Truss at 10: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller

by Anthony Seldon

Liz Truss's disastrous premiership was the shortest and most chaotic in British history. In the space of just 49 days, Truss witnessed the death of the longest-reigning monarch, attempted to remould the economy, triggered a collapse in the value of Sterling and was forced on a series of embarrassing U-turns that ultimately led to her resignation. The aftershocks of her time in office are still felt today. How did she blow her opportunity so spectacularly?

Based on exclusive interviews with key aides, allies and insiders, and focusing on the critical steps that led to her demise, this gripping behind-the-scenes work of contemporary history gives the definitive account of Truss's premiership.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Current Affairs, British Literature, Audiobook

384 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2025

About the author

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.

Reviews

[Geevee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Seldon shows why he is trumpeted as a master-writer of contemporary British politics. This account of the seven week tenure of Liz Truss as British prime minister in late 2022 is very engaging, readable, and enjoyable (even if the events weren't so enjoyable on my pension and investments).

Full of intriguing details and genuine moments of surprise, especially where Truss fails to listen, consider and act on sensible advice and experienced voices, the account leaves the reader in no doubt that Mr Seldon has the measure of the lady, and she has only herself to blame for failing in Number 10.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy good, political narrative and/or current affairs with well-sourced comment and analysis.

[Nick Garbutt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liz Truss has long both appalled and fascinated me. She was one of the more grotesque figures to emerge during the fag end of the Tories long mismanagement of the UK.
When she became her party’s choice to succeed the disgraced Boris Johnson the absurdity of the choice seemed emblematic of the UK’s descent into pure farce.
What followed was the shortest prime ministerial term in the 300-year history of that office. The economy was crashed, the nation’s credibility destroyed, her budget was shredded a few days after it was published and she was forced to resign less than 50 days after being appointed. Two years later her party suffered the most heavy defeat of its history. She even lost her own seat where she had previously commanded a 20,000 plus majority.
Yet despite all that she still blames the “deep state” for her demise, refuses to apologise and spends a lot of time in the USA feted by fellow libertarian cranks.
It was therefore impossible to resist this short, definitive analysis of her failure which is sub-titled How not to be a Prime Minister. Anthony Seldon has written extensively about all the UK’s recent prime ministers and has unrivalled knowledge of the office and the skill set required to master it.
This is a brilliant, if jaw-dropping read. It beggars belief as to how a party with a rich history could choose such a person as its leader. I used to at least admire Truss’s resilience. Now I am beginning to understand that if she were ever to get near to power again she would almost certainly try to do the same as before.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and insightful look at Truss Government and her being the shortest reign ever as Prime minister

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable and accessible account of Liz Truss's short tenure as UK Prime Minister. Sir Anthony Seldon is a shrewd and knowledgeable writer about modern British politics and the constitution. He brings this experience to bear as he recounts the disastrous period of the Truss government in 2022. The book is largely a narrative and is gossipy in tone; not surprising as it is based on personal recollections.

There is a much more substantial assessment to be done of this period, especially of the rationale behind the "mini-budget". This probably needs access to all the relevant official papers. I suspect that it is a more complicated picture than is displayed here. At this stage in the historical process, one is left with the impression of a politician who had little to none of the skills needed to lead a government and party. The wonder is that Truss's colleagues allowed this situation to arise.

As an interim view of Liz Truss as PM, this is a decent account but I do not think it is near the full story.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of the time this read like a thriller, though of course I knew the ending..
A fascinating, if frightening, read. Balanced and very well researched.

Normally, being the softie I am, I would have started to feel for poor ET but she does not evoke sympathy. I kept thinking about Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus whilst reading. I recall the play being a study of arrogance and what happens when taken to extremes. I wonder whether she ever read it? Never too late and I must re-read it some time soon.

[Steve Kimmins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m never going to get on with a book detailing contemporary political events. Just not my leisure reading scene. But this specific event interested me - the shortest period in office by any British Prime Minister, ever. Just 49 days.
A British Prime Minister is the effective head of state even if there are legal niceties linked to meetings with and formal approvals for some actions from the hereditary head of state, the King/Queen at that time. They are not directly elected by the population but are the leaders of the parties whose representatives we do vote for on a local basis. It’s up to these local representatives, Members of Parliament, MP’s, to decide who leads them, though they usually consult their party members across the country. That can be complicated…

Since the trauma of Brexit, the UK leaving the European Union, the ruling Conservative Party has had crisis after crisis, leading to a quick turnover of leaders, and hence Prime Ministers. Liz Truss, the latest, snuck into the position after the initially popular but idiotic Boris Johnson lost all support of his MP’s. As usual with all unplanned leadership changes there was plenty of backroom dealing and plotting, which means a new leader inevitably starts off with plenty of enemies as well as friends. In addition this new leader came into power with a radical economic programme (free market economics that were intended to kick start sluggish growth, mainly heavy tax cuts funded initially by borrowing, though no plan for state spending restrictions) which hadn’t been tested in a national election as dramatic policy changes normally are. Result - almost an economic meltdown as the markets (the free markets she thought were beyond reproach) decided that the debt burden was probably unsustainable (admittedly it’s all judgments). Then a massive policy U Turn, with key staff sacked to protect her, but that didn’t help for long. On top of all this the longest reigning monarch in UK history dies during her short period in office and she doesn’t really play the sympathetic leader role properly. That’s the essential political summary!

The book takes longer, of course, to describe these events, their background and the players involved. The author has already written several books on recent prime ministers so he has a track record. Personally I found it rather dry, but it’s not intended as a thriller (though bits seems like that at times because of fast moving events) and it’s very heavily referenced to the outside sources used for the information, to show the book’s veracity. There’s a lot of detail on the individuals involved, politicians plus the researchers and assistants who lubricate the political wheels and play key roles. I developed a general distaste for them with their bizarre loyalties even as mistakes became very apparent. I accept that some politicians are in the job to improve things for the country and the people in it, rather than implementing ideologies, but it was very hard to identify anyone in that position in this book. All in all, a bit depressing. I’m just hoping, though not confident, that the rival party now in power, and one I generally favour, does a better job. Maybe more pragmatic attempts at improving conditions, rather than the full on ideological beliefs that brought Liz Truss’s time to an end.

