There is said to be a fear among some Tory MPs that voters are so disgusted by the combined incompetence and corruption of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson’s administrations, the party will be out of power for a decade. If voters read Sir Anthony Seldon’s forensic and eloquent evisceration of Truss’s chaotic and catastrophic 49 days in No 10, it could be two decades.
The blunt subtitle of Truss at 10, the new book by Seldon, Britain’s leading political biographer – “How Not to Be Prime Minister” – says it all. Its opening sentence encapsulates the entire Truss saga: “She came, she saw, she crashed.”
Seldon says that when he set about writing his eighth biography of modern British prime ministers, people teased him: “I bet it will be a short one!” The 365 pages, equal to more than seven pages for each day she spent in No 10, are packed with new details of how Truss’s policies unravelled spectacularly. They contain candid on-the-record interviews with many of those involved, including Truss herself and her partner in crime, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. The book provides fresh insights into the personal tensions, “character flaws”, and behind-the-scenes clashes that contributed to her downfall.
Seldon’s biographies of prime ministers usually focus on the art of statecraft, and analyse policies, tactics and strategy over their years in office. He faced a different task with Truss. She only produced one policy, and we all know what happened: she slashed taxes without any thought of balancing the books, collapsed the economy, and had to resign. Seldon unpicks this, hour by excruciating hour. But it is the deeply unsettling picture the author paints of Truss’s personal failings, and how they influenced her actions in office, that I found most compelling.
Seldon is not a writer who is given to exaggeration or hyperbole. Yet his book is littered with words such as “mad”, “unhinged”, “bonkers”, “barmy”, “rage” and “paranoia” in its descriptions of Truss’s time in No 10.
You might imagine that a prime minister, on being informed by a senior minister or adviser that a proposed policy is likely to go badly wrong, would have to hand a suitable response. According to Seldon, the stock reply of Truss to anyone who questioned her was: “F*** it, we’re going for it,” or “Press ahead, I don’t want to hear any f***ing objections.” It was as crude, immature and dangerous as that.
Ministers and advisers talk of her being driven by “total self-belief” – though you are left with the clear impression that they thought there was little to back up that belief. Having known Truss through my work as a political reporter at Westminster, I am familiar with her “total self-belief” along with her zeal for headline-grabbing wheezes. On one occasion, she told me she planned to campaign to restore the “Three Rs” in schools. I asked her: “What is seven times eight?” She blinked, then blurted out: “54.”
Anyone can make a mistake. But given the above, combined with her “populist and even reckless” nature, as Seldon terms it, it did not fill me with confidence when she became, on her appointment as prime minister, first lord of the Treasury – a role in which one is required to perform more complex calculations than seven times eight.
Her many political reincarnations, from anti-monarchist to royalist, Lib Dem to Tory, Remainer to Brexiteer, made me feel queasy. Seldon’s book confirms the notion that, for all her enthusiasm and intelligence, she is strangely rootless, liable to embrace impetuously any passing fad that might help her up the greasy pole.
Searching for an explanation for her downfall, Seldon says Truss “never mastered her inner demons”. He identifies these as a lethal co*cktail, comprising a weak temperament and blind faith in her convictions compounded by poor judgement and a desire to avenge those she perceived to sneer at her because of her state school background.
He describes her reaction when an adviser suggested she say in a speech that she “knows how it feels to have your potential dismissed by those who think they know better”. An ecstatic Truss exclaimed: “I love it! It’s a massive ‘f*ck you.’ It’s great. It’s kind of deeply true. It’s basically a class issue as well. That’s the other reason people call me ‘stupid’. ‘Mad’. Public schoolboys!”
Most prime ministers are capable of making tough decisions without taking out the strains of high office on those around them, says Seldon. Truss showed no such grace. “Even senior cabinet ministers were treated with contempt and humiliated in public. She regularly told her personal staff to ‘shut up’ or simply blanked them. Her team would regularly feel she was talking behind their backs and playing one off against the other.”
