Excessive Truss issues

Whether their reviewers are mocking or mollifying, the British press is giving Liz Truss' book something it doesn't deserve – attention.

Previously: All The Newsnight's Women
Netflix's interview drama was almost as puffed up as the Prince at its centre.

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Liz Truss has a book out. Surprisingly, it’s not one of those waterproof ones for babies where they can chew the corners while enjoying the bright colours, but it serves much the same purpose for political journalists. It has provoked two kinds of review: Those that pretend the woman who couldn’t outlast a lettuce has important things to say, and the more common variety that luxuriates in laughing at the ex-Prime Minister who barely got her feet under the table .

Whether laughable or laughing, the reviews all make the same fundamental mistake: Writing about the book at all. There’s a principle of online journalism that a hate click has the same value as one from someone who agrees with an article. For Truss, coverage of her book has a similar effect: Preternaturally incapable of self-reflection, she sees all attention as good attention. It’s that desire that explains her grinning, staring, dog-watching-a-card-trick response when she held her book the wrong way up during a promotional appearance on Fox News.

Not only do you not need to read the book itself, you don’t even need to read the reviews. Save time with my reviews of the reviews:

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Six things that stand out for me in Liz Truss book,
Chris Mason, BBC News

After listing what he considers the morsels of interest in Truss’ 100,000+ word soup of self-justification and self-pity, Mason concludes:

Whatever you may think of Liz Truss, if you like political ideas and argument, this is a provocative and enjoyable read. She gives direct answers to direct questions.

… And if you are of a sceptical inclination, wondering why or whether she deserves attention, I would say all former prime ministers deserve scrutiny.

That’s such a fence-sitting verdict that Mason will spend the rest of the week having the splinters removed. The book doesn’t contain good political ideas and arguments but he argues that simply because Truss is a former prime minister we should treat her babbling as worthy of serious attention. How bizarre does she have to become before her brief Downing Street tenancy is rightly reduced to a funny pub quiz fact rather than a calling card that earns her extensive coverage?

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Ten Years to Save the West — as readable as a crisp packet,
Patrick Maguire, The Times

In this, the best of the newspaper reviews, Maguire is honest with the reader about the experience of trudging through Truss’ tedious prose (“[As if the publisher had] asked ChatGPT to imagine Keith Joseph and Richard Littlejohn reading Wikipedia to one another.”) but nearly sprains something trying to find some positives:

Nonetheless, this book poses some important questions. What drove this stalwart of Cameron’s modernisation project to introduce such a destructive economic programme as prime minister and call for Nigel Farage to be readmitted to the Conservative Party? Why did her government fail so spectacularly? Is she right to blame the technocrats of the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England, all of whom tend to look and think like one another, for constraining the power of democratically elected politicians?

The answers to those queries — which you won’t find in Truss’ book — are: 1) She will say anything for attention 2) She ignores anyone who gets in the way of her quest for attention 3) In general, yes. In her case, no.

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Liz Truss’s memoir is ludicrous and shows how unworthy of office our shortest-serving PM was,
Sean O’Grady, The Independent

Despite opening with one of the quotes that should be banned from newspapers for overuse (Churchill’s “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”), O’Grady’s review is commendably blunt:

She was, is, and will forever be a national embarrassment, her only exceptional talent being an astonishing lack of self-awareness. 

It’s not a useful trait in a politician, and it’s a highly unattractive one in an author. She is just as much hard work on the printed page as she is off it.

Having made his point in the first few paragraphs, the following torrent of words puts the review into ‘stop, stop, she’s already dead’ territory.

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Ten Years to Save the West review – shamelessly unrepentant,
Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian

Jefferies’ review is a lot more economical with the word count and keeps things a lot simpler, expressing the level of incomprehension you’d imagine the average reader would experience:

The book’s big reveal is not so much that Truss can’t say sorry, but rather that she didn’t know what was going on at the very heart of the British economy she sought to revivify. The extent of her ignorance is astounding. I kept writing “How did you not know?” in the margins of her chapters on her premiership.

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Liz Truss’s riotous romp of a memoir proves she never stood a chance,
Tim Stanley, The Daily Telegraph

From a view that sounds gratifyingly like one a normal human might hold, we swing wildly to the most performatively unhinged response possible. Treating Truss’ tome as though it’s a Jilly Cooper novel, Tim Stanley writes:

Most PMs’ memoirs are a multi-volume snoozefest. Liz Truss has published the first in history that could be accurately described as a “romp”…

If, like me, you think she was fundamentally right – that Britain is getting poorer because we’ve forgotten how to generate wealth – then how and why she failed demands some serious thought. There were bigger forces at play than mere eccentricity.

It’s entirely predictable that the Telegraph welcomes Truss’ diagnosis of what ails the UK and the wider West. Wildly pointing at things and screaming ‘woke’ while arguing a left-wing elite is to blame for every right-wing government’s failures is the preferred technique of Telegraph columnists. Truss has simply followed their lead at length.

Were she not so desperate for fame in the United States — which explains why her book is so obsessed with railing against ‘globalists’ — Truss would no doubt be in the frame for a regular Telegraph slot. Surely an ex-PM, however short-lived, could knock out the former Tory chief of staffs (Nick Timothy) and ex-Labour backbenchers (Tom Harris) who are making up the numbers there right now.

I recognise the irony of complaining about Ten Years to Save the West being given so much attention and then adding to it but it’s a bit like not wanting to get a huge spot on your forehead but having to apply some cream to it when you do. There was an option to ignore the book; thousands upon thousands of books go unreviewed every year. But I suppose if the newspapers had tossed their review copies in the bin, Truss would only have seen it as more proof that the deep state is conspiring against her.

You only have to read a few paragraphs of the extracts serialised by the Daily Mail to understand that Truss will always be someone who after falling over her own feet will be certain that her enemies have boobytrapped the route with tripwires.

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