‘Those who claim I crashed the economy are either very stupid or very malevolent’

Who did for Liz Truss? The shortest-lived prime minister in our history has blamed the “deep state”. But let’s not forget the part played by a vegetable. On October 14 2022, the Daily Star began a livestream of a lettuce next to a framed photo of Truss to see which would last longer. The lettuce went viral.

Once politicians are the butt of a national joke they struggle to regain dignity and respect, particularly when those Tory MPs who backed Rishi Sunak to be their leader are enjoying, and quite possibly colluding in, their demise.

I have come to believe that our 56th prime minister was hard done by and that some of the “conspiracy theories” that she is accused of peddling may be close to the truth. Unfairly or not, “Liz Truss crashed the economy” has taken root in the public imagination. It is a cruel fate for a fiercely bright, driven woman who was in a tearing hurry to stimulate growth in order to spare us higher taxes and ever more debt. As she left No10, Truss said to a friend, “The economy is going to get much worse and Rishi has no answers – if they think getting rid of me is the answer they’re much mistaken.”

“She wasn’t vengeful, it was just being logical,” the friend recalls.

The daughter of a maths lecturer who has been known to ask job applicants to prove themselves by multiplying fractions (yikes), Truss can be logical to a fault. There is a touch of Mr Spock’s naughty niece about her. Logic makes her formidable in debate, but nuance eludes her. After such an epic public humiliation, most people would don the Greta Garbo headscarf and sunglasses and scurry off to lick their wounds in private for a few years. Not Liz.

Truss has come out fighting with a combative, brutally honest book about establishment groupthink and the way the woke Left has colonised our institutions.

It will certainly help infuriated Tory voters understand why the Conservative government they thought they voted for behaves as if it’s being held hostage by Extinction Rebellion.

She insists that Ten Years To Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room is not a complaint about how unfairly she was treated. Nonetheless, there is much score-settling: the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey (mischievously labelled “Rock-a-bye Bailey”), Michael Gove and the Whitehall “blob” all get the blowtorch treatment.

We meet at one of those grand, think-tank places in a Mayfair Georgian terrace. Truss is impeccably groomed in a navy trouser suit with a cream blouse and that gold-circle necklace she wore throughout her leadership campaign like a talisman. When I say her book is much more readable than most political tomes she says she thinks it is “quite emotional”. (Er, no, Liz, it really isn’t.) I laugh and Truss, seeing the funny side, starts laughing too. “OK, it’s quite emotional,” she says drily, pausing a beat. “For me.”

Some colleagues suggest she is still in denial about what happened during those 49 whirlwind days of her disastrous premiership. Doesn’t Truss feel embarrassed looking back? Regretful?

“The people who claim I crashed the economy are not telling the truth,” she says. “They’re either stupid or malevolent and should be ashamed of themselves.”

But people say their mortgage has gone up because of Liz Truss? “It’s not true,” she says again. (The girl from Leeds sounds more bluntly Yorkshire when she’s irritated or defiant.) “What I care about is the truth,” she continues, “I don’t care about what ignoramuses in the BBC say.”

Surely, though, on a human level it must be devastating, I persist.

Truss avoids my question about shame and regret. “I’m not saying I didn’t do anything wrong, or got everything right... but just some of the ludicrous claims that I’m responsible for economic stagnation. It’s not true, I tried to FIX IT!”

There is a touching account in the book of the Queen installing Truss as prime minister at Balmoral. “She was amazing, totally alert mentally, still across every issue. She was witty too. She had clearly been waiting for this, her final duty, although we didn’t know that obviously.”

The late Queen said to Truss: “pace yourself ”. “I didn’t listen to her,” Truss grimaces.

Her bravado is admirable in its way, but also deeply odd. What she went through was traumatic by any standards and she was probably far more upset than she admits. A leading Truss backer says Liz told him she spent her final afternoon in No 10 in tears before giving her resignation speech.

In the months after she was toppled, her mood went up and down. Friends rallied, helping her land a deal for the book and set up the Growth Commission, a group

Bloodied but not bowed, Liz Truss tells Allison Pearson why Britain should abolish the Supreme Court, Nigel Farage should join the Tories and how she’d never have gone for the top job if she’d known how toxic the Conservative Party was

dedicated to reversing the stagnation in the economy. In February, Truss and Mark Littlewood, former director general of the libertarian, free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, launched Popular Conservatives ( jauntily shortened to Pop Cons and not far in outlook from the Reform UK party). Truss was recently spotted at Nigel Farage’s 60th birthday party. Could she imagine working alongside Farage? “I’d like to see Nigel join the Conservative Party,” she says.

What would she say to disillusioned Telegraph readers intent on voting Reform? “I want the Conservatives to propose a bolder policy agenda that actually changes the system. Until we do things like leave the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), row back on net-zero targets and take back control of economic policy from the Bank of England and the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) it is harder to persuade people to vote Conservative.”

She thinks Rishi Sunak is sincere about his Rwanda plan, but says it won’t work. “To deal with illegal immigration, it’s not enough to leave the ECHR. You’ve got to make the judicial system more accountable in Britain. So I think we have to abolish the Supreme Court, reverse the Constitutional Reform Act and repeal the Human Rights Act.”

