As Liz Truss prepares to leave Downing Street after 47 days in power, the PM’s reputation is in tatters. Seeing out the reigning monarch after seventy years, spooking the financial markets like a distant hyena terrifies a family of meerkats, and, incredibly, tanking the Tories’ poll rating to its lowest ever level at the same time as paying everybody’s gas bill. But listen, Liz. I wouldn’t worry. Because it doesn’t take very long before people start pining for and eulogising former prime ministers that drove them potty when they actually were in office.
Just this weekend gone, singer Tanita Tikaram sent a much-liked tweet saying she would like Gordon Brown back. Theresa May pretty instantly developed a camp coterie of young gay Tory men who revel in the ‘shade’ she throws from the back benches. Even the rarely-spotted David Cameron has his admirers.
The further back you go, the warmer the nostalgic glow. John Major, viewed during his heyday as a walking calamity of a nerd with the charisma and voice of Michael Palin as Reg Pither, has grown a fan club that hail his every utterance as a beloved elder statesman. There were some very odd photographs of him strolling about chummily with former arch-nemesis Tony Blair when they made their optimistic intervention in the EU referendum campaign. One pictures them now as two old gents under the pavilion at a bowling green, perhaps sharing a jug of Pimms, reminiscing about the days at the despatch box, occasionally looking up to check on the state of play. ‘Perfect spin on that bowl there, did you see that, John?’ ‘Yes, but then you always liked some good spin, Tony.’
‘I was prime minister’ Truss will think, arranging to pick up her daughter from a party or taking the bins out
Then there are the might-have-beens, and they can be forgiven anything. Tony Benn launched a one-man show that toured the provincial theatres of many Tory shires, packing them in and delighting people who not very long before were threatening to eviscerate him whenever he popped up on television.
Dennis Healey became a twinkly funny uncle. The ex-deputy leader of the Labour party was often found sitting in the audience of ITV’s ‘An Audience With …’ asking planted questions of Dame Edna or Peter Ustinov. He was surrounded by people whose income he had stolen 99 per cent of for the purposes of making life in the 1970s so restful and idyllic.
Some of us are old enough to remember when Michael Portillo was regarded as the devil incarnate, a right-wing politician who made an odd, thumping speech about the SAS. A very remote character indeed from the pastel-trousered metrosexual locomotive fancier and Mr Reasonable of political TV he is today.
We think of aged prime ministers and close also-rans like dead dogs: you forget how they defecated on the carpet, barked all night and chewed your slippers. As time passes, old PMs become like the pop songs of your youth that remind you of being young, even if you were miserable and hated those same songs at the time. In the middle of my sixth decade I find I am pleased to see members of Spandau Ballet when they occasionally pop up in the media, something I could never have envisaged when they were at the height of their powers and I had vigour and hair.
Everybody becomes good old so-and-so, just as inevitably as everybody becomes poor old so-and-so at some point, with luck following a decent interval, after that.
And Liz Truss? A place guaranteed in the history books, yes, but as the flash in the pan, the Maureen from Driving School of prime ministers, a one-hit wonder but of the ‘Mambo No 9’ or ‘Turtle Power’ kind. For this reason, speaking engagement fees may be a bit lower than normal.
My advice to her would be to ‘lean into’ the brand. Trademark the Liz Truss name and franchise it: the Liz Truss escape room or the Liz Truss pop-up restaurant (the twist is that it pops up and then immediately falls down, crushing everybody inside). A second career like Portillo could be a goer, though perhaps not in a field that requires a natural ease around cameras, or indeed speaking.
It will all seem like a dream, to us and to her. ‘I was prime minister’ she’ll think, arranging to pick up her daughter from a party or taking the bins out, as George Lazenby and Paul McGann must think of their short stints as Bond and Who.
And none of it was really her fault. She was a collateral pawn, stitched up by Tory MPs terrified of the popularity of Kemi Badenoch (who had made the terrible mistake, never forgiven by the resentful British, of being young, attractive and clever). I hope, sooner or later, Liz will get a little love.
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