Liz Truss’s book to detail plan to ‘save West’ in 10 years - a period more than 70 times her term as PM

She only lasted 49 days in office – a duration which means she’s the shortest-serving UK prime minister in history – yet Liz Truss believes she has enough insight from her brief stay in No 10 to write a book drawing upon her time in office.

Good to see the former foreign secretary strengthen her stance on the environment by (presumably) saving paper…

Expanding upon the premise behind Ten Years to Save the West – out in April – Ms Truss said in a statement: “I want to share the lessons from my experience in government and those international meetings where I was often the only conservative in the room and demonstrate that we have stark choices to make if we wish to avoid a managed decline of the Western architecture that has presided over generations of relative peace and prosperity.”

She also tweeted that the book will set out how to address “disastrous ideas” from the left, which is a bit rich considering what she came up with as PM.

A decade, by the way, is around 3,650 days – that’s 72 times the amount of days Ms Truss actually spent in Downing Street.

So she should probably curb her enthusiasm a little.

After all, the last time she was enthusiastic about something to do with her premiership, her catastrophic “mini-budget” with then chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng triggered an economic crisis and ultimately resulted in the end of her tenure.

News of the book’s title follows an announcement in April that Truss was putting pen to paper once again.

Further details about the publication, as well as additional reflections on her time in office, were given in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, in which she said the West needs a “Conservative movement revival” similar to the “big intellectual movement” behind US president Ronald Reagan and former prime minister (and Ms Truss’ political hero) Margaret Thatcher.

On her ill-fated premiership, she told the outlet: “I was pushing against a system and against an orthodoxy that was gradually moving to the left.

“I’ve said before that I made mistakes on things like communication and execution, but the fundamental problem was there wasn’t enough support for conservative ideas.

“Frankly by the time I became prime minister it was probably too late. As a party, had we done enough to lay the ground and really change the architecture, if you like, that Blair and Brown had left behind? No, I don’t think we did do enough.”

Ms Truss added she “still can’t believe” what happened during her time as PM.

Neither can we, Liz.

She continued: “I really fear for the future of the West. We have seen very slow growth for several decades and our culture is being questioned, even basic things like human biology.

“The same thing has happened across the Western world. At one G7 meeting I thought, ‘actually I’m the only conservative in the room here – you’ve got Biden in the US, Trudeau in Canada, Macron in France’.

“You’ve got a global left which Biden is obviously a key part of, but also the global environmental movement, the Greta Thunbergs of this world, the anti-capitalist movement, and they have been very effective in pushing what is politically acceptable.”

All of this led to her stating she wanted to see a Republican back in the White House following next year’s election, though she added she was “not going to comment on which Republican”.

Just to quickly recap some of the contenders for the GOP spot in 2024, there’s the ex-Potus who’s been indicted four times (Donald Trump); the businessman who claimed “climate change is a hoax” (Vivek Ramaswamy); the anti-mask Florida governor who promises a “war on woke” (Ron DeSantis); and the former vice president who attended a church service where a pastor claimed gay people are possessed by “demons”.

So that’s something…

And as for whether she’s still in contact with Mr Kwarteng, who she sacked amid increasing scrutiny of her leadership, Ms Truss revealed they are in text contact “occasionally” but that she is “not speaking to him that much”.

Awkward.

Of course, the jokes about the upcoming release wrote themselves:

Hopefully the book doesn’t suffer the same misfortune as the one written by The Sun’s Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, who had to make several rewrites to their biography Out of the Blue following her dramatic resignation.

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