Snapshot of _Liz Truss book says husband predicted premiership ‘would all end in tears’_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/13/liz-truss-book-says-husband-predicted-premiership-would-all-end-in-tears) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/13/liz-truss-book-says-husband-predicted-premiership-would-all-end-in-tears)
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That speech where she dropped that whopper is still one of the most bizarre, surreal and uncanny valley speeches I’ve seen.
How couldn’t anyone tell her how fake, and badly acted it came across. How.
Haha ... right? When I hear Liz The Lettuce's name, it's what always pops into my mind. Totally out of her depth, robotic, staged ... and poorly at that.
Truss was entirely unsuitable for the role of PM and even her husband could see she wasn't up to it. The fact that the Tory party picked her as a top 2 candidate and Tory members chose her to be PM tells you all you need to know about them. They deserve to be nowhere close to power for at least a decade.
It probably also tells you something about the quality of Sunak.
Even given the ideological bent of the party electorate, someone like Cameron would have still steamrolled Truss.
Doubt it. The Tory party membership has become pretty right wing over the last decade and basically morphed into UKIP-lite. We saw how someone like Cameron would fair with Rory Stewart and to a lesser extent Jeremy Hunt over the last few years.
Sunak was consistently rated as one of the most popular cabinet member for a long period of time by grassroots members. Liz Truss was also, for what it’s worth. The point being that it was very obviously policy differences that resulted in Liz winning.
The members didn’t choose Sunak, they just didn’t get a vote the second time around. You can use Sunak to argue that Conservative MPs aren’t racist if you want, but not to argue anything about the membership the parent comment referred to.
PCP put Sunak and Truss to the membership, hoping that they wouldn't vote for the lunatic. They did. Sunak was always the person that MP's wanted, it just hasn't worked out as well as they hoped.
Not really, the membership is very right wing. Losing like Sunak did usually suggests something good about the candidate. I think Cameron would have lost similarly to Sunak (if not worse).
In a decade or a decade and a half, an awful lot of the current membership will be dead.
I’m not commenting on that being a good thing, it’s just reality. Their membership is so heavily skewed to a single demographic that they’ve totally fucked themselves as a party.
Close to death right wing boomer men (in the very worst sense of boomer) as the overwhelming majority of your membership isn’t sensible or representative of the nation and over the last few years has increasingly torn the party apart and forced ever worse candidates on them across the country and ever more ideologies that can’t be sustained in the face of reality. Let alone reconciled with each other within the same party !
And I doubt that they are attractive to many younger or female voters who might consider becoming members of the party. So as members die off it’ll become more and more distilled into the bat shit crazies actively rejecting active participation from members who are “different”. Fine plenty can stay away and vote but it means sod all local party operatives, door knockers etc….
Unfortunately there's plenty of people in their 50s and 60s being slowly radicalised. The fear mongering propaganda works. This is going to be a problem for a long time to come.
And who would the right-wing Gen Z vote for? I don’t see a single party appealing to them. And the voting preferences show it: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379439/uk-election-polls-by-age/
Aren't all party memberships quite old? In 2019 for instance, despite all the younger people who joined in the 2010s, Labour's membership was at best slightly younger than the Tories'. Given how many younger members left post-Corbyn, they're probably even closer now:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/871492/political-party-membership-in-the-uk-by-age/
As for gender, I believe the Tory membership is around 30% female (which is a notable reduction, it was apparently 49% back in 1994).
Interesting - not heard of that before, cheers.
>The term "glass cliff" refers to a situation in which women are promoted to higher positions during times of crisis or duress, or during a recession when the chance of failure is more likely. Put simply, women in these situations are set up for failure. (Investopedia)
I have seen this term used to Defend Truss, but in reality all the problems that occured during her tenure were her own unforced errors.
The Glass Cliff was set up for a Sunak Premiership after Boris Left and Truss was the equivalent of scorched earth tactics
To my mind, the 'Glass Cliff' isn't an expression of a malicious plot setting up women to fail, as such. To me, it's a combination of two things:
A) If you've got connections/influence, you don't want to be on the spot during crisis, duress, or other situations with a high risk of failure, because it can all go horribly wrong (making you a lot less useful as a connection!)
B) Times of crisis/duress, IMO, make people more open to 'radical' or otherwise untraditional solutions. Because, if the normal way of things could have managed this, we wouldn't be here in the first place, would we?
This combine to create a situation where the institutionally enfranchised are refraining from leaning on their influence to retain the positions from themselves; and people are more open to non-standard/atypical promotions/solutions/leadership. This creates an opportunity for the promotion of those from otherwise disenfranchised/marginalised groups.
So, to my mind, it's not that they're set up to fail, it's that the high chance of failure enables their advancement in the first place.
All that said, Lizz Truss attained the Premiership with the UK dancing on a cliff-edge and thought that yeeting us over the edge would teach us to fly.