She’s still around even after losing her normally very safe MP’s seat in the last election, now trying to say there was a ‘deep state’ conspiracy, an establishment ‘blob’ working against her, a ‘left wing’ governance at the Bank of England (!) and even trying to get Donald Trump’s attention with visits to the US (he seems to be ignoring her)!

I guess it was interesting in its way, and it clarified why she rose and collapsed so quickly as prime minister. So I can’t fault the author or the book even if I don’t intend to read similar books again. That I read it all is an achievement which compliments the standard of writing. I wasn’t sure about the ‘tick box’ criteria he used as an analysis tool for a successful PM, though he’s right that she failed all of those he presented.

It’s not as long as the page count suggests - fully ⅓ is made up of detailed references to source documents and an index.
I’ll give it 5* and a recommendation to any GR friends who are unwise enough to pass their leisure time reading about contemporary UK politics.

[Julian Worker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful insight into the 7 weeks of Liz Truss's tenure as Prime Minister (PM) in 2022. It was a complete catastrophe and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

How the Conservative Party members thought she was suited to be PM, I've no idea. The first and only time she said 'thank you' to her close staff members was when she was telling them that she'd resigned. She was thin-skinned, unsure of her decisions, outwardly aggressive and uncompromising, convinced 'the Blob' was against her, and wanted to implement her policies straightaway without any thought as to their consequences.

She blamed other people for her failures, and was in denial about the political realities, all the time she was concerned she only had two years to make a difference before the next General Election.

This book is based on exclusive interviews with insiders, allies, and her closest advisers making it an enthralling read.

Her collapse of the value of the pound sterling and the creation of a vast hole in the UK economy has probably tarnished The Conservative Party's reputation for being careful with the economy and for fiscal prudence for a generation.

Recommended.

[Colin Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed, blow-by-blow account of who did what, said what, and when. Doesn't add much to what a British audience that follows politics would know already, and really rather too measured and polite about Truss herself. One of the few striking points made is that Truss was convinced she was supported by the electorate because she was enthusiastically supported by Tory members and she confused the former with the latter. It's a mistake the Tories have been making for a long time - Tim Bale's "The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron" mentions that the Tory leadership was so convinced that their obsessions (crime, Europe) were voters' obsessions that they sacked their pollsters for telling them otherwise.

But on the whole, the book lacks any analysis of why it all went so horribly wrong for Truss, who was an experienced minister who had never loused anything up on this scale before. For example two factors unaddressed by Seldon were:

1. that the Tory leadership faced the impossible task of making Brexit deliver for British capitalism. As Truss herself puts it at one point, the available choices were Norway and Singapore - and since Norway meant accepting rules you had no power to make, it had to be Singapore, or a badly implemented version of Singapore, which then blew up on the launch pad (Truss had a weak understanding of economics, though she made it central to her plans, and adhered to a simplistic version of her hero Thatcher, which didn't help).

2. the growth of the hard right internationally, especially Trump's victory in 2016. Yes, he was gone by the time Truss became PM. But her hatred of the "blob", her belief that she couldn't trust state bodies like the Treasury or the Bank of England, her impatience with protocol, her determination to drive through change by the force of her individual will, her claim that she was nobbled by the "deep state" - all this is Trumpian, very unlike any kind of British Conservatism.

[Jacob Stelling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another fantastic instalment in the Prime Ministers series, with an excoriating assessment of Truss’ catastrophic time in office.

I particularly rated the structure of the book, which functioned almost as a performance report against which Truss’ failures could be measured. Especially against the backdrop of Truss’ conspiracy theories which attempt to blame everyone but her, using such quantitative measures of success (or complete lack thereof) made for a stronger analysis of the premiership.

As always, the authors have unparalleled access to insiders, offering a chance to understand what was really going on in Number 10 during that chaotic period, making Truss at 10 a must-read.

[Walden Effingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do like to read Prime Ministerial autobiographies, but I would not wish to read Liz Truss's as it could well be unreliable. This is the next best thing. It's a very good account of her short time in office, and what a catastrophe it was. It is hard to believe that a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury , and then Prime Minister, and former management accountant could be so financially illiterate. I'm not generally an armchair critic, but I could have done a better job (that's how bad it was!).
A fascinating account that can be read at pace. I was so impressed, I may now seek out Seldon's account of Boris Johnson (as I'm sure the same could apply!).

[Owen McArdle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this – it certainly benefits from only needing to cover a short period of time to give us an awful lot of detail of who did and said what and when!

[Issy Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting bits and interviews, but there's a bit of a lack of actual analysis - ends that it was multi causal and mostly because she was bad, but I think we already knew that. Found the way of structuring a bit lazy

[Martin Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an opportunity to watch the car crash of Truss' premiership again. Though this time in slow motion and HD.

[Simon Dane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sobering reminder of the hapless and hopeless term of office of Liz Truss, but dissected with an objectivity and evidence. Spoiler alert - Liz doesn’t come out of this well!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps written to soon and to try a make a book of her short stay at No 10, you get the feeling that there is a lot of going over old ground.

What I found most interesting was the authors comparing Liz with earlier PMs, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, maybe the perfect PM is an impossibility. One PM highlighted for his intelligence and understated manner was Clement Attlee, often forgotten, but the architect of NHS bought in successfully during the constraints after WW2.

Somehow the Tory party managed to keep in power for 14 years even though there has been infighting over the EU from John Majors reign. Brexit cut across the traditional party lines, but seemed to hit crisis point with the Tories s they tried to neuter Farage and which ever party he was leading at the time.

