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Liz Truss is fatally self-aware. She has spent her time out of office recording her flaws with painstaking accuracy. Extracts from her book Ten Years to Save the West, which is published today, establish why she succumbed sooner than a lettuce.
To understand why Truss was so poorly equipped to reside in No 10, remember that the prime minister must command a majority in the House of Commons. When she became PM, the Tory party was fractious and bitter. Removing leaders had become a habit. Some Conservative MPs made it known that Truss was anathema to them. They viewed her as fringe and crazed. As John Rentoul reminds us, Rishi Sunak won the most support from MPs. But it was the Conservative Party members who elevated Truss to the top job. That made bringing her MPs onboard as soon as possible central to her survival.
And yet, Truss – the impaler of the pound – describes herself this way: “I’m gregarious and I like people, but even my best friends wouldn’t describe me as a great people manager.” Not a great people manager? Well, good luck herding 360 of the unruliest people in the country. Examples such as these show a piercing ability to identify why she was so bad at the job. Here’s another example about her decision to cut welfare in real terms:
It seemed to me wrong that somebody on welfare would get a bigger rise than someone in work. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Conservatives were opposing it.
She did not have the capacity to put herself in their position in order to understand their actions. It took David Cameron’s buddy and Dutch PM Mark Rutte to tell Truss that he was worried about what was happening in Britain for her to think – in her words – “maybe I’m in some serious trouble”. She has repeatedly refused to deny that she is considering a comeback despite publishing this catalogue of errors.
Why, then, does she persist? The Sun’s Harry Cole greeted Truss in one of her many interviews to promote the book with, “What are we saving the West from… not Liz Truss?” To which Truss replied with amusement: “Ha-ha.” She knows she’s a joke. She even seems to take part in it. But she does not care.
Come and see Anoosh, Ben and me live!
The New Statesman Podcast will be returning to the Cambridge Literary Festival on 20 April for a live performance. Grace Blakeley, the economics writer, will be joining us. And I have good news: Morning Call readers get 20 per cent off tickets with the promo code NSDIGITAL24. It would be great to see some of you there. Just click here:
Freddie’s picks
Sarah Manavis pours cold water on the comedian Joe Lycett’s fake news stunt.
How do you become a “supercommunicator”? Sophie interviews the author Charles Duhigg about his new book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
Like a competent musician who sent mildly racist tweets, Truss’s arguments should be separated from her lizard-like charisma and delusional personality. There’s a risk that Truss’s crazed approach to governing means that the institutions she criticised are deemed beyond reproach. Look at Labour’s infatuation with the Office for Budget Responsibility. Some revere an institution established by George Osborne in 2010 as if it came out of the Glorious Revolution. That Truss ignored the OBR secured its reputation. This is a mistake. Relying exclusively on economic forecasting to shape policy saps ideas and debate out of politics. Andy Haldane, the former chief economist at the Bank of England, is the respectable face of what you might call “institutional scepticism”. He argues that economic modelling – which dictate OBR and Bank forecasts – is inherently flawed (Financial Times).
The NS is hiring for a new position: we are seeking an experienced writer-editor to join our team. Please pass this on to anyone you think may be interested, or click to apply.
How do we protect the upsides of flexibility for workers whilst providing security and union representation? What is the right balance between workers’ autonomy and worker protections? Listen here to our exclusive podcast episode, in partnership with Uber, as they approach the three-year anniversary of their recognition agreement with GMB Union, where we discuss the future of work in 21st-century Britain.
America cannot afford another war in the Middle East
My kids’ Catholic parochial school held its annual fundraising gala on Saturday evening. And while the other parents glided between the dance floor, the bar, and the buffet, I was glued to my phone, desperately updating my news apps and social media feeds for the latest on the full-blown war poised to break out between Israel and Iran. My mind cycled through imagined-but-all-too-realistic pictures of the impending horrors.
Had the Middle East taken that final step into the end times, dragging the rest of the world with it? For now, Joe Biden seems to have staved off the worst possible outcomes. But to keep at bay the nightmarish scenarios requires urgent and nimble diplomacy – and a sturdy willingness to say “No” to Benjamin Netanyahu’s unpleasant government.
That evening, I trembled over the fate of my homeland, Iran. I thought about its passionate, funny, and sometimes maddening people. My kin. I thought about the densely packed city of my birth, Tehran. The Persian and Islamic antiquities that might be damaged or destroyed in an Israeli response to the Iranian barrage. I worried, too, about the safety of my friends in Israel. Ever since my early twenties, when I scrolled tearfully through the website of Yad Vashem, the Jewish state’s Holocaust memorial, the necessity of a safe Jewish homeland has been one of my foundational political commitments.
But above all, I was filled with fear as an American. In the wake of 9/11, the United States had wasted 20 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives on fruitless regime-change wars in the Middle East and North Africa. These conflicts had demoralised the nation, distracting leaders in Washington from the social and economic carnage that had unfolded in the homeland during the same period. America had finally extricated itself from the region in 2021, creating an opening for domestic reconsolidation and reconstruction. Would an Israeli-Iranian conflict pull the country back into a region whose tribal, ethnic, sectarian and historical intricacies it couldn’t begin to master? Oh God.