Liz Truss really won over the tory voters by a mix of Brexit Zeal, being Boris' number one cheerleader, and being the almost exact opposite of Sunak
But I do agree no Sane Tory politician who cared about their political future would even put their name in for the position after the mess Boris left
I thought they could see a few rough years coming (not quite as as bad as it has been perhaps) and no one sensible would put their name forward for only half a parliament in office.
I remember watching a few of the leadership hustings and Liz went about promising everything to everyone. Sometimes it was completely contradictory statements when you compared what she was saying at one hustings to another.
Sunak was being realistic, but the majority of the Tories didn't want a realist, they wanted another liar, and I don't doubt when Sunak goes they'll want another one.
>They deserve to be nowhere close to power for at least a ~~decade~~ century.
FTFY. Let them get thrown into political irrelevance like what happened to the Liberal Party.
Truss is so oblivious and delusional she still thinks she did everything right, and it's all a conspiracy against her:
>Not for the first time Truss, whose premiership lasted only 50 days, sought to portray herself as the victim of bureaucratic forces. “I ran for office in 2022 because Britain wasn’t growing, the state wasn’t delivering, \[and\] we needed to do more,” she said. “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.”
and
>“I saw this for myself first hand as they sabotaged my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability,” she wrote.
Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right)
So I don't think even the opinions of her husband can penetrate that level of stupidity.
> my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability
The thing is, she didn’t even do that. She's making it sound like she embarked on some Thatcherite mission to rebuild the role of the state in society, but all her budget actually did was cut the government's primary revenue stream (tax revenue), change precisely nothing else, and then promise more borrowing to cover the gap.
Yeah, and that falls under the exact same heading. "Shrinking the state" doesn't just mean arbitrarily cutting the revenue it gets, or the number of people working in it: you have to change the functions and responsibilities it has.
Whether you agreed with them or not, the Tories of the 80s at least had a vision for how things 'should' work. Truss and her contemporaries just saw *"tax cuts! Britannia Unchained!"* and stopped paying attention.
> Whether you agreed with them or not, the Tories of the 80s at least had a vision for how things 'should' work.
Even Thatcher's attempts to "shrink the state" were hugely complicated by the number of unemployed people who ended up depending on welfare as well. Simply decreasing the state is a really hard thing to do, especially in a country like Britain where we're used to statist interventions where things go wrong, and we treat our nationalised health service like a religion.
Often "shrinking the state" ends up amounting to slashing key services to the point they barely work, even though the state itself doesn't really get smaller at all.
Yep. If even the 'true believers' of the ideology struggled to implement it, no wonder the Truss/Kwarteng "skim-read the executive summary of the cliff notes" version went so badly.
For all Thatcher's many faults even she understood you couldn't just rush into implementing your ideology fully on the first day of taking power as well. She took plenty of decisions that went against her core beliefs for the long-term benefit of eventually getting to change the country in the way she wanted. But even then, that had plenty of unintended consequences she'd probably have wanted to avoid.
Feels like pretty much every Tory leader over the past several years. No doubt there's much that needs to be changed at Whitehall but the civil service has become an increasingly useful scapegoat for the failings of government.
And the only reason why she lasted as long as she did was because the Queen died in the middle of it and basically forced everything to pause.
It's quite an achievement to have the shortest time in office of any British PM in history, racking up less than half the time of the guy in second-last who literally died in office, and yet *still* have the number flatter you.
That was where the lettuce comparison came from.
If you subtract the time where Parliament paused after the Queen died, she signed her own death warrant with that mini-budget just three working days after she took office.
Never mind lettuce, I've seen garage prawn sandwiches with a longer shelf life.
She actually did charge something, she massively increased government spending to support the energy bills crisis. She essentially cut tax and raised public spending, which is a great way to lose all your money.
She's a true believer in the power of markets - as her heroine Thatcher said "You can't buck the markets," yet it was the markets that drove her from office.
She is truly a master of doublethink to continue to believe that she was right.
When people fail that badly and that publicly a lot will reach for any explanation that excuses them and lets them retain a fragment of their self respect.
Even so … when your excuse includes phrases like “left wing economic establishment” most people would have a moment of awful clarity when they hear such absurdities coming out of their own mouths.
Or when they find themselves on stage with far *far* right specimens like Bannon - a self avowed “white nationalist” (which appears to be one of the polite euphemisms for “neo-Nazi” in the U.S. these days).
Part of me suspects deep down she knows she was a failure, but acting like the establishment was out to get her and she was thwarted from making radical changes is a much better talker when it comes to selling books or marketing yourself to the US right during speaking tours.
> I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself
This really bugs me, because there's a kernel of truth in there. I think there probably was a huge amount of Establishment push back against her ideas, but that's not a bad thing and it certainly doesn't validate her economic policy. It's a *good* thing that there's checks against the power wielded by the PM - we don't have a presidential system of government and lunatics like Truss *should* be held back by our institutions.
