Liz Truss has a deranged plan to ‘save the West’ (who from – herself?)

Fans of Liz Truss, of which there may theoretically be one, will sadly have to wait seven months to get their hands on her promised new book, Ten Years to Save The West, which is not due out in April 2024, by which point there will already be only nine and a half left.

But for those who would sooner start panicking now and get straight on with saving the West by following the advice of the least credible human being alive in Britain today, then don’t panic (or rather do, as she has generously furnished us with an extremely clear idea of what to expect).

It is made obvious from the book’s press release that Liz Truss has learned precisely zero lessons from her 49 days in office, which have reduced her and her name to absolutely no more than a fully anthropomorphised punchline to a joke at her own expense.

Her ideas for saving the West bear remarkable similarity to a dying wasp’s idea of escaping through a shut window. Just keep going at it, harder and harder, over and over again until it works, which it definitely will, and if it doesn’t, then it was the window’s fault anyway.

The book is going to blame the “global left” for everything that’s gone wrong. It was the fault of the “global left” that, to take but one example, she didn’t understand the UK pension market and so accidentally set it on fire, because no one from the “global left” explained it to her, which despite her being prime minister at the time, she seems to think they should have done.

“In Ten Years to Save The West,” the blurb reads, “[Truss] will argue that the rise of authoritarianism around the world and the adoption of fashionable ideas propagated by the “global left” give us barely a decade to preserve the economic and cultural freedom and institutions that the West holds so dear.”

It’s not immediately clear, at least not to anyone sane, quite how she will argue this, given that the “global left” and its fashionable ideas are currently all that is keeping an actual fascist out of the White House, whose own somewhat less fashionable ideas include a Muslim travel ban and bragging about sexually assaulting women.

(In promotional interviews for the book, she has said that “we need to get a Republican back in the White House”, which is ordinarily not a very wise thing for a former British prime minister to say, in the countdown to Donald Trump running for office, with the backing of a Republican party that still firmly believes in stolen election conspiracy theory and wants to burn down democracy in America. Mercifully, she is a “former British prime minister” in much the same way as the late Michael Foot was a footballer for Plymouth Argyle.)

Truss has already spent her time out of office jetting around on a kind of self-exculpatory Why I Was Right And Everyone Was Wrong World Tour. Her advice has mainly been the same as that of a medieval royal physician who, having drawn four pints of blood from the ailing monarch, concludes the only solution is to draw three more.

Naturally, we pre-apologise if this metaphor turns out to be rather too on the nose, given the book also claims to be “peppered with newsworthy anecdotes from her time in public life – such as her memorable last meeting with Queen Elizabeth II”.

It does threaten to be the final sledgehammer blow to anyone who has somehow managed to protect their own personal irony-o-meters from the last seven years of entirely sociopathic politics. Having to listen to the fourth-in-succession of ever more right-wing Tory prime ministers blame the “global left” for the almost cosmic mess that is entirely of their own making is about as spectacularly insane as it gets.

But the thing to consider is whether that’s the point. For a few short days, Truss, Kwarteng and their various outriders got everything they wanted. They forced their wildest fantasies on a country that didn’t want them and they rhapsodised about how great it all was until it became obvious that it wasn’t. Until, in their minds’ eye, the “global left” stepped in, which in this case was those notorious global lefties: the Bank of England, mortgage lenders and the international bond markets.

The real consequence of Truss and the increasingly unhinged intellectual world she has embraced is the current semi-dystopian reality in which right-wing Tories now act like they are in opposition, not government. They talk about “Broken Britain”, about the terrifying state of the public finances, and they look more and more deranged, but the cure is coming – namely that they will soon actually be in opposition and (almost overnight) they’ll have someone else to blame.

Truss, in other words, is not so worried about having 10 years to save the West, but she does think she might have a few to save her reputation, for a final frenzied rush at the window.