After the disgraceful way they treated May over the negotiations for Brexit, trying to square the best interests of both the country and her party, perhaps they had learnt the script for regicide.

Maybe letting the party members choose the PM should be stopped after Johnson and Truss.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seldon’s Prime Minister books are pure catnip to me, being lively and effortless accounts of political histories that I feel invested in, but wasn’t always able to fully appreciate at the time. This one starts out feeling like a lot to swallow, inundating the reader with names upon names of people, many of whom have thus far been largely hidden behind the scenes, but the drama of the book makes the real issues behind Truss’s downfall feel legible.

I devoured this in a matter of days and probably will do so again when Seldon tackles Sunak and Starmer. For the political aficionados out there, the contents of this book are likely old hat. But for me, I really appreciated it as a means to clarify and organise a tumultuous and rapid period of modern British History.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liz Truss was the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. And one of the worst, if not the worst.

Anthony Seldon explains why this is so in 330 absorbing and entertaining pages. He does so by examining her failure to master 10 skills that, he says, successful PMs must master, such as securing the power base or avoiding U-turns.

I personally found the chapters on "mastering the big events", which focusses largely on Truss's handling of the repercussions of Queen Elizabeth II's death, and "maintaining a reputation for economic competence", about the disastrous mini-budget of September 2022, the most rivetting, but none was bad. Taken as a whole, the book makes a persuasive case for regarding Truss as a complete failure and unmitigated disaster as PM.

The writing is excellent - crisp and witty. Like Seldon's Johnson At 10, it shows a considerable improvement on May At 10 in this regard.

Recommended.

[F.R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though what happened with Liz Truss’s (very) brief government was highly embarrassing and costly for the country, it was also hilarious to watch. Never have I been so glued to Twitter. I remember hearing details of the mini-budget and thinking it was never going to work; I remember being on a train back from Manchester when Kwasi Kwarteng boarded a plane from Washington and everyone – bar him – knew he was going to be sacked on his return; and I recall waiting to see who lasted longer – lettuce or Truss.

Anthony Seldon’s books have been at the periphery of my vision for a while, always covered in the broadsheets on their release. I must read more of them. This is a fantastic encapsulation of the brief era, with the occasional jaw-dropping detail thrown in as he tries to make sense of utter chaos.

[Gill T · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book an interesting read particularly the comparison between different prime ministers in history. The 10 rules that Liz Truss broke in her efforts to be Prime Minister were carefully examined. In general everyone could learn from them especially listening to other people and learning from other people’s mistakes. A well written book. I enjoyed the style of the author.

[Abe Staples-McCall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd just started a new job in the civil service when Liz Truss came to power. I was starting to vaguely understand it when she left.

This was truly one of the maddest time and Seldon's book does a great job of breaking it down so you can understand and see where it all went wrong, from poor party management to believing her own hype. Must read to understand just how politics has got to where it is.

[Beckie Turton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently on holiday with my mum who had listened to an interview with the author on the radio… so naturally asked if I could speed read the book on hols and tell her the good parts. A relatively balanced read yet one that does make clear how delusional Liz was.

[Asli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight into the short but eventful premiership of Liz Truss. Particularly interesting (and poignant) was the detail in which the passing of the Queen was covered. The book lives up to its title - any aspirants for the role of PM or any high office should read this to understand what a delicate balancing act the job is.

This is the first book I have read by Anthony Seldon - I will be now going backwards and reading about each of the other Prime Ministers he has written about - Boris is 10 is next.

[Olivia Brooker · Rating 5 out of 5]

really enjoyed this !!!

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads well but quite light on source material and is padded out in places.

[Libby Conway · Rating 3 out of 5]

“she came, she saw, she crashed” - the chance to relive the complete car crash of liz truss

[Jake Maude · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lettuce

[R · Rating 4 out of 5]

A devastating yet at times quite subtle takedown of an absolutely awful individual. Seldon, in a slightly cringeworthy way dedicates this book to the students of Epsom College, and bases his analysis of Truss’s premiership on the 10 rules PMs must abide by, all of which Truss broke.

Introduction
· Truss is unrivalled in the shortness of her premiership. Only Lord Bath (1746) and Lord Waldegrave (1757) served shorter premierships. She compares favourably to continental Europe, where in Spain of the 102 Prime Ministers elected since 1823, 66 have gone within a year. In reality though, Truss really did head a “Mince Pie administration” (one that does not last beyond Christmas). Seldon also confirms that she did have an affair with the MP Mark Field.

Rule 1 - Secure the Powerbase
· Truss was in Bali when Johnson resigned, and put in an early call to Isac Levido to run her campaign, but he said he was contractually unable to support any candidate (an early sign that the best did not want to work for her). Armed with no team at all, she called Jason Stein (Prince Andrew’s PR person who would quickly fall out with Mark Fullbrook and whose appointment would confirm Truss’s character. Her path to power was certainly helped by Ben Wallace who confirmed he would not run having just divorced his wife. His passive support (he would quickly regret it) would prove crucial for Truss in ensuring she gained the support of most of Johnson’s cabinet. Braverman also supported Truss at the last moment in exchange for the Home Office. Both were on the right of the party, but Truss was more liberal about immigration than Braverman. Pretty much all her supporters only backed her because they thought she would win the support of members. Sunak won the most votes, with Mordant being attacked from both Truss and Sunak viscously (Williamson was very aggressive towards a number of colleagues). Truss, in a continued theme throughout her premiership thought her popular standing with party members translated in the support of the majority of MPs. Two weeks before the contest ended, Fullbrook informed Truss that most of the members had voted, and she should now focus on planning being PM as extra campaigning was of little use. At this point, Truss’s character plummeted further and she refused to listen to most of her advisors. She also played her advisors’ two camps off against each other in those two weeks (something Johnson also enjoyed doing). She was however obsessed by Stein.