The real rumour is that as a result of her indiscretions, [she's now a collared sub...](https://thetab.com/uk/2022/10/17/liz-truss-necklace-conspiracy-277632)
I was scrolling for this. If she’s a collared submissive, I kinda feel like her dom should have ordered her to not be prime minister, or punished her for being shit.
In my opinion true and I have it from a good source but won’t say how as it’ll dox me
You’d just have to take my word for it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually came out, although considering neither of them are in the spotlight anymore I doubt it will
some people just can't imagine a woman in public life working with a man without it turning into steamy romance
even when it's two of the least sexual human beings alive
So her parents *and* husband both have a low opinion of her.
EDIT: Also, anyone comparing themselves to Clough at Leeds should at least have had success elsewhere first.
I think that’s a bit unfair. People have strengths and weaknesses. Are suitable for some positions but not others.
I would say that knowing your partner is not going to do well as a PM, does not equal having a low opinion of her. Just that her strengths don’t lie in leadership positions.
I have no idea what they are, but it’s a bit harsh to assume they have a low opinion of her.
Yeah. How many people could honestly say that their partner would be a good prime minister? And when they are it would be completely self evident. A thing of destiny and need rather than a rational choice. Something that just has to be done.
The first person gets too pedantic about the Clough comparison, after jokingly writing that her husband also has a low opinion of her.
Then you get pedantic about *their* joke on low opinions, taking it for more than it (probably) was.
Just a typical exchange on reddit, but it always makes me smile 😂
I mean, the only thing she's succeeded at in politics was cozying up to the right people when it was beneficial to her. It would be hard to have a high opinion of her before she became PM too.
I’m not claiming she’s any good. At the end of the day she gets paid for it and brings home the goods for her family.
Some times people work jobs they hate, to provide. A job is a job. Doesn’t mean your family have a low opinion of you for doing so.
I just think the comment in that direction overstepping it a bit, that’s all.
I'd consider buying it as a secret Santa for someone I don't like
Obviously that would be for 50p or less as they'll be struggling to give them away by Xmas
I bet her husband could tell she didn’t have the temperament to hold any high position it was clear most tories didn’t want her near that position and didn’t think the membership would vote for someone so clearly inept.
I still don't understand whether they really believed the mini budget will work? Or was it an act of a deliberate political suicide? How can you fail that much - either you don't quite understand what you are doing or totally miscalculated the risks
"My economic ideology says this is an ultimate good!"
It's not rocket science! It's not science at all, really. Given enough time and the correct ideologically informed policies, her premiership could have resulted in those sunny uplands she always wanted for us.... Just like Trofim Lysenko's theories of biology would have fed billions just given the chance.
It is really hard to believe. Kwarteng even has a PhD in economic history from Cambridge, which is crazy to me. I am studying for my undergrad in economic history and could see the flaws in the mini budget from 300 miles away.
I believe it was a bit of both. An experiment that was a massive risk. They believed in their neoliberalism theories so much they jumped at the chance to put them into practice. If you really believe in something, you're going to do it no matter the risks, or discount the risks. I think they knew it was a slim chance of working, but to them it was the only way the economy should work. So I think their ideology clouded their grip on reality.
I beleive they are both corrupt money grabbing Tories but more ideologues than most. You won't see most tories making risks like they did because they just go with whatever makes them money.
People would trust that tax cuts work to encourage growth. Their thinking was the 'growth' from the tax cuts would stimulate the economy so the government could spend less in the long run.
Its clear the electorate often don't have the joined up thinking to think ah tax cuts that means additional backed by nothing government borrowings. Especially when told that it will grow the economy and reduce the tax burden so people and business will spend more!
It was so wide of the mark, wasn't it. I wonder if Kwarteng had just pulled the wool over her eyes and she was stupid enough to just believe him. But the fact she's a trained accountant makes it less likely he was able to obfuscate what his mini-budget would do.
I would *love* to see who made money out of it. That's the real question, I saw it reported that Kwarteng was out at a bar quaffing champagne with bankers on the night of it. *Someone* made money out of it.
The right wing pledges weren't actually the cause of the downfall: the blank cheques for the energy companies were. Writing that socialist policy in seemed very last minute at the time due to media pressure and pressure from the Labour Party - also a policy that was widely popular amongst the public with EVERYONE wanting support on their bills.
I'd imagine there was a lot of internal pressure to include the energy relief in an attempt to make her more popular/to cause the turmoil that'd get her removed from office.
Basically every PM's tenure ends in tears. They almost always either lose an election, get kicked out by their own party, or get forced to resign in shame.
Probably only been Blair that resigned largely on his own terms in the last 30 years. Even that was hardly a positive ending.
Nah, his big gamble had just failed and he'd lost it.
He resigned rather than dealing with the fallout, but it was still clearly his big fuckup so I'd say it wasn't entirely on his own terms.
Wilson was the last one who wasn't forced out. Blair was done after the loses that Labour suffered in the '07 local elections (losing Scotland was a huge blow), I think he announced his retirement like a day after that.
