ONE OF THE quirks of Liz Truss brief stint as British Prime Minister is that for the remainder of her life she will be invited to all manner of important events.
See, for example, her presence at the coronation of King Charles III or her laying a wreath at the Cenotaph along with six other former PMs on Remembrance Sunday.
These perks may or may not be worth the constant reminder of her 49 days in office but, speaking today in Dublin at least, she will never be allowed to forget it.
Truss was the big ticket draw on the first day of the European Broadcasting Union’s News Xchange conference in the Convention Centre.
Even in introducing their keynote interview, a task that is usually full of platitudes, the EBU’s Director General Noel Curran made reference to Truss’ disastrous seven weeks in office.
What followed was an acerbic 40-minute interview conducted by RTÉ’s David McCullagh.
At one point the broadcaster raised the infamous Liz Truss lettuce in successive questions, prompting the human Truss to snap.
“What’s the relevance of that question?” she said in response to the first and then secondly giving her verdict on the lettuce and whether she could see the funny side in hindsight.
“I don’t think it was particularly funny, I think it’s puerile,” she said.
The chat between the pair rattled along through a variety of topics from her use of social media to how the media covers politics and indeed Boris Johsnon.
McCullagh however was keen to focus on Truss and her tenure in Number 10.
In case you don’t remember, Truss replaced Johnson as PM after she was voted Conservative leader by a party membership who bought into her vision of a lower tax economy, particularly for the well-off.
Her controversial mini-budget, which included the abolition of the 45% tax rate on earnings over £150,000 and a cut to corporation tax, spooked the markets, sent the pound plummeting, and forced a £65 billion intervention by the Bank of England.
It also forced Truss to sack her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng before Tory MPs then decided to dispense with Truss herself.
The mini-Budget, McCullagh put it to her, could be described as “an audacious gamble at best, foolhardy at worst”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Truss was unreprented, arguing that the UK was, and still is, “in serious economic trouble” and that she had to be “bold” in reversing stagnant economic growth.
Despite being clear in her own mind that the approach was needed, Truss has realised that she did not have the backing to weather the storm in the markets.
“It didn’t have enough support among Conservative MPs and amongst the economic establishment in Britain,” she said.
But fundamentally, having lower taxes, having less regulation, and getting the economy moving I believe is the only way to achieve economic growth.
She even mentioned Ireland’s low corporate tax rate as an example, referencing how the boss of pharma firm AstraZeneca said the company chose here as a hub and not the UK because of corporation tax.
Asked whether she had done her due diligence before announcing the mini-budget, she said “maybe we could have gone a bit slower”, but added “we were facing a real crisis” with rising energy bills.
Truss added that not enough people were prepared to come out and publicly support her plan, and that “the policies were not falling on fertile ground”.
“I think the fundamental problem was there wasn’t enough political support for what I was trying to do,” she said.
RTÉ’s @mcculld getting straight into @trussliz at #NewsXchange, asking her about her use of social media and claims she attempted to be 'a Thatcher tribute act’.
— Rónán Duffy (@ronanduffy_) June 19, 2023
Truss says there was nothing deliberate about it and that female politicians are too often compared. pic.twitter.com/mCi7C5lh4e
Media
The stated topic for the discussion was “the constant demands of the 24-hour news cycle on government”, so the pair did share exchanges about the relationship between the media and politicians.
Quoting former Tory MP Enoch Powell, McCullagh put it to her that “politicians complaining about the press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea”.
Truss said this was “completely true” but then went ahead and criticised the media anyway.
Her main complaint was that the press was too often focused on people and not policy and was distracted by what she referred to as “froth”.
Politics is treated like “a brand of entertainment”, she said:
Who’s up, who’s down, who says what about who – it’s a bit playground when there are really serious issues going on.
And what about the ‘froth’, her examples:
What Boris Johnson has done, Gary Lineker’s tweets and Philip Schofield.
While she was quick to criticise the media for focusing on people and not policy, McCullagh asked her about the various photographs she posed for that were eerily reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher.
Such as when she posed on top of a tank or in a furry hat in Moscow.
Truss denied that this was a strategy, saying that this was “lazy thinking”.
“I think it’s one of those things about being a female politician. You inevitably get compared to other female politicians,” she said.
“I think that the British media are known throughout the world for being particularly vociferous and I don’t think they are particularly deferential to politicians,” she said.
“It’s frustrating because I came into politics because I wanted to change the country, I want to push particular ideas, and it is frustrating when you get diverted onto a discussion of what hat you’re wearing.”
And what about that other Tory former PM, the one who recently quit as an MP and who will again be in the news today when MPs vote on the report that accused him of lying to parliament?
“He himself has said he’s made mistakes, and none of us are perfect,” she said.
I’m not questioning the integrity of the report that parliamentarians have put the report forward. I think the judgment is pretty harsh, but I’m not questioning the integrity of those people.
Much like her successor as PM Rishi Sunak, it is unlikely that Truss will be in the House of Commons to vote on the report today, but what way would she vote if he was?
“As I’ve said I’m not questioning the integrity of the MPs but I think the sentence is overly harsh.”
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