Who will Liz Truss go after next – the lettuce?

I wonder if Liz Truss is familiar with the “Streisand effect”?

In case it had passed you by, the term refers to how a public figure attempts to protect their reputation from some slight, but where the attempt to do so actually makes matters worse by drawing even more public attention to them and the cause of their embarrassment.

In the case of showbiz legend Barbra Streisand, the problem was an aerial photo of her magnificent home in Malibu, used in a story about coastal erosion. Outraged at the invasion of privacy, she sued, created a scandal, and thus attracted many, many more people to view the innocuous image, and in doing so made herself look a bit silly.

Now you might think that it’s not possible for Truss to make herself into an even more ridiculous – not to say derided – phenomenon than she already is, but her legal “cease and desist” letter to the prime minister proves that, in this field at least, she is peerless.

She has, improbable as it may seem, got her lawyers to threaten Keir Starmer with a lawsuit if he continues to say that she “crashed the economy” during her brief premiership in 2022, during which she famously crashed the economy. According to the letter, such remarks “cause serious harm to her reputation”. To which one can only ask: “What reputation?”

Because, after all, her reputation stood so high when she left Downing Street after 49 days in power that the whole nation was plunged into sadness at the loss of such an icon, and tributes to her service poured in from across the world. Oh, hang on, that was Queen Elizabeth II, the news of whose death prompted in the mind of Truss, according to her own memoir, the thought: “Why me, why now?" (Truss never missed an opportunity to fail to raise to an occasion).

The loss of Truss from the nation’s helm, in fact, was greeted with a mixture of joy, relief and an abiding sense of disbelief that such a plainly reckless and unsuitable character had ever been allowed anywhere near power.

The short answer to that conundrum, obvious to students of the recent history of the Conservative Party, is that she was promoted and manoeuvred into such a position by Boris Johnson because he knew she was so inadequate she was bound to make him look good, while Rishi Sunak would not; and so it came to pass. Another act of selflessness there by Johnson, the second worst prime minister of the 21st century.

I’m afraid that Truss and her lawyers will need more than a letter to Starmer to rewrite history. They will have to send a threatening note to virtually everyone in the country who watched her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, deliver her now notorious, maximum-damage mini-Budget, and saw the pound and the bond markets collapse into panic in real time.

The pain was especially acutely felt by those seeking a mortgage at the time, but the chaos caused by her incredible package of unfunded tax cuts was so bad that the position was irrecoverable. Even after she had jettisoned Kwarteng, recruited Jeremy Hunt to replace him and reversed almost everything in the Budget, her reputation – that precious commodity she seeks now to defend – had sunk so low that even her most loyal allies told her she’d have to go.

The term “crashed the economy” may not literally be true because, as her lawyers stress without a hint of irony, she wasn’t allowed to hang around long enough to watch inflation soar and the economy slump into recession, but the damage to the real economy inflicted by her disastrous policies was real and long-lasting, and just as corrosive to her party’s reputation for economic competence.

That they were reversed – and Truss removed – before things got even worse is hardly the “win” Truss’s legal team seems to think.

Otherwise, as ever, she seeks to blame the Bank of England and anyone else in what she terms “the blob” for the mini-Budget-induced meltdown.

There was certainly trouble in one corner of the pensions market, but that was because no one had ever thought that bond yields could soar quite as far and quite as fast as they did when Kwarteng got to his feet in the Commons to announce the biggest tax cuts in half a century. Over the following weekend, when things were hardly going swimmingly, he smugly told the press that there was plenty more of that audacious stuff to come. His defiance ended his career too.

A legal letter cannot alter the truth. Her fall was rapid and it was all her own fault.

Even Kwarteng, her friend as well as colleague, tried to warn her she was going too fast. She fired the top civil servant in the Treasury for the crime of pointing out of the consequences of her plans – so much for her being controlled by the “economic establishment”.

Secretive to no great purpose, she refused to inform the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) about her plans, which she was required by law to do: and she obsessively kept the Bank of England in the dark. So, they didn’t ever try to stop her own folly, because they couldn’t. Had she actually picked the phone up, they could have helped her mitigate and avoid the worst of what followed, and maybe even save her career.

The conspiratorial idea, which she clings to, that the Bank and the Treasury orchestrated world financial markets to sell off gilts and sterling hardly bears scrutiny, as if the hard-nosed dealers in Singapore, Wall Street and the City of London would give a flying fig about what Andrew Bailey thinks about anything.

The “blob” might not have saved her, but her attempts to apportion blame elsewhere since would sound a bit more convincing now. Instead, the Truss experiment was very much a solo one, and a fearlessly determined one too – admirable in a perverse sense, and, you’d imagine, very much inspired by the tactics of the Japanese air force in the closing months of the Second World War.

Unlike the admirable Streisand and her legal blunder, Truss doesn’t have an otherwise glittering collection of achievements to set aside one unfortunate error of judgement: Not even the political equivalent of Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl, described as a “musical vanity project about a cross-dressing religious scholar. Yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.”

There’s nothing else Truss did as premier, nor as foreign secretary, nor in any of her other jobs that stands the test of time or could rescue her reputation from the very depths it currently inhabits.

The only thing she ever understood was that to win a Conservative leadership election, it is only necessary to tell the party membership exactly what they want to hear, no matter how unrealistic and “cakeist” that may be.

Her mistake was to actually believe in the economic fantasy she peddled to the grassroots, the one where tax cuts always pay for themselves and where it is definitionally impossible for a Conservative prime minister to crash the economy.

It was Truss herself who tanked her reputation, and the position is irrecoverable. She may as well sue the lettuce.