All told, the Tehran regime launched more than 300 drones and missiles at Israel. But the Israelis, acting in concert with the US, Britain, France and Jordan, intercepted most of the objects, resulting in “a lot of bang, but relatively little destruction on the ground”, as the New York Times reported. The whole thing looked like a well-choreographed tit-for-tat, with the Islamic Republic giving the Western powers ample notice, sequencing the attack in waves, and then declaring the affair closed (barring further Israeli escalation). The Iranians, in other words, were determined to save face and give a deterrent impression, but without getting into a war they probably know they can’t win.
So far, then, the Biden White House has managed to thread a difficult needle: maintaining support for the Jewish state in the wake of the 7 October Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, while averting a wider confrontation that would pit the US-led bloc in the region against Iran’s “axis of resistance”. It’s a thankless posture. The more excitable elements of the pro-Israel movement are already screaming about betrayal and calling on Biden to “end Iran”. Meanwhile, the Israel-sceptical left, not a small component of the Democrats’ young base, has grown disaffected in response to what they see as Biden’s failure to restrain Netanyahu in Gaza.
But Biden’s approach in the Middle East – if not in Ukraine – has generally hewed to a sound realism. While a series of missteps have undermined America’s position somewhat in recent decades, Washington remains the principal outside power in the region. As such, the United States couldn’t have permitted the atrocities of 7 October, carried out by Iran’s Gaza proxies, to go unpunished. Not without losing serious credibility. At the same time, America doesn’t need and can’t afford another big Middle East war as it shifts attention to the much more geo-economically vital Pacific region.
Hence, the response from the Biden administration so far: a tit-for-tat pattern of conflict management aimed at keeping things reasonably contained, allowing the arch-enemies to save face without actually bloodying each other’s faces. This model leaves all parties – including important domestic constituencies, Jewish and Muslim – dissatisfied. Indeed, it’s almost designed to do so. Those seeking perfect justice will always be disappointed by international affairs. Given the current global balance of forces, in which US hegemony is waning in relative terms, conflict management, muddling through and avoiding the worst is the best we can hope for.
Still, if Biden’s approach works, history might just reward his leadership with the same retrospective glow that now surrounds JFK’s and RFK’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Emphasis on if, however. To a queasy-making degree, the plan relies on Netanyahu appreciating that Israel’s superpower patron mustn’t be cornered; that he mustn’t stoke a direct conflict with wildly destabilising consequences that would likely jeopardise US power and, thus, America’s ability to protect the Jewish state in the long term. Western governments, including the Biden administration, are urging restraint in Jerusalem, and let’s hope they keep at it. There are reports that Israel’s war cabinet has agreed to respond forcefully to Iran’s attack, but without sparking a wider conflict. The nightmare of regional war still looms too close for comfort.
Mailshot
Blake Morrison: In Salman Rushdie’s Knife, love defeats hatred
Nick Hunt: In praise of walking
Maggie Doherty: The poet who took it personally
Anthony Esolen: A society that can’t sing
Sophie Gilbert: TV’s new wave of difficult men
Endangered Bornean orangutan born in Florida, weighing three pounds
London’s most expensive street, average house £9.6m, revealed
Ben’s take
Another of our exclusive Redfield & Wilton polls today, this time a play on the Reagan question of, “Do you feel better/worse off than you did when this lot came in?”
And in a surprise to few of us, most think the UK is in a much worse state than it was in 2010. That was the year, let’s not forget, that the Conservatives were saying Britain almost “went like Greece” – whatever that meant.
Today, while 58 per cent of us say we’re in a much worse state compared with 2010, just 48 per cent say we’re in a much worse state, personally, compared with then. This may be a consequence of respondents factoring for Covid, when isolation and loneliness peaked for many. National decline appears a stronger narrative than personal decline. The loss of UK prestige on the world stage is a perception felt by many.
And with that…
The head of Ofcom Michael Grade has turned his hand to cultural criticism. The man responsible for regulating modern television has a low opinion of the shows the industry is churning out.
“In the old days, professional entertainers used to entertain the public,” he said in a forthcoming interview. “Now the public are entertaining themselves.” Reality TV, in other words, is a shabby, pornographic imitation of real entertainment. He went on: “Television has also become patronising in the sense of: ‘This will do for the audience.’ No mind at work behind it. No real craft thrown in. Just bread and circuses.”
Is that fair? Let me know what you think by hitting reply.
All the best,
Freddie — @freddiejh8
FYI - the subscription button doesn’t work on the mobile app (I think this is the case across Substack, but requires a text link)
You are all missing what she's trying to do.
Remember she has just returned from the USA , having spent considerable time with the Maga crowd & some of Dodgy Donald's closest conspirators.
She thinks the tactics Trump has staged for decades , "Spouting The Opposite of the Truth" , will work for her , as it has done for him.
Its that Simple.