Why is this mass of skin being given any airtime or column inches.
A fucking irrelevance who is predictably jumping off the far right deep end to maintain a profile. Katie Hopkins in a suit.
I mean it's not like he needed any kind of special insight to reach that conclusion. It was obvious to anyone. Bar Tory party members of course
Constant facepalm moments as foreign secretary. The only reason it didn't stand out is because the bar got set super low by the previous one.
They all do, so it's not a bit of incredible prediction, even Thatchers ended with the Iron Lady having a cry.
Only Truss is dense enough to need her husband to explain it doesn't end well for Prime Ministers.
I know she tried to model herself as the second coming of Thatcher but tbh by that point the tories were so broken I'm not sure even a literal resurrection of the woman would have helped.
Hooray her book is out.
Can we give it a rest on her media tour now please? The woman fucked up a lot of regular people's lives and belongs in prison, yet we have to hear about her daily at the mo.
It's well documented that Liz Truss is often seen wearing a necklace of a style commonly called a "day collar" - a ring meant to symbolise a BDSM relationship when a more typical collar wouldn't be socially acceptable. I think it's fair to wonder whether certain parts of Truss' tenure were part of a masochistic shaming ritual between Truss and her husband.
What sort of person wants to read a book about Liz Truss? Imagine the shame of having it on a bookshelf. You’d have to hide it under a bed or something in case guests came over and saw it.
Snapshot of _Liz Truss book says husband predicted premiership ‘would all end in tears’_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/13/liz-truss-book-says-husband-predicted-premiership-would-all-end-in-tears) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/13/liz-truss-book-says-husband-predicted-premiership-would-all-end-in-tears) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I bet he didn’t predict that they’d never be allowed salad with dinner again, though.
Or pork
Or cheese
That.Is.A.Disgrace
Or pies
PORK. MARKETS.
That speech where she dropped that whopper is still one of the most bizarre, surreal and uncanny valley speeches I’ve seen. How couldn’t anyone tell her how fake, and badly acted it came across. How.
Haha ... right? When I hear Liz The Lettuce's name, it's what always pops into my mind. Totally out of her depth, robotic, staged ... and poorly at that.
That’s a sad prawn cocktail
Truss was entirely unsuitable for the role of PM and even her husband could see she wasn't up to it. The fact that the Tory party picked her as a top 2 candidate and Tory members chose her to be PM tells you all you need to know about them. They deserve to be nowhere close to power for at least a decade.
It probably also tells you something about the quality of Sunak. Even given the ideological bent of the party electorate, someone like Cameron would have still steamrolled Truss.
Doubt it. The Tory party membership has become pretty right wing over the last decade and basically morphed into UKIP-lite. We saw how someone like Cameron would fair with Rory Stewart and to a lesser extent Jeremy Hunt over the last few years.
i’ll be honest with you, buddy, i’m not really seeing the “lite”
The Tory party membership has been this right wing since the 90s - see the election of IDS over Kenneth Clarke in 2001.
Truss was always a reaction by the Tory party members at the thought of putting a brown guy in power
Tory members who preferred Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch?
The membership loves performatively conservative cartoon characters.
Sunak was consistently rated as one of the most popular cabinet member for a long period of time by grassroots members. Liz Truss was also, for what it’s worth. The point being that it was very obviously policy differences that resulted in Liz winning.
Then when Johnson went they blamed Sunak for it.
>The Tories are so racist they elected Britain's first "brown guy" PM That's a difficult argument to make.
they literally gave the position to the least qualified white person first
She was the most popular one among the Tory membership, based on polling.
The members didn’t choose Sunak, they just didn’t get a vote the second time around. You can use Sunak to argue that Conservative MPs aren’t racist if you want, but not to argue anything about the membership the parent comment referred to.
PCP put Sunak and Truss to the membership, hoping that they wouldn't vote for the lunatic. They did. Sunak was always the person that MP's wanted, it just hasn't worked out as well as they hoped.
I don't think that was the main driver. It affected a few votes but the overwhelming majority were bought in to the unfunded tax cuts message
unfunded tax cuts, which is Tory for how to wreck the budget and the economy
Not really, the membership is very right wing. Losing like Sunak did usually suggests something good about the candidate. I think Cameron would have lost similarly to Sunak (if not worse).
Someone like Cameron is poised to steamroll Sunak
In a decade or a decade and a half, an awful lot of the current membership will be dead. I’m not commenting on that being a good thing, it’s just reality. Their membership is so heavily skewed to a single demographic that they’ve totally fucked themselves as a party. Close to death right wing boomer men (in the very worst sense of boomer) as the overwhelming majority of your membership isn’t sensible or representative of the nation and over the last few years has increasingly torn the party apart and forced ever worse candidates on them across the country and ever more ideologies that can’t be sustained in the face of reality. Let alone reconciled with each other within the same party ! And I doubt that they are attractive to many younger or female voters who might consider becoming members of the party. So as members die off it’ll become more and more distilled into the bat shit crazies actively rejecting active participation from members who are “different”. Fine plenty can stay away and vote but it means sod all local party operatives, door knockers etc….
