Anthony Seldon’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. Those who feel compelled to read his account of Liz Truss’s 49 days in Downing Street in 2022 – and I am not sure how numerous outside Westminster they will be – should prepare to feel traumatised.
Over 365 pages it becomes clear that the chaos, self-regard and detachment from reality apparent from the outside is not only confirmed by accounts from “inside the room” but was probably even worse than we thought. In a crowded field, the moment when Team Truss considers cancelling cancer treatment on the NHS to fund her tax cuts for the rich is perhaps the most shocking. But the manic swearing, petulant blindness to the suffering she was causing and deafness to reason is rarely short of disturbing.
An ITV drama along these lines would surely be dismissed as dystopian viewing rather than a national rallying call in the fashion of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. Seldon is not given to hyperbole, but I counted the word “unhinged” to describe Truss and her actions at least four times – and in this story there are no Mr Bates-style heroes to fight the good fight on our behalf.
The one potential caped crusader – Tom Scholar, the seasoned and courteous permanent secretary at the Treasury – was sacked by Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng on day one of her reign. Scholar’s absence left the country with a deluded captain helming a ship headed into the mother of all storms, after throwing overboard the officer with the authority and expertise to point out that the ship was about to sink.
Seldon’s access to the ministers, officials and special advisers of those torrid months is remarkable. And yet we have to wait too long for Truss’s story to get going. Several pages at the front of the book are devoted to past prime ministers who faced early turbulence or who turned out to serve for only a short term – even if their time in office was not outlived by a salad. The only helpful comparison to me seemed Anthony Eden – whose “wild and capricious decision-making” made him act obsessively and disastrously over Suez just as Truss’s unbridled folly over her mini-Budget ensured her downfall. Seldon speculates how much Eden’s abdominal illness and the “mind-altering” drugs he took to ease the pain affected his judgement, and ponders the influence of possibly excessive caffeine and Sauvignon Blanc on Truss’s mental stability. Eden never recovered from the humiliation of the catastrophe that defined his time in No 10 but Truss seems weirdly lacking in remorse or reflection in regard to hers.
In his youth, Eden was considered brilliant, a natural successor to his one-time mentor Winston Churchill. For all Truss’s fantasies as to her own glittering Churchillian destiny, she never really shone in the eyes of others despite an exceptional belief in her own talents. When she was a junior education minister, one colleague recalled Truss picking up on “causes like Maths and Stem for girls, but she didn’t know how to work with officials, other ministers or the Coalition”. At the Environment Department, she failed to convince both the farming and environmental lobbies that she knew her brief, despite becoming “hyperactive” on a few favourite projects. And in 2017 when she became chief secretary to the Treasury – arguably the nerdiest of jobs, requiring calm, clarity and excellent counting – she declared herself the “disruptor-in-chief”. When Philip Hammond was chancellor, the Treasury became so wary of Truss that she found herself, to her fury, deliberately excluded from sensitive discussions. It hardly helped that she seemed “positively to rejoice in aggravating colleagues”.
As for her other political hero, a newspaper once recounted her having “herself made up so that she resembled an animatronic waxwork Margaret Thatcher” but “it didn’t work”. On another occasion she donned a headscarf and in true Maggie style drove around in a tank bearing a Union Jack. As a stunt, it was just as clunky as Boris Johnson’s self-styling as the new Winston in his bid to be prime minister. When will Tories learn that pound-shop Churchill and Thatcher wannabes do not good leaders make?
When Truss won the contest to replace Johnson, there was an “odd” reaction from Tory MPs and even from one of her own aides: “I felt a slight sense of dread when I heard. And I’m sure I was not the only one thinking ‘Is she up to it?’” And yet we read of her defeated rival Penny Mordaunt publicly praising Truss’s “authenticity” and “sense of duty” while Sajid Javid (a former chancellor) supported her financial plans. Only Rishi Sunak appears to have been clear about her flaws. In one of the most interesting (though unattributed) quotations in the book, one of his senior aides detected an “undertone” in the wider leadership contest, noting that “had Rishi’s father-in-law [the billionaire businessman NR Narayana Murthy] been white, wealth might not have become such an issue”.
After Truss defeated Sunak, it did not take long for lunacy to take hold behind the black door of No 10. In a cycle of radicalisation, manic impatience and paranoia over the “axis of evil” of the naysayers at the Treasury, Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility, madder and madder ideas began to fly. “We need shock and awe,” Truss declared to her sleep-deprived team.
The “hot plugs” of the time included the idea of removing all barriers to rich Russians coming to London to help boost the economy, and plugging a nuclear submarine into the national grid. Truss was perhaps alone in seeming to enjoy the frenzy and risk of it all. The consequences to the nation seemed irrelevant. The few dissenters were shouted at and humiliated. Even so, it is breathtaking that more people did not try to stop the damage before it was too late. Careers were repeatedly put before country.
It soon became clear Truss did not have a workable plan but by then the bunker mentality was set. A rare rational decision of the time was turning down Jacob Rees-Mogg’s overtures to be chancellor (Seldon unexpectedly describes Rees-Mogg as a “figure of immense dignity as well as sensitivity”). President Joe Biden, meanwhile, hardly bothered to disguise his dislike, and other foreign leaders their dismay, at Britain having made yet another ruinous choice of premier. When her extensive unfunded tax cuts were announced, the damage was not just to the UK’s international standing, however. The price of borrowing soared for homeowners and the government alike. Truss’s bravado could be measured in billions of pounds lost.
Seldon’s day job of headmastering private schools has apparently left him with abundant time to write dozens of books on British politics and in so doing he has become something of a politician himself. Hints as to his loyalties include the sympathetic line on the first page that Truss came into No 10 with “high intelligence, a clear plan and the right focus”, and frequent references to (albeit undefined) dividends from Brexit.
He has carved out an excellent niche as Britain’s most prolific political chronicler. Truss at 10, though, is not a considered biography: we learn little about what made Truss the way she is beyond the fact that she apparently “knew” about books rather than “read” them; we are given statements about how few MPs ever liked her, but without drilling in to why. It is instead a bruising blow-by-blow account of the terrifying consequences of putting entirely unsuited people in charge of a country.
For all Seldon’s grasp of the tawdry detail of this government, there remain plenty of pressing questions. Chief of which Seldon himself poses: “How on earth… had the British democratic system, the oldest and most tested in the modern world, thrown up Liz Truss?” Or, how can a politician seemingly without charm or personal graces, restraint or reflection, respect for great institutions or care for the nation, hold the greatest office in the land? Particularly after the downfall of another figure entirely unfit to enter No 10? The tone of the criticism of her conduct might have been particularly visceral – as women in public life have sadly come to expect – but its substance cannot be denied.
Seldon fails to give a full answer (although the raucous support for her mad mini-Budget from certain media quarters should be a source of eternal shame). Nor does he provide clear thinking on the equally important challenge of ensuring that no one like her enters Downing Street again. We must hope his next book provides a deeper analysis – and does not cause painful flashbacks to a time we might prefer to forget.
Sonia Purnell’s new book, “Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Power & Intrigue”, is published on 19 September by Virago
Truss at 10: How not to Be Prime Minister
Anthony Seldon
Atlantic, 384pp, £22
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[See also: The Tony Blair advice bureau]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble