Truss the saviour exposes ‘Labour’s secret plan’ | John Crace
It’s one of the great philosophical questions of our age. Or any age, for that matter. If Liz Truss didn’t exist, would it be possible to imagine her? Could anyone conceive that someone so brain-meltingly dim could have once been our prime minister?
And even if they could, would they have dared to believe that in harness with this industrial-strength stupidity there could be such a total lack of self-awareness. Liz comes with a vacuum-packed confidence in her own talent. While the real world treats her, at best as a joke, at worst as the last cockroach still standing, she maintains her messiah complex. The saviour waiting to rise from these streets.
In LizWorld, the problem is not that we had too much of her. It’s that we never got enough. And there’s a bit of me that can’t help agreeing. Forty-nine days – really, 39 days, as during the 10 days of state mourning for the late queen, Liz was prevented from doing any actual harm – was just too short.
Yes, I know she still crashed the economy and left us all worse off, but that was almost a price worth paying for white-knuckle ride entertainment. You wait more than 200 years for a prime minister this unsuited to high office, and I was fortunate enough to have a ringside seat. Just think what she might have achieved had she been able to stick around for a few more months. A UK on its knees.
These days, though, Truss lives a mysterious half-life. Split between the real world and the meta-world. Both existing and not existing. Occasionally spotted making incoherent speeches to small gatherings of the far right in the US, but mostly confined to a small attic space that doubles as the studio for her no expense incurred The Liz Truss Show on her YouTube channel. Each episode of which deserves the accolade of “mini-classic”. Just not in the way she might have hoped. Because with every outing, she goes from bad to worse.
Late on Wednesday, Liz released her latest offering. Boldly called “Labour’s Secret Plan: Labour PANICKING as Reform surges in Makerfield By-Election”. This promised to be the inside story on Makerfield. An on-the-ground exposé of what all the major media outlets had missed. A perspective so radical it would change everyone’s perceptions. And to help her, Liz had gone to the very top. No need for John Curtice, every TV channel’s go-to expert for polling analysis. Nor for the equally brilliant Rob Ford, the man the Beeb uses when Curtice is unavailable.
Instead, Liz had signed up June Slater. A former Ukip member, political blogger and occasional talking head on GB News. The psephologist’s psephologist. The election guru of our times. June wasted no time in getting down to it. Even though most anecdotal evidence from the constituency suggests Labour are likely to win relatively comfortably with even Reform privately admitting they would need a miracle, Liz and June saw things differently. Labour were definitely panicking. Or PANICKING as Truss put it.
We knew this because Slater had been up to Makerfield and spent a day campaigning with Rob Kenyon, the Reform candidate, and all she had seen were voters throwing palm leaves at his feet. “Rob is a very busy man,” she confided. “A quiet man, a bit of a thinker. Like my husband. When someone brought up a problem he got his phone out.” This must be the man who thinks so deeply he openly admits he’s a sexist, refuses to apologise for offensive remarks to Carol Vorderman, reckons Russia had a point when they invaded Ukraine, and isn’t entirely certain whether he supported Brexit or not. But this, apparently, was why voters were switching to Reform in their thousands.
June did concede that some people were reluctant to vote Reform because “they don’t want to appear hateful”. Though she appeared bewildered as to why this should be. Liz just nodded. It was a mystery. It surely can’t have been anything to do with Nigel Farage calling for “pure, cold rage” after the murder of Henry Nowak. Or Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick promising to deport all foreigners. Including Europeans with settled status. Though, as a gesture of goodwill, their children would be allowed to stay and be put up for adoption if they were born in the UK.
Next we got on to “Labour’s Secret Plan”. This turned out to be so secret that literally everyone had heard of it. Apart from Liz and June. Somehow they had been kept out of the loop. The byelection had been called because Andy Burnham was trying to get back into Westminster so that he could challenge Keir Starmer to become prime minister. Who could possibly have guessed? Stay tuned with Liz and new vistas will open up.
After that the conversation drifted. June admitted there had been a time prior to the Brexit referendum when she had considered voting remain, but had luckily changed her mind when her husband had pointed out that the EU was basically a communist state. Liz nodded eagerly. Grateful for the brainwipe, so she had no recollection she had been a Tory minister actively campaigning for remain a decade ago.
We moved on to Covid and the importance of not getting vaccinated. How people just had to see a picture of Starmer to provoke a kneejerk response that he was Chinese. Looking at photos of Farage and thinking of Russia was a definite plus, however. June started to get a bit maudlin. She used to have a house in Austria but now there was nowhere she really wanted to live. “The Blob” was everywhere. It won’t be long before she holes up in the wilds of Montana with a few dozen semi-automatic weapons.
The last word went to Liz. She, too, saw the malign influence of “the Blob” in every nook and cranny of the British state. The country was being lost. Labour had infiltrated every organisation. But at least we would always have her. While she still drew breath, there was hope. Never underestimate the power of the quarter-wit.