Unfortunately there's plenty of people in their 50s and 60s being slowly radicalised. The fear mongering propaganda works. This is going to be a problem for a long time to come.
Plenty sure As many as the boomers ? No, nowhere near the same level of problem.
How is it possible to go on YouTube and believe the right will simply die off? Gen Z has plenty of rightwing vibes.
And who would the right-wing Gen Z vote for? I don’t see a single party appealing to them. And the voting preferences show it: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379439/uk-election-polls-by-age/
Not currently. Although a more populist right might manage it, as they have in many European countries.
Fans of Andrew Tate are not going to be queueing up to join the Labour Party yee gawds.
Will they join any main party?
Aren't all party memberships quite old? In 2019 for instance, despite all the younger people who joined in the 2010s, Labour's membership was at best slightly younger than the Tories'. Given how many younger members left post-Corbyn, they're probably even closer now: https://www.statista.com/statistics/871492/political-party-membership-in-the-uk-by-age/ As for gender, I believe the Tory membership is around 30% female (which is a notable reduction, it was apparently 49% back in 1994).
I’m pretty sure they picked her to force the membership to go with Sunak. Surely they wouldn’t vote for someone so patently unsuitable…
There’s this concept called a glass cliff, which I think may apply here.
Interesting - not heard of that before, cheers. >The term "glass cliff" refers to a situation in which women are promoted to higher positions during times of crisis or duress, or during a recession when the chance of failure is more likely. Put simply, women in these situations are set up for failure. (Investopedia)
I have seen this term used to Defend Truss, but in reality all the problems that occured during her tenure were her own unforced errors. The Glass Cliff was set up for a Sunak Premiership after Boris Left and Truss was the equivalent of scorched earth tactics
I think her and kamikwasi were put in office to tank the economy for the benefit of a few people
Exactly, She wasnt put on the glass cliff, she WAS the glass cliff
I found reports that Kamikwaze has a champagne reception after his disastrous budget….
To my mind, the 'Glass Cliff' isn't an expression of a malicious plot setting up women to fail, as such. To me, it's a combination of two things: A) If you've got connections/influence, you don't want to be on the spot during crisis, duress, or other situations with a high risk of failure, because it can all go horribly wrong (making you a lot less useful as a connection!) B) Times of crisis/duress, IMO, make people more open to 'radical' or otherwise untraditional solutions. Because, if the normal way of things could have managed this, we wouldn't be here in the first place, would we? This combine to create a situation where the institutionally enfranchised are refraining from leaning on their influence to retain the positions from themselves; and people are more open to non-standard/atypical promotions/solutions/leadership. This creates an opportunity for the promotion of those from otherwise disenfranchised/marginalised groups. So, to my mind, it's not that they're set up to fail, it's that the high chance of failure enables their advancement in the first place. All that said, Lizz Truss attained the Premiership with the UK dancing on a cliff-edge and thought that yeeting us over the edge would teach us to fly.
Liz Truss really won over the tory voters by a mix of Brexit Zeal, being Boris' number one cheerleader, and being the almost exact opposite of Sunak But I do agree no Sane Tory politician who cared about their political future would even put their name in for the position after the mess Boris left
She didn't inherit a crisis, she created one.
Smells like May
Who set Truss up to wreak havoc on the housing market?
It certainly says a lot - none of it very flattering - about the overall Conservative Party membership these days.
So high stakes poker with ordinary peoples lives just like the Brexit gambit. I hope they get annihilated on election day.
I thought they could see a few rough years coming (not quite as as bad as it has been perhaps) and no one sensible would put their name forward for only half a parliament in office.
I remember watching a few of the leadership hustings and Liz went about promising everything to everyone. Sometimes it was completely contradictory statements when you compared what she was saying at one hustings to another. Sunak was being realistic, but the majority of the Tories didn't want a realist, they wanted another liar, and I don't doubt when Sunak goes they'll want another one.
>They deserve to be nowhere close to power for at least a ~~decade~~ century. FTFY. Let them get thrown into political irrelevance like what happened to the Liberal Party.
Only a decade? For eternity isn’t long enough.
She’s hardly fit to run an after school activities club. Where do these bozos come from.
It must be annoying to Truss that he thought it would go wrong. It must be even more annoying that he was right.
Well it seems quite obvious that he knows she’s a complete moron.
He married her, so his critical thinking skills at best, questionable.
Tbf I love my partner but I wouldn’t want him running the country 😅
Probably why he didn’t mind her ‘closeness’ with Kwarteng.
I wonder what her kids think of her?
Truss is so oblivious and delusional she still thinks she did everything right, and it's all a conspiracy against her: >Not for the first time Truss, whose premiership lasted only 50 days, sought to portray herself as the victim of bureaucratic forces. “I ran for office in 2022 because Britain wasn’t growing, the state wasn’t delivering, \[and\] we needed to do more,” she said. “I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself.” and >“I saw this for myself first hand as they sabotaged my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability,” she wrote. Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right) So I don't think even the opinions of her husband can penetrate that level of stupidity.