Rules 2 – Have a clear plan
· Truss should have known that none of the nine really agenda changing PMs came to office at the tail a party’s time in power. Therefore, whilst her plan was clear, it was also too alienating, something she should have remembered. Her forgetting of this however was in keeping with her character as she never read, had no interest in history, and refused to read newspapers while in N10 making her practically oblivious to the market’s reaction to her mini budget. She never watched TV and knew of books rather than read them. Truss was obsessed with Margret Thatcher and tried to copy her fashion and approach of using meetings to confirm decisions. What she did not study was that Thatcher was capable of changing position if the argument was convincing enough and read insensately.
· Truss’s first experience as a junior minister in the Department for Education was only for Cameron’s EDI purposes. It ended with her being Foreign Secretary, a role she actually performed half decently, and can claim considerable credit for being the creator of the Windsor Framework, which Sunak finalised when in office. She also loved the near 700 photo opportunities the FO provided.
· During the two week’s preparation that Fullbrook advised her to carry out at the end of her campaign, Ress-Mogg who was desperate to become Chancellor said that Britain’s Nuclear submarines should be plugged into the national grid to boost power supplies. Simon Case politely said that was not possible. This serious, but shocking lack of expertise amongst her allies started to show, with Simon Clarke, who Truss liked, suggesting investment zones (a waste of money as they draw capital from other areas, but it sounded impressive, so Truss heartily supported the idea). Kwasi who viewed his role to support the PM, not challenge her (having read extensively about the dysfunctional relationship between May and Hammond and Brown and Blair) offered little, while Chris Philp became increasingly nervous about the speed Truss was proposing and tried to stand up to her (and was promptly slapped down). Concerns were also voiced about appointing Braverman, but the aid who suggested to Truss she should reconsider her appointment was duly shouted at in front of everyone. Furthermore, even public warnings were being made by the economist Lyons who sent her a private note warning her that markets could be concerned about her planned budget, and were starting to position accordingly. The note was leaked in the FT. She also refused to consider the OBR in her budget planning process.

Rule 3 - Appoint the best cabinet/team
· Her appointment of Coffey as both Health Secretary and DPM was a sign of how few MPs Truss liked or knew (she virtually knew nothing about her Chief Whip who she instantly hated and wanted to sack). She refused to appoint perfectly sensible and trustworthy MPs such as Greg Hands or Damien Hinds both of whom supported Sunak and she regarded as arrogant public-school boys. A wide Vs narrow cabinet was decided by Truss. She thought Thatcher has made a mistake appointing “wets” for the first two years, and May for creating a wide but divided cabinet in 2016. She even annoyed Coffey and Morton (the Chief Whip) by leaving them to hire and fire junior cabinet members. For each cabinet minister, Truss created a bullet point list of priorities, which was actually quite well received and showed her clear (albeit wrong) direction of travel. Case even said to her that the transition was quite smooth the day after she appointed her cabinet.
· He errors in appointing certain cabinet ministers was also reflected in her appointment of personal advisors. Truss in her defence spent a long time working through what her slimmed down Cameron like N10 team would look like, but there were just too many blurred responsibilities. She also was incredibly resentful of the Civil Service and used Scholar’s sacking as an example to the Civil Service, which ironically weakened the Treasury further and created an empty vacancy for somebody to be able to work with financial markets. She left Kwasi to sack him in an awkward 20-minute meeting (see PG 115) where Scholar accepted his sacking graciously, but once the deed was done, Truss and Kwasi both suddenly realised they did not know who to replace him with. It would become one of the many ironies of the Truss tenure that she ended up relying more than any PM of recent history on their Cabinet Secretary (Case) who performed well and won over Liz Truss and James Blower, who was Scholar’s replacement.

Rule 4 - Command the big events
· Truss was told immediately upon being appointed PM by Sir Edward Younger (in a room next to the Queen’s sitting room) that the Queen would likely die in the coming days. When told of the news that she had died, Truss, Case and a handful of aids sat in the Downing Street flat. Truss cried, but after a 10-minute silence, Case ended the meeting by saying “God save the King” after the housekeeper brought some tea. Truss decided to discard the pre-prepared speech provided to her by the Civil service and write her own terrible speech which was quickly forgotten. Upon coming back in from the speech, Truss sought positive confirmation from her team about her speech which no one provided.
· Interestingly, the Queen’s death had been identified as a potential source of national instability by the NSC, which never officially came to pass, but as proven later on did actually transpire as a source of national instability because during the 10 days of mourning Truss became obsessed with cutting the 45p tax rate because she sought to reclaim the public narrative which she felt was lost after her energy cap announcement on the day the Queen died had not received much media coverage. The Queen’s death stopped any teething issues being resolved (such as the shortage of experience in the Treasury following Scholar’s sacking), or establishing working patterns, all of which made Truss more detached from her N10 team. It also allowed Sunak’s allies to regroup. The crisis identified is normally mitigated. It is the ripple effects from the crisis that matter most.

Rule 5 - Be credible and highly regarded abroad
· Truss’s introductory call with Biden is commonly regarded as the worst held by a PM since WW2. No personal warmth, and clear loathing by Biden who disliked what he viewed as her economic populism. Her time as FS boosted her standing, but not really her credibility as most leaders could see she was using it as a platform to launch her bid as PM.

Rule 6 - Learn how to be PM
· Sometimes the qualities that take a politician to the top including tribalism and populism are the very characteristics that undermine them once in N10. A leopard must really learn to change their spots. The basics of reading her boxes and having a serious intent to do the job well were not in question, and she did possess a decent political enigma. Her flaws however were many, including her desire to carry out revenge for years of being patronised and talked down to. She hated people not taking her ideas seriously or when people disagreed with her. Thatcher was patronised as well, but knew how to hold it back and spur her on and embrace the intellectual aspects of the argument.
· Truss also hated telling people off personally, and preferred to let her own servants do it for her. When Braverman at the Tory Party conference said in her speech that she wanted tighter immigration Truss was furious. Braverman was summoned but when Truss entered the room she complimented her and did not tell her off. Braverman never forgot that Truss was too weak to reprimand her.