Drilling into Truss’s “inner demons”, Seldon says one cabinet minister told him: “She’s hard work to be with. She doesn’t emote.” A second minister observed: “No one used the word ‘autism’. But it’s what we were thinking... her reluctance to engage... her unpredictability when the s*** hits the fan.”
Hard though it is to believe, Kwarteng emerges from Seldon’s book with even less credit than Truss. Seldon acknowledges that, for all her faults, she had more “moral seriousness” than her predecessor, Johnson. But a prime minister as unpredictable as Truss needed a strong chancellor. Kwarteng, her close friend and “ideological soulmate”, was the opposite.
Seldon says Kwarteng feared, even before he became chancellor, that Truss was “losing her perspective” – and he did not agree with her on key economic matters. She only made him chancellor, he says, because he agreed to acquiesce to her. Kwarteng feebly tells Seldon: “I formed the view that the chancellor should defer to the prime minister.”
When he belatedly tried to stand up to her, fearing – rightly, as events showed – that her Budget was a massive error, she told him to go ahead, and he gave in without a word’s objection. Seldon’s assessment is damning: “It is hard to think of any chancellor in decades who would meekly have done as he was told by No 10, reversing what he knew to be right.” When Truss ruthlessly sacked Kwarteng in a forlorn attempt to save her own skin, he seemed to be in a daze. He tells Seldon: “WW2 veterans in my constituency used to tell me that, if you’re going to die, keep calm to the end.”
Having admitted that he was ready to do exactly as she ordered, Kwarteng has the temerity to say that he now regrets it and that he “should have put my foot down harder”. He adds: “Some prime ministers were brittle. But Liz took it to a whole new level. She simply wasn’t fit for the job.” He may be unaware of the following, but Seldon does not appear to be: they were both unfit for their jobs.
The author pins the blame for Truss’s rise to power on Johnson. She only became prime minister in 2022 because he backed her, says Seldon, and he did so merely to spite her rival Rishi Sunak, whom he blamed – falsely, as Seldon states – for his own downfall.
Yet shameless Johnson’s public support for Truss was fake all along, says Seldon. “When asked by MPs who they should support, he would say, with varying degrees of conviction, ‘Liz Truss.’ But in private he remained disparaging of her.” Johnson cynically “peddled the [Sunak] betrayal theory far and wide, knowing it would damage Sunak and benefit Truss”.
Nor does Seldon spare the blushes of Conservative-supporting newspapers like the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph, which helped Truss to win power and promoted her kamikaze budget. The Mail praised its “seismic boldness and courage”, he notes. Its support for her was so slavish that it was about to launch a campaign to defend the calamitous decision to scrap the 45p tax rate at the very moment when she was about to ditch that policy.
Seldon writes: “Kwarteng was instructed to speak to the [Daily Mail] editor Ted Verity to say ‘You must do as you think fit, but if you run with that story, you’re going to look rather silly because the policy is going to change.’” Craven Kwasi did as he was told – and the paper took his advice.
It is hard to disagree with Seldon’s conclusion that Truss and Johnson are chiefly responsible for the Tories’ recent landslide election defeat. “Her vanity and neediness and willingness to trample over others was of Johnsonian proportions. The party’s longstanding reputation for economic competence and cool-headed pragmatism had been severely tested since 2016, but the final thread was snapped by Truss. The British state suffered from her trashing of its institutions and personnel, hard on the heels of Johnson’s systematic undermining of them.”
The disturbing air of unreality surrounding Truss’s persona and politics is reflected in Seldon’s account of her demeanour when she knew her fate was sealed. “Rather admirably, if a little eccentric, she retained her optimism right to the very end. Seldom has a prime minister been happier after they knew the game was up. ‘She radiated positivity in her final days, as if she was almost happy it was over,’ said an aide.”
‘Truss at 10: How Not to Be a Prime Minister’ by Sir Anthony Seldon is out on 29 August
