Liz Truss has spent her time since being ousted as Prime Minister reinventing herself as an anti-establishment right-wing disruptor.
Rather than lick her wounds and accept a degree of responsibility for the market meltdown triggered by her ill-advised mini-budget – as her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had done – she has instead doubled down and blamed the “economic establishment” – in this case the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility.
This has seen her pop up in America speaking at conferences along with the likes of Donald Trump and JD Vance, and the wider Maga (Make America Great Again) movement.
It is also why the UK’s shortest serving Prime Minister – she managed just 49 days – was in London this week helping to launch an American-style right-wing conference.
Truss was forced to quit Downing Street in 2022 when her mini-budget of £45bn unfunded tax cuts sent the financial markets spiralling, which saw interest rates, and thus mortgages, rocket.
Despite all this the former Conservative Foreign Secretary is not ruling out a return to Parliament one day- she lost her South West Norfolk seat in the 2024 general election Labour landslide after 14 years as an MP.
Inaugural Conservative Political Action Conference
Truss was this week, speaking at, and chairing, the inaugural UK version of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) where Nigel Farage will be the key note speaker on Friday.
Asked whether CPAC could be the start of a political comeback, Truss did not rule out a return to Parliament.
“I don’t rule out anything,” she said. “Who would? I mean, British politics is so crazy. If you think where we were 10 years ago, Brexit vote, where we’ll be in 10 years’ time, who knows?”
She also did not give a straight answer to whether she could follow other former Conservative colleagues such as Robert Jenrick in defecting to Reform. “You’ll note that at this conference we’ve got people from the Conservative Party speaking, such as Andrew Griffiths and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and we’ve also got people from Reform. And what I care about is the ideas. That’s what I’m focused on.”
Sources in Reform has previously indicated that Truss would not be welcome in the party, although they said the same about the former Tory home secretary Suella Braverman, who has since been admitted. The Guardian reported earlier this year that Truss and Farage had enjoyed lunch together.
The problem for Truss is that she is now widely viewed as politically toxic after her disastrous tax-cutting mini-budget crashed the pound and UK gilts.
Some economists fear Andy Burnham, who will become the seventh Prime Minister in just over 10 years on Monday, could repeat the mistake after he previously railed against “being in hock to the bond market” and floated a relaxation of the Government’s borrowing rules.
He was criticised for those comments, and has since tempered his rhetoric as he nears Number 10 – to the point that his pick for Chancellor has been an agonising one in order not to spook the markets.
Truss remains unrepentant
Despite her spectacular downfall, Truss is unrepentant, and continues to maintain that the British “deep state” destroyed her premiership.
She was of course actually ousted by her own MPs. After sacking Kwarteng and bringing some stability back to the economy with the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor, a chaotic vote on fracking amid accusations of bullying and manhandling and a disastrous press conference saw Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench body the 1922 committee, indicating to her that she did not have the support to go on.
When asked her advice for Burnham, Truss insisted it had not been the financial markets which had brought her down. “I don’t think it was the bond markets. It was the economic establishment, the Treasury and the Bank of England,” she said.
Most observers argue it was none of these, but Truss’s own decision to ignore the OBR and introduce £45bn of unfunded tax cuts in her mini-budget, which sent the cost of debt soaring, the economy into freefall and – the biggest sin for a Prime Minister – pushed up interest rates, meaning millions saw their mortgage payments rocket.
As much as politicians may rail against the bond markets, the fact is they control the price of Britain’s debt payments, and there is a lot to repay. Increasing spending or cutting taxes without a way to pay for it increases borrowing more, and can mean the cost of servicing the debt gets even higher – with potentially disastrous economic consequences including sky-high inflation.
Advice for Burnham
Asked whether Burnham should tear up the UK’s current economic architecture, including the Office for Budget Responsibility, Truss said: “Correct. Because at the moment, and I think successive prime ministers have discovered this, they do not have the power. Parliament doesn’t have the power to make the changes.
“I think it is quite interesting that some people on Andy Burnham’s team, such as Louise Haigh, have openly said there are problems with the OBR (the Office for Budget Responsility), with the Bank of England.
“She’s right about the problems. I’m not sure I would agree with her on what the solutions are.”
Haigh, the former transport secretary who resigned in 2024 after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to a fraud offence a decade previously, is a close ally of Burnham’s and is expected to be appointed chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in his cabinet.
In an article for the New Statesman in February, Haigh claimed that the “narrow, particular and ideologically rooted perspective” of the OBR pushed governments towards spending cuts rather than long-term investments, although she called for the body’s reform rather than its abolition.
Many economists would question the wisdom of Truss’s prescription for Burnham. Indeed, Truss’s threats to tinker with the Bank and her decision to sideline the OBR when producing the mini-budget were widely seen as contributing to her financial crisis. Reform have recently ruled out scrapping the OBR precisely to build confidence with the markets.
No sympathy for Starmer
Despite suffering a similar fate to Starmer – who is quitting Downing Street because he would otherwise be ejected by his MPs – Truss said she did not have sympathy for the outgoing PM.
“No. He made his own bed,” she said. “Essentially the Labour Party’s analysis of what had gone wrong in Britain was the Conservative Party hadn’t spent enough money, and they got there and they discovered economic stagnation, very high taxes, very high government spending, and they’ve made the problem worse. So it’s not a surprise that he turned out to be the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history.”
While Ipsos did poll Starmer as having the worst personal satisfaction ratings for any prime minister since the company started asking the question in 1977 at -66 (compared to Truss’s -62 shortly after she resigned), some other pollsters suggest fewer people approved of or favoured Truss, with YouGov giving her a net favourability of -70 in October 2022, below Starmer’s nadir of -57.
CPAC is an annual event in the US and has developed a close connection with Donald Trump and his Maga (Make America Great Again) movement. Speakers at the US conference include Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk – and Truss. While it has held conferences in other countries before, this week’s three-day visit to London is its first in Britain.
Speaking to The i Paper on the thinly-attended first day of the conference at a corporate hotel near the O2 on Thursday, Truss said she had helped bring CPAC to these shores because “what I felt was needed in Britain is a place where the liberty and sovereignty movements can meet.”
She said Britain needed a “wider movement” beyond any one party on the right “to actually get change”. “Britain is run at the moment by a progressive blob, so we need a counter blob,” she argued.
“What I discovered about being in the frontline of British politics is that without a broader movement that supports change in the country, you can’t achieve things and that’s why I’m working on CPAC to develop this broader movement.”
“I think Britain needs a system change,” Truss added. “It’s not just one prime minister that’s a problem here. It’s the whole system that isn’t working. And I think a lot of people actually, even on the left of politics, would agree that there is a system problem in our country.”
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