Rule 7 - Avoid large policy errors
· After Tom Scholar’s departure the Civil Service’s advice became more nuanced and less clear for fear of upsetting Truss. Kwasi was also so determined to carry out the PM’s wishes that despite knowing in all likelihood the budget would create a crisis he just did what the PM asked. The one defence that does deserve some weighting is that the BOE completely missed the LDI crisis, however papers do show that the Treasury was warned about the LDI risks in 2021. Ironically Tom Scholar was the person responsible. The LDI crisis it is fair to say exacerbated the mini budget impacts, but was not the cause to Truss’s downfall. What really caused an issue was Kwasi’s interview on Sunday when he said that there was more to come (i.e more tax cuts). The script for what Kwasi would say was agreed on the Saturday, but on the morning of the interview he spoke to Truss who said mention there was “more to come”. Kwasi in private on Sunday after the interview said it was just “hedge fund managers buggering around” in response to the previous week’s market volatility (a typical response of someone who has no understanding of finance).

Rule 8 - Maintain reputation for economic competence
· No senior figures rallied around Truss her Party conference started to go badly wrong. When good PM’s are in crisis, senior figures rally around the PM. Not on this occasion. Most of her cabinet were already starting to desert her.
· Kwasi did however manage to save her from one huge economic embarrassment. Truss very nearly signed up to a $130bn deal with Equinor to supply gas at a price pretty much near market highs. Kwasi, backed by official advice said he would refuse to sign the contract. Truss was furious who wanted a chancellor to push around, not to challenge her.
· As Kwasi arrived at the G7 finance meeting, he was told by nearly every G7 country official that the UK was letting the G7 down. When Bailey told Kwasi that he would stop UK bond purchases on Friday 14thOctober he created an ultimatum for the government on whether or not to do a U-turn on the budget. The effort to try and persuade Truss to do a U-turn was a mammoth operational of wastage. Pointless meetings between pointless aids who then wrote pointless letters to Case, who then summarised those letters to create an official piece of advice. James Blower, who had only just been appointed Treasury Head then was drafted in to secretly meet with Truss (a technical breach of conduct as the Treasury Head should only meet the PM with the Chancellor present, but Kwasi was at the G7 and was losing respect in the Treasury). By Sunday 16 October, it was decided that a U-turn would have to be made, with Kwasi sacked on Friday the 14th - the last day of the BOE’s QE. A catastrophe was averted on the Monday as the markets knew by the Sunday that the budget would likely be reversed.

Rule 9 - Avoid U-turns
· MPs who defend public policy only for the PM to U-turn quickly lose the respect. This is exactly what happened to Truss. As soon as Kwasi was sacked Sunak was the first to phone him to say how sorry he was (in reality Sunak was sniffing him out / likelihood of Truss continuing as PM). Hunt did the same – despite a frosty relationship between the pair. PG 268 of how Truss phoned Hunt on Friday 14th to make him Chancellor is quite funny. By 5pm Friday 14th, Hunt had decided that nearly all the budget would be reversed (with MI6 also told who were now monitoring the situation). Hunt’s second move was to sack the hopeless Chris Phelp. Hunt wanted to appoint Stride but Truss refused (despite her telling him he could anything necessary) as she loathed Stride. Hunt appointed a dud in Edward Elgar to placate Truss, and sacked him a week later. Hunt privately admitted he found the weekend quite exhilarating, while for Truss it was humiliating as it was clear that Hunt was the now PM. When this was mentioned to Truss, she snapped back (I still have a PM motorcade (I find this fascinating because Trump said this when someone said to him that Mark Zuckerberg was incredibly powerful and he should try to get on with him)). Interestingly, on the day that Hunt was appointed Hunt was asked by Truss whether she should resign. Hunt said yes, but only if the process to replace her was swift. Hunt then summoned Brady and Jake Berry Saturday 15th to the Treasury to impress upon them (Treasury officials spelt out how delicate the situation was) that there needed to be a swift leadership election to calm the markets in the event that Truss went. Brady was supportive, Berry (who was already speaking to Johnson to try and get him to run again) refused and said how dare “f*****” Treasury officials lecture him.

Rule 10 – Retain the confidence of the party
· Often mistaken by PMs as they believe the “people” elected them, not their MPs. In her last couple of days as PM the amount of time wasted by the Truss team but also importantly the civil service in dealing with resignations was enormous. Case had to meet Braverman to say the PM was about to sack her, and then again had to waste time sacking Stein to appease Javid on the Tuesday 18thOctober (the day before the fracking vote that led to Truss’s departure and the day after Hunt had announced nearly all budgetary measured would be scrapped). All of this led to no planning in N10 for the fracking vote on Wednesday 19th, which saw Liz Truss’s remaining loyal aids to try and organise a meeting for 11pm to decide how best to proceed after the vote. When Truss got back, there was nobody to have a meeting with as all her aids had left in despair of the situation (what a revealing moment) and Truss exhausted cancelled a meeting with Hunt knowing that it was time to resign. Graham Brady who was counting letters up until the Party conference had stopped counting after Hunt’s mini budget and duly was asked for by N10 on Thursday 20th to let it be known that Truss was resigning.

[Alan M · Rating 5 out of 5]

9 months after her role as Prime Minister came to abrupt end, Truss confronts Seldon at a Spectator summer party. “Why are you writing a book on me?” she askes forcefully. “I’m writing my own book, you know”. Truss promptly stomps off before a nonplussed Seldon could say anything beyond “I’m glad”.

Seldon has documented each PM’s reign in meticulous detail since Blair in 2004. Given that the average time PM’s have spent in office is 4 years 9 months the Truss premiership presented Seldon a challenge. Would there be a book? Maybe just a blog post or pamphlet? Undeterred by either Truss’s hostility or a tenure that failed to reach a half century of days he undertook 120 interviews, reviewed a variety of official documents, some which he admits were sourced “opaquely”. He claims 85% of the book came from in person interviews. Never one to be accused of brevity, the book is in fact it’s one of his most accessible works to date. Despite the recency of her time at No.10, there were a whole host of things I’d not read before, or forgotten.