Truss avoids direct criticism of Rishi Sunak, but she pulls faces whenever I bring him up. She does say she was horrified by the removal of Boris Johnson. “It was self-defeating. He won the party’s mandate. I don’t say that Boris is perfect. He isn’t, but he was a winner.”

She reserves her most scathing words for the jaw-dropping disloyalty displayed by Michael Gove in the 2016 Conservative leadership contest.

Do you lack guile, Liz? “Probably yes,” she smiles, “If my eyes had been open to exactly how toxic the Conservative Party was, or how Machiavellian the administrative state was going to be, maybe I wouldn’t have gone for the top job.”

Which brings us to her downfall: cock-up or conspiracy? Truss’s leadership victory party was on September 5. But Sunak did not look defeated. There were rumours that a plot was afoot to have Liz out by Valentine’s Day. She was more vulnerable than she knew.

It is fortunate for Truss’s adversaries that the financial markets meltdown that forced her out is highly technical and hard for a general audience to grasp. (Much easier to make Truss the fall gal.) Plenty of respected economists privately say that “unprecedented” action by the Bank of England triggered a series of calamitous events that made the new PM’s position untenable. Interest rates were going up around the world and Russia’s war in Ukraine was causing havoc with energy prices so the UK’s predicament was far from unique.

Before Kwasi Kwarteng stood up in the Commons to announce his mini-Budget, there was a leak from the OBR which warned there was a £70billion hole in Kwarteng and Truss’s calculations. Were they deliberately gunning for her?

“I don’t have any proof. The economic consensus had been, amongst the Bank of England, Treasury and the OBR, relatively loose monetary policy, cheap money, which had been going on for years. That was very damaging to the economy, with high taxes and high levels of regulation. I don’t think Andrew Bailey wanted to move away from that, even though we’d got a mandate to do things differently. The markets reacted badly as it was clear the Bank of England and the Government were not on the same side.”

After Truss was ousted, the Bank reversed its actions – which made it looked like the markets were overjoyed at the installation of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the “adults in the room”. How is that not a stitch-up?

Truss is silent for a while, finally saying: “The outsourcing of decision-making to technocrats is completely wrong. What we should be basing our decisions on are the principles about what is the right thing to do, not some flimsy prediction in the future by the OBR. So the whole system is deeply flawed, but it’s in the interest of people who are insiders, who are part of the status quo; it’s a completely perverse system.”

Truss wants an inquiry into what happened. “The level of power that is exercised now in Britain by people who aren’t elected is a huge problem,” she says. “I put forward policies that I believe would have resulted in the economy being in a better position today. Raising corporation tax has not been a success. Things like the windfall tax on energy has not helped. So I believe the policies were right and I had a mandate to deliver them. And I was forced to reverse them.”

Why did she U-turn? “I had a gun to my head, that there would be a debt crisis if I hadn’t done it, or that we would not be able to fund UK debt. But why did the £70billion figure from the OBR leak? Why?”

All good questions that deserve answers. Backroom boys should not be able to bring down a sitting prime minister because she threatens their jammy lives. “They think I’m vulgar, she says.” Belly laugh. “Well, I am vulgar.”

The other view of this story is that Liz Truss was her own worst enemy. In Shakespearean tragedy, the hero is brought low by a fatal flaw. Truss’s was hubris, I think, an inability to heed voices telling her to slow down. You could have delayed certain things. I mean, why cut the top rate of tax from 45 to 40p when you know Labour are going to beat you with it?

“This is a tax that raises literally no money,” she says indignantly. “If Conservatives aren’t prepared to get rid of a tax that raises no money, and is a barrier to aspiration and a barrier to our country being more successful, what are they prepared to argue for? We’ve accepted the

Labour distributionist analysis of the world, which is there’s only a fixed size of pie, we’ve got to share it out. It’s unfair, unless everybody is being taxed at the highest possible level. It’s a Leftist argument and we have to fight it.”

There she goes again. Logic, logic, logic. Impeccably logical, Liz, but also lacking in empathy and misjudging the public mood in a cost of living crisis.

She gets upset for the first time when I ask how her teenage girls handled seeing their mother cast out like a pariah. “It was awful, pretty awful. Frances and Liberty are very protective of me. But they laugh and say, ‘Mum, what on earth is wrong with you, you’re never normal?’ and I suppose I’m not.”

What we know for sure is what happened to Liz Truss would have crushed a more normal person, a lesser person. “I’m not regretful, I don’t know why. I suppose I see myself as a warrior, a combatant. So I’ve lost this battle, but I’m still alive. I knew when I went for the job that it was going to be really tough and I would face the onslaught and opposition. I didn’t realise quite how big the onslaught would be, but it makes me more determined because what’s the alternative to fighting?”

She calls on Conservatives to be braver and, heaven knows, whatever her faults she is brave. No lettuce, she. I do think there is redemption for her among generous-minded people who will see the markets take umbrage at Labour’s tax and spending and, in the years to come, there may even be headlines that say the unimaginable. “Liz Truss was right.”

‘Backroom boys should not be able to bring down a sitting prime minister’