don’t feel a sense of that if you’re in London or reading the mainstream media. The people who are angry are not the people with power.’
Goodwin advised ‘going to war with such people,’ including the civil service. For Trump it’s easy, he said, because a president can hire and fire government appointees. A British prime minister isn’t empowered to sack senior mandarins. Goodwin wants this corrected.
‘Bring forward legislation that will allow the prime minister to make much a wider number of appointments.’ And he concluded on a hopeful note. ‘It’s the people who are going to save this country.’
Liz expressed her faith in the young. ‘I’m a big believer in Gen Z. I think they’re the ones who are going to save us.’
She introduced Alex Phillips, from Talk, who spoke earthily about mass migration. In Bournemouth, where several hotels are occupied by migrants, she said that ‘accusations of sexual assault are off the scale.’
‘Many are essentially sexual tourists,’ she theorised. ‘Young men coming from cultures where the greatest titillation … might be seeing the flash of an ankle. And they look at western culture and think great, these women are worthless.’
‘And these are working class girls,’ added Liz, ‘not your upper-class toff.’
Phillips predicted that ‘sleeper cells within every town and city in Europe’ would shortly strike civilians. She foresaw ‘a multi-casualty mass coordinated terror attack across the whole of the western world where they’re trying to co-ordinate multiple October 7ths.’
She advised Starmer to use the Royal Navy in the Channel. ‘Be the first leader to turn the boats around.’ Liz explained how Whitehall would kill this idea. ‘They’d say, prime minister, you can’t do it, it’s illegal.’
Straight afterwards, they shared a moment of hilarity as Liz remembered that Starmer is a human rights lawyer.
‘He spent his entire career trying to get illegal migrants into the country and stop them leaving. It was literally his job.’
This was the show’s best moment. But also its weakest. Liz wants an insurgency against the left-wing establishment but she can’t start a revolution by chatting with polished media performers in a TV studio. Her guests agreed with everything she said and the show felt like a bank holiday book-club or a gripe session at Wetherspoons. And she seems unaware that her personal brand is broken. Her spell in Downing Street has entered the joke-books but not the history books. Any MP under attack over Labour’s fiscal policy has only to say ‘Liz Truss mini-Budget’ and the line of questioning dissolves. And she belongs to a tiny clique of irascible former prime ministers whose views are simple to dismiss.
To scare the hard-left establishment, she needs to confront them. Why not open up the TV studio to the turquoise hair, the ring-pull noses, the trans radicals and the eco militants? The show’s emotional theme is ‘Liz lectures’ rather than ‘Liz learns.’ If she were to embrace her foes with an open mind, she may win over a few recruits. Being angry and radical is pointless. And until her enemies start watching her show, she’s an irrelevance.
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