The former Prime Minister Liz Truss has stepped back into the political spotlight with the publication of her ambitiously titled new memoir, “Ten Years to Save the West”.
Since being ousted as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister in 2022, Truss has remained a largely fringe figure in the Conservative Party, but in recent months has re-emerged having “hitched her wagon to a newly launched organisation called Popular Conservatism”, said David Runciman in The Guardian.
Her “British version of much of the American alt-right agenda” has meant her book has immediately made headlines and handed Truss a flurry of media appearances, said Adam Boulton at Reaction, leading to the question of whether a political comeback is really possible.
‘Unfinished business’
Truss herself has said she has “unfinished business” in politics and has “refused to rule out running” to be Tory leader at some point again in the future, said Sky News. She did, however, say that her book was not part of a leadership bid, but to “build support for her political ideas”. But there “isn’t much evidence” that the “hysterical pitch of American conservatives” she has adopted “resonates across the Atlantic”, argued Rafael Behr in The Guardian.
Among the “Alan Partridge-esque anecdotes” in Truss’s book, wrote Rachel Cunliffe in the New Statesman, what becomes clear is that, rather than saving the West with her new brand of libertarian politics, she believes that the “first step to that is saving the Conservative Party from itself”. Truss’s awareness that the current government “would prefer to pretend she doesn’t exist” and that the mainstream party members consider her “an irrelevance” is why she has reappeared with a book of “tell-all revelations” and “bombastic end-of-the-world rhetoric”, added Cunliffe.
Yet, while it is clear Truss “has a self-awareness problem” that “leads her to blame her failures on anyone and everyone” else, it is worth assessing whether “there are points she makes that Westminster can actually learn from”, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator.
Truss’s key points, though “largely limited to what stopped her” rather than holistic, said Hardman, are focused on “the resistance from the civil service to reforms” and Whitehall’s “obstructing” of elected politicians.
‘A deeper problem’
Her specific policies and opinions aside, the reaction to Truss’s book highlights a greater problem in Westminster: “it has stopped listening”, wrote Kate McCann at the i news site. Though many will “baulk at the idea” of a Truss comeback, the response “exposes a deeper problem” that there is a “narrowing of the lens” and that it had become routine to “scoff and shrug” off ideas that “don’t fit”. Truss is “not the perfect messenger” for this point, added McCann, but she is not the only one to identify the “failure to properly consider things which don’t fit the narrative”.
The question remains whether, despite making a return to public view, Truss could drum up enough support to make a concerted bid for power again. So far her “attempt at a comeback” appears to be working and she is “getting another hearing – at least in Conservative circles”, said Boulton.
Indeed, her voice is “listened to and influential among her party members”, agreed Chris Mason at the BBC, and while Tories “privately anticipate losing the election”, Truss is hoping to be in the mix as they “consider their future after it”.
If Truss’s “is the only story anyone can hear”, it raises bigger questions for the future of the Tory party, wrote Behr, and indicates that they “don’t have a leader” and “don’t have an argument” and eventually “could end up without a party”. In the long term, he concluded, for the former prime minister there simply aren’t “enough Trussite MPs, let alone Truss-supporters in the country” to “inspire much beyond ridicule”.