Normally his books are chronological but with only a month and a half to work with Seldon structures his review of her time as PM around the qualities he thinks a PM needs to be successful (as if we didn’t know the ending…..). Seldon’s forensic analysis of her time at No.10 sets out a mosaic of reasons why she crashed and burned so quickly. Foremost among these was that unlike Johnson, May or Cameron she was driven by an all-encompassing ideology – that the UK could only return to economic success via disruption and a single minded focus on growth. This unwavering vision coupled buckets of ambition and self-belief unfortunately overlooked the need for a plan that was realistic and practical and consequently created one of the biggest economic disasters to ever be inflicted on the UK.

Seldon argues Truss was an autodidact but crucially without Thatcher’s curiosity or Cameron’s incisiveness; she venerated the former for her (Thatcher’s) determination and distained the latter for what she felt was his posh boy misogyny. She loved to set maths tests at interviews, placing great store in raw intellect, blind to understanding that without the ability to use it practically it had little value. Truss personally had no interests beyond politics. After an unexceptional career as an accountant with Shell and then Cable & Wireless, she then became a right leaning think tank (Reform) director.

She entered Westminster at the same time as Kwasi Kwarteng and they quickly became soulmates. Truss admired of his prodigious intellect (double first from Cambridge and a PhD in economic history) crucially coupled with his willingness to defer to her. Very early on she felt the only way to succeed would be to be both PM and Chancellor and she judged he would allow her.

His brief analysis of her early days as an MP provides some insight to what was to follow. There were early conflicts with Michael Gove and his then adviser Dominic Cummings when she was appointed by Cameron as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs. Cummings described her as “a human hand grenade” who “caused chaos instead of getting things done”.

Seldon maintains Truss was never popular with other Tory MPs, a self-appointed “Brexit Queen” whose support for Remain was abandoned without a second thought once she saw that only unequivocal support for Brexit would give her access to ministerial office. May made her the first female lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice, but Truss was demoted to Treasury chief secretary as May felt Truss was inadequate defending the judiciary after Brexit and was a frequent source of leaks.

The demotion had a significant impact on her subsequent ascension to PM. Truss, already furious and humiliated by the demotion, became even more jaundiced when her ideas weren’t immediately and unquestioningly adopted by Chancellor Hammond or head of the Treasury Tom Scholar. She determined they were “anti-growth” and part of a loose cabal called “the Blob”, which encompassed the Treasury, the Civil Service, the Bank of England, ex public school boys or anyone else that didn’t accept her views. Seldon argues that Truss had a “populist and even reckless streak in her that actively relished the bravado and risk; and rage against the establishment, bordering on paranoia. The ‘blob’ was out to stop her and all she was trying to do; it was almost exclusively peopled by public school men who had patronized her and belittled her, and she was going to slay it”. This fundamentally shaped her tenure as PM, and became it’s most fundamental flaw.

The election campaign for PM is described in detail describing the alliances and double crossing that seem to be central to the process getting MPs votes. As a former Chancellor, Truss’s dislike for Sunak was already deeply embedded and she bought readily into the rhetoric of “Sunak the traitor”. This ensured support from the likes of the dethroned World King Johnson and his toadies such as Dorries and Rees-Mogg, the latter thinking he would be her Chancellor – something which she didn’t disabuse him of until after she was elected. Truss felt it was wrong to offer ministerial posts in return for votes, but then did exactly that with Braverman by offering her Home Secretary, something she almost immediately regretted. Ultimately victorious, her acceptance speech was notable only for it’s petulant refusal to once acknowledge Sunak, but references Johnson several times.

Truss believed her election gave her a mandate to kick start the UK economy and drive single mindedly for growth. This would be the platform on which she would then win the general election which was just 2 years away. Seldon points out 142k of the 172k Tory membership chose Truss – about 0.3% of the population, and a cohort that was thought be 97% white, around half over age 60 and more than half in the south of England. As mandates go, it couldn’t have been narrower, or more out of touch not just with the wider electorate but her fellow Tory MPs as well. Nonetheless Truss decreed this was the mandate “the UK” had given her, seemingly impervious to how disconnected she was.

As leader, she quickly developed a reputation for inflexibility, an unwillingness to listen to any advice that was at odds with her views and opinions, and with an interpersonal style that was frequently abrupt and demeaning and almost universally without appreciation or humility. Ironically one of the few people she trusted whilst PM was Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who somehow managed not to be dismissed as a member of “the blob”.

In sharp contrast, her immediate priority on becoming PM was to sack Tom Scholar, permanent secretary to the Treasury, and the second most senior civil servant after Case. It was an extraordinary act without precedent with far reaching consequences. Despite Seldon being told by a number of sources that Truss had routinely criticized him long before she became PM, she maintains to this day that his dismissal was down to Kwasi Kwarteng, conflating who she delegated to actually do the deed with whose idea it was. It took Kwarteng 20 minutes to sack Scholar, on the day that Truss was made PM. Andrew Bailey as the Governor of the Bank of England was only spared the same treatment when Truss and Kwarteng concluded removing both so quickly would be too much. Instead Truss briefed relentlessly against the Bank of England (and still does) whilst leaving the Treasury with no head as she planned to implement the most radical budget of modern time. What could possibly go wrong?

As we now know, it turns out pretty much everything. Kwarteng now accepts that they should have gone slower and provided more insight. He acknowledges that he had qualms about the mini budget but failed to stand up to Truss. For her part Truss remains unrepentant and subscribes to all the conspiracy theories beloved by the hard right to excuse the chasm between ideology and real life.

Seldon does a good job of breaking down the time line of economic melt down Truss and Kwarteng unleashed and how each time the possibility of stability and recovery hoved into view, either Truss or Kwarteng simply dug themselves in deeper and rejuvenated the crisis.

