Book review Shameless, petulant and cliche-ridden it's a perfect model of political memoir

'They didn't seem to understand," writes Liz Truss on page 250 of this unstoppably selfserving reworking of Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, "that the UK was heading towards an economic cliff and I was seeking to conduct a handbrake turn to avoid driving off the edge."

- Stuart Jeffries

Ten Years to Save the West
Liz Truss

The scene is Birmingham, 30 September 2022, just before the self-described Brian Clough of prime ministers gave her keynote address to what turned out to be a divertingly catastrophic Conservative party conference.

The then prime minister is livid about how a cabal of blob-adjacent political invertebrates were trying to nobble the week-old minibudget that she had devised with her chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng .

By means of this budget, a new globally competitive postBrexit Britain would emerge. This “unchained Britannia ” would be unconstrained by planning regulations, free to frack as never before and able to explore the North Sea for oil despite the ululations of the anti-growth wokerati. This would be a Britain where the super-rich were less hamstrung by corporation or inheritance taxes, and in which the 45p income tax rate (what she calls here the “ anti-success tax ”) would be little more than a bad memory.

What Truss didn’t seem to understand, now as then, is the handbrake had long ago come off and that both she and Kwarteng, like some latter-day approximations of Thelma and Louise , were barrelling towards oblivion. At Birmingham, in the face of objections from fellow Tories and serious market jitters , Kwarteng U-turned on that tax break for the rich. Later, the pair’s whole plan for growth was junked.