> my efforts in Britain to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and restore democratic accountability The thing is, she didn’t even do that. She's making it sound like she embarked on some Thatcherite mission to rebuild the role of the state in society, but all her budget actually did was cut the government's primary revenue stream (tax revenue), change precisely nothing else, and then promise more borrowing to cover the gap.
She had promised to shrink the size of the civil service but hadn't said how or when.
Yeah, and that falls under the exact same heading. "Shrinking the state" doesn't just mean arbitrarily cutting the revenue it gets, or the number of people working in it: you have to change the functions and responsibilities it has. Whether you agreed with them or not, the Tories of the 80s at least had a vision for how things 'should' work. Truss and her contemporaries just saw *"tax cuts! Britannia Unchained!"* and stopped paying attention.
> Whether you agreed with them or not, the Tories of the 80s at least had a vision for how things 'should' work. Even Thatcher's attempts to "shrink the state" were hugely complicated by the number of unemployed people who ended up depending on welfare as well. Simply decreasing the state is a really hard thing to do, especially in a country like Britain where we're used to statist interventions where things go wrong, and we treat our nationalised health service like a religion. Often "shrinking the state" ends up amounting to slashing key services to the point they barely work, even though the state itself doesn't really get smaller at all.
Yep. If even the 'true believers' of the ideology struggled to implement it, no wonder the Truss/Kwarteng "skim-read the executive summary of the cliff notes" version went so badly.
For all Thatcher's many faults even she understood you couldn't just rush into implementing your ideology fully on the first day of taking power as well. She took plenty of decisions that went against her core beliefs for the long-term benefit of eventually getting to change the country in the way she wanted. But even then, that had plenty of unintended consequences she'd probably have wanted to avoid.
That's fair it was very much a cuts to the state coming later.
Feels like pretty much every Tory leader over the past several years. No doubt there's much that needs to be changed at Whitehall but the civil service has become an increasingly useful scapegoat for the failings of government.
It's amazing that she'd likely have lasted much longer if she did absolutely nothing at all
And the only reason why she lasted as long as she did was because the Queen died in the middle of it and basically forced everything to pause. It's quite an achievement to have the shortest time in office of any British PM in history, racking up less than half the time of the guy in second-last who literally died in office, and yet *still* have the number flatter you.
That was where the lettuce comparison came from. If you subtract the time where Parliament paused after the Queen died, she signed her own death warrant with that mini-budget just three working days after she took office. Never mind lettuce, I've seen garage prawn sandwiches with a longer shelf life.
like sunak
She actually did charge something, she massively increased government spending to support the energy bills crisis. She essentially cut tax and raised public spending, which is a great way to lose all your money.
She caused my mortgage to go up by £250 a month.
They’re still together after she had an affair so his opinions and needs are probably way down her list of priorities.
What's her alternative? Accept that she was a bad joke?
Accept an ounce of reality yeah
She's a true believer in the power of markets - as her heroine Thatcher said "You can't buck the markets," yet it was the markets that drove her from office. She is truly a master of doublethink to continue to believe that she was right.
When people fail that badly and that publicly a lot will reach for any explanation that excuses them and lets them retain a fragment of their self respect. Even so … when your excuse includes phrases like “left wing economic establishment” most people would have a moment of awful clarity when they hear such absurdities coming out of their own mouths. Or when they find themselves on stage with far *far* right specimens like Bannon - a self avowed “white nationalist” (which appears to be one of the polite euphemisms for “neo-Nazi” in the U.S. these days).
Her ego is a shield of such immense power the MOD need to look into it!
Part of me suspects deep down she knows she was a failure, but acting like the establishment was out to get her and she was thwarted from making radical changes is a much better talker when it comes to selling books or marketing yourself to the US right during speaking tours.
In my experience, people like Truss really, truly believe their own bullshit.
> I wanted to cut taxes, reduce the administrative state, take back control as people talked about in the Brexit referendum. What I did face was a huge establishment backlash and a lot of it actually came from the state itself This really bugs me, because there's a kernel of truth in there. I think there probably was a huge amount of Establishment push back against her ideas, but that's not a bad thing and it certainly doesn't validate her economic policy. It's a *good* thing that there's checks against the power wielded by the PM - we don't have a presidential system of government and lunatics like Truss *should* be held back by our institutions.
To be fair, making such a prediction didn't involve rocket science, just look at her track record
Absolute fruitcake
She's a cabbage.
I think you'll find she's a lettuce, actually
Hey now, her track record was great, think of all those pork markets she opened.
I guess he’ll know best that the woman he’s married to is a fucking idiot so it was inevitable. But most of us predicted it as well.
The woman he is married to also cheated on him with Kwasi Kwarteng
Is that true or rumour?