A package of massive tax cuts coupled with a massive outlay on an energy price guarantee immediately won over the majority of Tory MPs and the Tory press, but important non partisan sources immediately sounded alarm bells. Paul Johnson at the Institute for Financial Studies spoke of there being no “semblance of an effort to make public finances add up” while the FT was even more direct – “Kamikaze – or kami-Kwasi” was the FT view. The Economist took the budget apart line by line.

No one at the Treasury could offer much reassurance because Truss had refused to brief the vast majority of them. The Office for Budget Responsibility (a body set up by George Osborne), had also been frozen out due to being seen as another part of the anti growth “Blob”. Not entirely surprisingly global markets concluded the budget lacked almost any form of responsibility and Kwarteng’s backside had barely reconnected with the Commons benches after concluding his budget statement before the pound started to plummet to a 40 year low, while the FTSE decided this was worse than Covid and share prices tanked.

From there it got even worse. Seldon’s thesis is that by cutting off the Treasury and the OFB, whilst having only ideology fall back on rather than any actual economic knowledge or experience, they completely lacked any resources to support what they ahd put into motion.

A sequence of humiliating climb downs then followed with Truss blaming anyone but herself. She maintained that Scholar had set up the International Monetary Fund’s damming assessment (he was actually away on a walking holiday) or Sunak loyalists, or the Bank of England. She gave 24 interviews to local TV and radio stations thinking it would get her message out more directly, only to be gob smacked when one after another they went for the throat, questioning her competence and absence from the Commons (Mordaunt stood in having to deny Truss was hiding under a desk) rather than the deference she expected.

The remaining collapse is quite illuminating to see laid out, a string of doom laden dominoes that starts with the reversal of the 45p tax rate abolition, the loss of Tory MPs goodwill culminating in Kwarteng being summoned back from Washington and given his one and only motorcade from Heathrow so that Truss can sack him. Replacement Jeremy Hunt is given a free hand and concludes the whole budget has to be scrapped, thereby terminating Truss’s tenure in all but actual deed.

Seldon writes mostly with a directness and eloquence that makes the whole sorry saga as close to a page turner as a subject like this ever gets to be. He’s prone to detours into political history to create context for some of the events that unfold which do dampen the pace, but in truth these can be skipped. He’s unable to cite most of his sources directly as the majority are still working in government circles, and admits that he was given access to correspondence and even WhatsApp messages on a no names basis. This naturally gives those still in the Truss camp opportunities to discredit Seldon’s narrative, but his factual approach instills a confidence in his work that Truss never once managed in her 49 days as PM

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/truss-at-10-how-not-to-be-prime-minister-by-anthony-seldon-with-jonathan-meakin/

This 384-page book covers the 49 days of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in intense detail. It’s the latest in a series of books by Seldon on British Prime Ministers, looking at the qualities which make for good (and bad) leadership, and how Truss’s ascent and downfall illustrate those characteristics.

The fundamental of the story is that Truss launched both a plan to help households with the cost of energy bills, and a bigger plan to cut taxes, without offering any hint about how the books would be balanced, indeed insisting that there would be no cuts to public spending. The Treasury, whose job it is to point these problems out, had been muzzled by the sacking of its chief official on Truss’s first day in office. In her own memoir, Truss is fixated on a particular set of financial instruments that she had never heard of and which started going wrong as the crisis spread, and blames other people for not briefing her.

But the fact is that there was never any plan for funding either the energy payments or the tax cuts, and Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng were completely unable to give a straight answer to the question of where the money would come from, making them look financially illiterate. (Because they were.) The disintegration of the government rapidly followed. Truss blames the ‘deep state’ for her downfall; Seldon sees the problem as ‘deep incompetence’.

One of the headlines from media coverage of the book is that Truss supposedly considered cancelling cancer treatments by the National Health Service. This is not quite reported in the text; on 12 October, the day when reality broke in and the Truss team started frantically looking for £70 billion in savings, Shabbir Memali and Adam Memon, respectively economic advisers to Truss and Kwarteng, told Alex Boyd, Truss’s energy adviser, “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” (Boyd is obviously Seldon’s source.) It’s not a direct quote, barely even an indirect quote; my suspicion is that someone somewhere said, “Oh fuck, £70 billion is what the NHS spends on cancer” and the inference was drawn. Honestly, it’s clear that Truss had no specific ideas at all – which was part of the problem – and would not listen to anyone who told her this could be an issue – which was also part of the problem.

Another part of the problem was her leadership style, and given that Seldon and Meakin’s technique is to interview those close to the action and take those accounts as gospel, this is the part of the book that really does excel, even though I think some of the data could have been queried a bit (more on this tomorrow). In particular, Seldon finds her wanting in the skill of appointing good people and listening to them.

A point he doesn’t dwell on, but that is obvious to even the most casual observer, is that Truss is a very poor communicator. The local radio interviews after her mini-budget were the beginning of the end, really early in the game (29 September, in fact). The final blow, which fell suddenly and unexpectedly, was a completely avoidable breakdown in communications between Truss and her Chief Whip about a House of Commons vote on a relatively minor issue. She’s just not very good at people.

The best bit of writing in the book, however, is about an event that Truss had absolutely no control over: the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Truss had been briefed when she went to Balmoral for her formal appointment as PM that the end was much closer than most people knew. But when the moment came, she and a few aides crowded into the Downing Street flat for Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, to get the news from his palace equivalent, Sir Edward Young. It’s certainly an event that will be remembered much more vividly than any other moment of her premiership.

This is not a perfect book; Seldon has an axe to grind about the extent to which Truss proves or disproves his own theories of good prime minister-ship, and grinds it hard; he takes his sources too seriously; he under-rates the importance of communication as a skill; he is very wrong about Northern Ireland, so wrong that I’m going to go into it at greater length below. But all in all, it’s an engaging and fascinating account of an extraordinary political car crash.

