Liz Truss Says Don’t Call Me Stupid

Tory leadership contests are expected to be loaded with dirty tricks, trimming to the far right, intolerance in bucket loads, and other sundry unpleasantness, but the contenders would at least be able to muster a modicum of intellectual heft. Until now. And that brings us to the poll-leading, and therefore frightening, Liz Truss. Worst Prime Minister competition? Hold her beer.

How could she avoid the obvious bear traps that are unforced own goals? How could she appeal not only to party members, but reassure all those voters she needs to carry in order to win a General Election? What would a good leadership campaign have done? What would a sensible and competent leadership campaign have done? What would Nietzsche have done?

Sad to say, Ms Truss does not occupy that lofty intellectual plain. Nor can she call on the bluster and faux bonhomie of soon to be formerly alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But she has no problem continuing one Bozo speciality - talking well, but lying badly.

Her problems began with childhood recollection: she slagged off her secondary school. But Roundhay School in north Leeds is well-regarded, and a recent Ofsted report rated it as “Outstanding”. Also, it cannot have been such a terrible school, else how would she have gone from there to Oxford?

But a PPE from Oxford did not mean Ms Truss was capable of thinking things through: perhaps it did not occur to her that what she said to an audience comprised of the Tory faithful might also be relayed to a wider audience. She made this discovery after her comment on another Scottish independence referendum - that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon should be “ignored”.

Maybe the Tories don’t want to hang on to their last Parliamentary representation north of the border. The maybe became more definite when the Member for Times Long Past Jacob Rees Mogg sneered snootily that Ms Sturgeon was “often wrong and always moaning”. How long into a Truss premiership before Scotland declares UDI? A year? Six months, maybe?

Could she out-stupid even that? Like not just alienate most Scots, but a significant proportion of voters outside the south-east? She certainly could, and did it no style at all as those voters were duly informed that a Truss Government would cut public sector pay for those not working in the London area. It would save as much as £11 billion a year. But once again, she had failed to think through an idea from the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, that Astroturf lobby group supported by less than 0.1% of all taxpayers.

E molto pericoloso. Molto pericoloso

This idea was instantly backed by the TPA, but elsewhere it went down like the proverbial cup of cold sick. So there was a screeching U-Turn - not a good look for a candidate trying to model themselves on Mrs T - with the added smokescreen of victimhood. She had been misrepresented! Except she hadn’t. Also, we now knew she was being advised by the TPA.

As sketchwriter Tom Peck reminded her, “Someone should maybe tell the spokesperson for [Liz Truss] that this contest is only happening because the last guy just kept on lying, and his spokesperson had to apologise for deliberately lying for months”. Continuity Bozo had struck again.

Could it get even worse? Don’t ask. Maybe the TPA was behind the next gaffe: it was, after all, yet another attack on the BBC. “What I’m very concerned about on the TV licence fee is how many women have ended up in prison for non-payment, a disproportionate number”. But that number was not disproportionate in the manner she suggested: it was Zero.

By this point, many objective onlookers had seen enough, and LBC host James O’Brien was one of them. “Stupid populist policy announcement from Truss, followed by screeching u-turn followed by egregious lies. What a grimly familiar cycle. Boris Johnson’s corruption of British politics will not be fixed by his removal from Downing Street”. So how is she the favourite?

Former Sun editor David Yelland had the depressingly familiar explanation: “Few understand this, but the air cover Tories get from Mail, Sun, Telegraph, Express acts as a multiplier of lies - and a giant comfort blanket - but [Ed Davey[, [Keir Starmer] and [Nicola Sturgeon] face a battalion of bollocks daily. The gap is immense”. That’s why we have a less than adequate Government.

Power without responsibility: the patriots who made the UK a laughing stock.

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