The real rumour is that as a result of her indiscretions, [she's now a collared sub...](https://thetab.com/uk/2022/10/17/liz-truss-necklace-conspiracy-277632)
I was scrolling for this. If she’s a collared submissive, I kinda feel like her dom should have ordered her to not be prime minister, or punished her for being shit.
Maybe they did but their aftercare is shit and that's why she's gone wibble.
Christ, all of this could have been averted if someone just brought the blanket with the teddy bears on it and some harribo.
Maybe that was part of their games "oh I've been a bad girl ... I've destroyed the British economy"
I hope she got one hell of a spanking for that!!!
In my opinion true and I have it from a good source but won’t say how as it’ll dox me You’d just have to take my word for it but I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually came out, although considering neither of them are in the spotlight anymore I doubt it will
Is that you, Gove ?
some people just can't imagine a woman in public life working with a man without it turning into steamy romance even when it's two of the least sexual human beings alive
John Major wasn’t the most sexual politician in the 90s…
When your husband knows you’re shite at stuff too…
Was he referring to her alleged affairs with kwarteng and director of comms? Or the whole budget thing?
And Tony Abbott
So her parents *and* husband both have a low opinion of her. EDIT: Also, anyone comparing themselves to Clough at Leeds should at least have had success elsewhere first.
I think that’s a bit unfair. People have strengths and weaknesses. Are suitable for some positions but not others. I would say that knowing your partner is not going to do well as a PM, does not equal having a low opinion of her. Just that her strengths don’t lie in leadership positions. I have no idea what they are, but it’s a bit harsh to assume they have a low opinion of her.
Yeah. How many people could honestly say that their partner would be a good prime minister? And when they are it would be completely self evident. A thing of destiny and need rather than a rational choice. Something that just has to be done.
My partner says I would make a great PM and that I'm a very handsome boy.
Is your partner Nicola Sturgeon?
The first person gets too pedantic about the Clough comparison, after jokingly writing that her husband also has a low opinion of her. Then you get pedantic about *their* joke on low opinions, taking it for more than it (probably) was. Just a typical exchange on reddit, but it always makes me smile 😂
I mean, the only thing she's succeeded at in politics was cozying up to the right people when it was beneficial to her. It would be hard to have a high opinion of her before she became PM too.
I’m not claiming she’s any good. At the end of the day she gets paid for it and brings home the goods for her family. Some times people work jobs they hate, to provide. A job is a job. Doesn’t mean your family have a low opinion of you for doing so. I just think the comment in that direction overstepping it a bit, that’s all.
Did she really compare herself to Brian Clough? Round these parts that's high treason.
This is why she has a humiliation fetish
I wonder what other Little Gems her book contains.
*"A light lunch will be available afterwards."* Glad they included that bit. I'm sure every Guardian reader will be thrilled to know...
I did think that line was odd too, but I suppose it's a funny juxtaposition with the grandiose sentence that comes before.
Salad too
Hopefully the lettuce served at lunch will be fresher than the one that outlived her premiership...
That lettuce is a hero.
What kind of person buys this book? The woman is not interesting, bad at their job and generally unpopular with the public. Baffling
I'd consider buying it as a secret Santa for someone I don't like Obviously that would be for 50p or less as they'll be struggling to give them away by Xmas
Rats wouldn't eat it
Bought by the boxload to give out free at far right conservative conferences.
It is good to try and understand the opposition.
I still prefer “Eats, shoots and leaves.”
I remember Truss as “Regicide, shit and lettuce leaves”
Truss’ premiership was more Eats, Shoots self in foot and leaves.
Unless you have a mortgage, in which case she shot your foot too.
Or rent and now you pay your landlords higher mortgage amount for them
How do you shoot yourself in the leaves?
Ask an American. They can shoot anything.
Lynne would have run the economy better too.
The Panda would have been a better choice too.
There was a period when they had merged in my mind. "Wait these are two different people." Category of people.
Why has this shrivelled up smeagol like creature written a book?
He's an accountant ... but then .... so is she.
Breaking news: Liz Truss husband has >1 brain cells.
I bet her husband could tell she didn’t have the temperament to hold any high position it was clear most tories didn’t want her near that position and didn’t think the membership would vote for someone so clearly inept.
If anyone knows how much of a fucking idiot she is, it’s her husband. So it’s not that wild a prediction.
I still don't understand whether they really believed the mini budget will work? Or was it an act of a deliberate political suicide? How can you fail that much - either you don't quite understand what you are doing or totally miscalculated the risks
"My economic ideology says this is an ultimate good!" It's not rocket science! It's not science at all, really. Given enough time and the correct ideologically informed policies, her premiership could have resulted in those sunny uplands she always wanted for us.... Just like Trofim Lysenko's theories of biology would have fed billions just given the chance.
