Liz Truss: traduced or trussed?

[Because of overseas travel commitments, this blog will be off air for new instalments for a fortnight. Next edition will appear on 15 May.]

The older we get, the more memory plays tricks on us. It tells us all our childhood summers were sunny, our Christmases were always white and that The Irish Times was once a serious newspaper. Well, it might be too sweeping to say that The Irish Times is now an altogether unserious “newspaper”. But memory is not lying in reminding me that it is not as serious as it once was — especially in its opinion columns.

On 18 April, the newspaper published an opinion piece[i] by Finn McRedmond under the headline

Treatment of Liz Truss shows there is still a bias against middle-aged women

And the sub-headline:

For all her weakness, it is worth remembering we have let other politicians get away with much worse

These headlines capture the broad thrust.

After a shallow review of how other British and Irish heads of government have spent their time after leaving high office, Ms. Redmond gets down to her subject.

Truss is seeking to rescue her legacy. And she has every right to.

I don’t think anyone sensible would deny Ms. Truss’s “right” to seek to rescue her legacy. What many might reasonably dispute is whether that legacy is capable of rescue. Indeed Ms. Redmond goes some way along the road with that…

It is true that she was a bad prime minister.

You sense there is a “But” coming and come it immediately does.

But for the sake of her legacy she is also not incorrect to say she was never given a proper try.

Ms. Redmond is hedging a bit in deploying the hazy, lukewarm formulation “not incorrect”. If she believes Ms. Truss was correct, she should have said so. If she believes something else, she should have written whatever that something else is. Instead she fumbles towards a kind of “She might be correct…”

But, more important, she might have given a view on what would have constituted “a proper try” and by what criteria that “try” might eventually be determined to have been success or failure.

It reminds me of the old joke about the odious George Galloway. Once a Labour MP, he asked a party colleague plaintively: “Why do people take an instant dislike to me?” The colleague replied briskly: “Saves time, George. Saves time”. Ms. Truss got her try and fluffed it decisively almost immediately.

But Ms. Redmond has some sympathy for her.

Truss is granted a level of hostility — in and out of office — that seems disproportionate. For all her strangeness, we ought to remember we let people get away with much worse.

Faint if not damning praise indeed. Well, yes! Hitler, Pol Pot and various other bad guys got away with much worse for much longer but that hardly justifies giving Ms. Truss an unmerited break.

Ms. Redmond plods along.

It is hard to avoid the sense that part of Truss’s problem is that society has a difficult time with middle-aged women, no matter its pretensions to the contrary.

Again, Ms. Redmond hits the nail gently on the side of the head with her evasive “It is hard to avoid the sense…” And the sweep about “society” having “a difficult time” and its “pretensions” is just vague verbal cotton wool. But, in any event, the contention that her age and sex are what did for Ms. Truss is demonstrably untrue.

It is certainly the case that Ms. Truss was “middle-aged” when she entered and departed from Downing Street aged 47. But it is no less true that Margareet Thatcher was middle-aged when she was elected leader of the Conservative party in 1975 aged 49 and still so when she became Prime Minister in 1979 aged 53.

Mrs. Thatcher survived and mostly thrived for over 11 years as Prime Minister because she was good enough at the job. Ms. Truss fell after less than two months because she was no good at the job. End of story. Her failure was individual, nothing to do with her sex or age.

Ms. McRedmond reminds us of Ms. Truss’s credentials to be regarded as “heavyweight”.

…we ought to remember, Truss brought Conservative Party members with her. They elevated her to the job ahead of Rishi Sunak. She lasted in cabinet for a long time. She was enough of an operator to get big jobs and somehow mediate her transition from Remainer to post-Brexit free market ultra quite convincingly. She is not devoid of talent.

Note again, the recourse to mealy mouthing: “She is not devoid of talent.” I will be more forthright and concede that Ms. Truss has a talent of lighthouse luminosity for self-promotion backed by immense self-belief in her entitlement to and credentials for leadership, which in the mediocre context of our time were enough to propel her to the highest political office in the land.

But the real measure of “talent” is not the offices you win, but what you do with them.

Ms. Truss was indeed in cabinet “for a long time”, eight years before becoming Prime Minister. And she did indeed hold some “big jobs”, five cabinet offices altogether. But can anyone recall a single significant achievement in any of them? I can’t either. Ms. Truss rose without trace and left no trace until it all fell apart.

Indeed, Ms. Truss’s tenure in cabinet (before she went down in flames as Prime Minister) is most remembered for a bizarre, spacey speech at the Tory Party Conference in 2014, shortly after her appointment as Environment Secretary[ii]. On youtube, it still repays viewing today as wonderful unintentional comedy.

Rounding the bend before the home strait, Ms. McRedmond contrasts the treatment meted out by media commentators to Ms. Truss to more benign media treatment of “heavyweight” (my word — tongue in cheek) male observers of UK politics — podcasters Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart whose authority allegedly goes unquestioned and talk radio presenter and arch-remainer James O’Brien who is a media darling.

Loving him (Mr. O’Brien) and loathing her (Ms. Truss), as many seem to do, surely reveals a pretty severe ideological prejudice.

That different people like some public figures and dislike others is just part of the normal fabric, ebb and flow of discourse and life, not a pathology.

Clustering Ms. Truss alongside three selected males doesn’t even rise to the level of a flimsy case that she is the victim of “ideological prejudice”. It is a bit like saying that a sample of three selected doctors who are rumoured to be paid €100 per hour and a single selected dentist who is rumoured to be paid only €90 per hour establishes the existence of prejudice against dentists compared to doctors. Ms. Truss gets a rough ride from the media now because she deserves it.

Ms. McRedmond concludes her plea to the jury:

Truss shouldn’t be treated to a revisionist history: her tenure was rocky and many of her ideas poorly conceived in office, out of office and in cabinet. The pivot to right-wing US populism may not rescue her legacy. But we have to wonder why so few are willing to give her a fair hearing.

No, Ms. McRedmond, we don’t have to wonder anything at all and I suspect that the only reason Ms. Truss is getting any hearing or public reaction is because of her shamelessly and endlessly parading her bizarre views in front of any camera or microphone that comes within her reach. Her self-belief has not been dimmed one watt by the slings and arrows of (by her lights) outrageous fortune.

Here is a fair explanation of why Ms. Truss should never be let near any levers of power ever again.

Ms. Truss became Prime Minister in September 2022. Her flagship “policy” was to reduce higher rates of income tax on the basis that these cuts would recharge sluggish economic growth sufficiently to pay for themselves over time without incurring any downside risk.

Before the budget in which these measures were announced, her government effectively fired the top civil servant at the Treasury, presumably because he was not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the idea. It declined to seek a forecast from the non-partisan non-departmental Office for Budget Responsibility of the potential impact of the measures. She seems to have blithely disregarded the already high level of public borrowing and prospective continuing spending deficits, exacerbated by a not ungenerous (thank you Ms. McRedmond) package of supports to householders faced with increased energy prices announced shortly before the budget as a consequence of the war in Ukraine.

Once announced, the tax cuts caused commotion on the markets, triggering pressure on the Pound, the intervention of the Bank of England and increased interest rates across the board, notably on UK government borrowing, household mortgages and other negative fallout which endures to this day. People are still paying for Ms. Truss’s irresponsible frivolity.

Ms. Truss’s time in Downing Street was a perfect lesson in how not to run a railroad. Hoping and wishing for good things to happen because of a few effortless pen strokes is no more of a policy or a strategy than the stars are God’s daisy chain.

That she has ambitions to return to high public office confirms exactly what we already knew of Ms. Truss’s outsized ego. Scattering blame on everybody else while exempting herself altogether indicates the density of her chutzpah.

That there is even a smidgin of a possibility that her wish for a comeback might come to pass tells one all one needs to know about the sorry state of contemporary British politics.

And that The Irish Times happily publishes so limp, lazy and watery an opinion piece as this says a lot about contemporary standards of broadsheet “journalism”.

[i] Treatment of Liz Truss shows there is still a bias against middle-aged women — The Irish Times

[ii] Liz Truss: Speech to Conservative Party Conference 2014 (youtube.com)