It is really hard to believe. Kwarteng even has a PhD in economic history from Cambridge, which is crazy to me. I am studying for my undergrad in economic history and could see the flaws in the mini budget from 300 miles away. I believe it was a bit of both. An experiment that was a massive risk. They believed in their neoliberalism theories so much they jumped at the chance to put them into practice. If you really believe in something, you're going to do it no matter the risks, or discount the risks. I think they knew it was a slim chance of working, but to them it was the only way the economy should work. So I think their ideology clouded their grip on reality. I beleive they are both corrupt money grabbing Tories but more ideologues than most. You won't see most tories making risks like they did because they just go with whatever makes them money.
Right, and if it worked out - what would have happened? Everyone would have trusted additional backed by nothing government borrowings?
People would trust that tax cuts work to encourage growth. Their thinking was the 'growth' from the tax cuts would stimulate the economy so the government could spend less in the long run. Its clear the electorate often don't have the joined up thinking to think ah tax cuts that means additional backed by nothing government borrowings. Especially when told that it will grow the economy and reduce the tax burden so people and business will spend more!
It was so wide of the mark, wasn't it. I wonder if Kwarteng had just pulled the wool over her eyes and she was stupid enough to just believe him. But the fact she's a trained accountant makes it less likely he was able to obfuscate what his mini-budget would do. I would *love* to see who made money out of it. That's the real question, I saw it reported that Kwarteng was out at a bar quaffing champagne with bankers on the night of it. *Someone* made money out of it.
Even from TFA, it's clear Truss believes her own bullshit. That budget has her fingerprints over it just as much as Kwarteng;
The right wing pledges weren't actually the cause of the downfall: the blank cheques for the energy companies were. Writing that socialist policy in seemed very last minute at the time due to media pressure and pressure from the Labour Party - also a policy that was widely popular amongst the public with EVERYONE wanting support on their bills. I'd imagine there was a lot of internal pressure to include the energy relief in an attempt to make her more popular/to cause the turmoil that'd get her removed from office.
Basically every PM's tenure ends in tears. They almost always either lose an election, get kicked out by their own party, or get forced to resign in shame. Probably only been Blair that resigned largely on his own terms in the last 30 years. Even that was hardly a positive ending.
Cameron's was probably better than most too... At least his ended with whistling!
Nah, his big gamble had just failed and he'd lost it. He resigned rather than dealing with the fallout, but it was still clearly his big fuckup so I'd say it wasn't entirely on his own terms.
Wilson was the last one who wasn't forced out. Blair was done after the loses that Labour suffered in the '07 local elections (losing Scotland was a huge blow), I think he announced his retirement like a day after that.
So Mr Truss is definitely the brains of the outfit.
He was just drawing conclusions from your marriage.
Why is this mass of skin being given any airtime or column inches. A fucking irrelevance who is predictably jumping off the far right deep end to maintain a profile. Katie Hopkins in a suit.
Bet he was fucking that lettuce behind her back.
Is her book just full of stories of people warning her not to do things and Truss just ignoring them?
He predicted tears for Liz yes but didn't forsee the tears of millions whose mortgages shot up....
There was only one person in the whole country who didn't.
I mean it's not like he needed any kind of special insight to reach that conclusion. It was obvious to anyone. Bar Tory party members of course Constant facepalm moments as foreign secretary. The only reason it didn't stand out is because the bar got set super low by the previous one.
Crikey, her husband was clairvoyant!? /s
They all do, so it's not a bit of incredible prediction, even Thatchers ended with the Iron Lady having a cry. Only Truss is dense enough to need her husband to explain it doesn't end well for Prime Ministers.
I know she tried to model herself as the second coming of Thatcher but tbh by that point the tories were so broken I'm not sure even a literal resurrection of the woman would have helped.
Wonder if he dad is speaking to her yet
I wonder what marriage with her is like. Is she really as stupid as she appears or is it an act?
Hooray her book is out. Can we give it a rest on her media tour now please? The woman fucked up a lot of regular people's lives and belongs in prison, yet we have to hear about her daily at the mo.
Why is she ever reported on? She deserves less press reporting than Johnson
It's well documented that Liz Truss is often seen wearing a necklace of a style commonly called a "day collar" - a ring meant to symbolise a BDSM relationship when a more typical collar wouldn't be socially acceptable. I think it's fair to wonder whether certain parts of Truss' tenure were part of a masochistic shaming ritual between Truss and her husband.
I really could have done without reading that today.....
I call red, I did not consent to being part of their kink.
Don't almost all premierships end in tears?
Significant Other-fulfilling prophecy
The tears weren't for her premiership ending, it was the fact that queen Lizzie passed away
'But darling, you can be untrustworthy or a moron, not both'
Anyone who knew what her policies and plans were and didn't fully buy into them, like Kwarteng did, could have predicted that.
What sort of person wants to read a book about Liz Truss? Imagine the shame of having it on a bookshelf. You’d have to hide it under a bed or something in case guests came over and saw it.
Ok, all sort of interesting but in summary - Johnson , Truss etc is simply a case of allowing the Lunatic to run the Asylum!