The Northern Ireland bit:

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/liz-truss-and-northern-ireland-examining-anthony-seldons-narrative/

Seldon reports that Truss's engagement with the EU, while prime minister, opened the way to the eventual Windsor Framework signed between her successor, Rishi Sunak, and the EU the following year, and indeed highlights this “pathbreaking work” as the sole foreign policy success of her premiership.

Like much of Seldon’s book (including many of the best bits), this is probably based on an assertion from a single source, and I think Seldon could usefully have questioned it. It very much clashes with the received narrative of Truss’s relations with the EU in relation to Northern Ireland.

The best quick summary of that received narrative, i.e. what we all thought had happened, is laid out by Truss herself in her own book. She discusses the topic in a short section at the end of Chapter 8, her experience as foreign secretary (rather than as Prime Minister). She tells how (despite discouragement from “lots of people”) she decided to take over the EU dossier from David Frost when he resigned in December 2021 and “put in a call to Boris and expressed my thoughts on what we should do to take on the EU over the unworkable and damaging Northern Ireland Protocol”.

In her version, Johnson duly gave her the role of dealing with the EU, but negotiations with the EU got nowhere, so “I then prepared a law to put through Parliament with Attorney General Suella Braverman. This became the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill and used the doctrine of necessity to overcome international law issues.”

The Bill got through the House of Commons before Johnson’s resignation, and he and Truss then planned to use the Parliament Act to force it through against the House of Lords. “It never got to that point, as my successor withdrew it. Yet the Windsor Framework that he installed in its place simply does not resolve the issues. Too much was given away to the EU. That is why I could not support it.”

I don’t agree with most of Truss’s political judgements, but I also don’t dispute any of the historical facts that she states. (The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill did make some progress in the House of Lords before it was withdrawn by Sunak, but Truss can be forgiven for missing it.)

Seldon’s version is very much at variance with the historical facts as I understand them to have been and as Truss reports them. He introduces the topic in Chapter 5, on Truss’s foreign policy as prime minister. He starts by framing the issue tactically, as one where Truss could gain the support of “the ‘no-surrender’ ERG MPs”. Seldon describes the Northern Ireland Protocol as “stuck together by Johnson in 2019 to replace May’s ‘backstop’ to ensure Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the rest of the UK post-Brexit” which is inaccurate on several points, most notably that the Protocol ensures that Northern Ireland will remain aligned with the EU, not the UK.

Seldon goes on, “For two years, inertia had reigned while hardline Brexit minister David Frost had been overseeing it. But possibilities for progress were suddenly opened up when he resigned from Johnson’s government the weekend before Christmas in 2021.” It’s a peculiar positioning of blame for the failure of the EU-UK negotiating process in 2020 and 2021 on Frost. First of all, even unsympathetic observers would cut Frost a little slack due to the global pandemic. Secondly, the perception in Brussels at least is that Frost was only channeling his master’s voice, and that Johnson was the real problem.

Seldon: “Johnson alighted on the Foreign Secretary as the ideal figure to take on the matter. Truss had no delusions that the master schemer was offering it to her knowing it would be ‘a poisoned chalice’, a clever wheeze his team had concocted to trip up a rival whose star continued in the ascendant… Her team fully intended it would rebound against No. 10.” This is completely at variance with Truss’s account of her volunteering for the task, eyes wide open. They cannot both be right. Possibly Seldon’s (justifiable) contempt for Johnson is misleading him here.

Seldon: “Their rivalry reached a high point in March when a paper she had placed in his PM box was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph. The press report, which painted her as trying to stop Johnson from invoking Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, provoked fury against her among Brexiteers. ‘It was not true, and they knew it. It was No. 10 making mischief so Johnson could be seen to be tougher on Northern Ireland than Liz, and good in the eyes of the right wing,’ said an aide. Truss was furious; ‘We’re not going to submit anything on paper to No. 10 ever again,’ she fumed. She stormed into No. 10 to see Johnson on Monday 28 March, the day after the article appeared. ‘Right, we’re going to legislate on this, no compromises,’ she told the PM, one aide recalled. They agreed that any hope of support from the EU was forlorn, and from their deliberations emerged the hardline Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which ground through the system until Johnson resigned in July, for her to pick up when she became PM.”

There are a number of inaccuracies here. The leak that annoyed Truss appeared on 13 March, not 27 March as Seldon implies (it is dated 12 March on the Telegraph website). The lede is that Truss had “set out plans to put the potential triggering of Article 16 on hold because of the Ukraine crisis and instead help Northern Ireland businesses with an ‘economic stimulus’ package including tax cuts.” It also quotes “Steve Baker, a former Brexit minister, [who] warned that it would be ‘risible’ to shelve the triggering of Article 16 until later this year because of the war in Ukraine.”

What did appear on 27 March was an interview with Truss where the Telegraph noted that “she does not deny having shelved the idea of triggering Article 16 any time soon, because of the need for a united EU front in the face of Russian aggression”. The problem was not the leak, but the fact that she did not push back firmly enough in the interview on the suggestion that she was wobbly on bashing the EU; not for the first or last time, she lost control of the message, and blamed it on someone else (Johnson in this case). In Seldon’s version, it was from this moment on that Truss and Johnson determined to align on Northern Ireland and legislate to break their previous commitments and international law. I wrote in May 2022 about the foolishness and short-sightedness of their position.

Seldon comes back to the topic when he brings Truss, by now Prime Minister, to New York for the UN General Assembly, in a rush after the Queen’s funeral in September 2022. “Truss’s political team said she should go, and she herself was anxious to have her planned bilateral with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the Northern Ireland Bill… She ended up seeing von der Leyen twice and she proved key to unblocking the impasse. Their meeting secured agreement for back channels to open up, and for ideas to be explored and tested. After the Mini-Budget[,] momentum was lost, and it was left for Sunak to pick up the pieces. The result was the Windsor Framework of February 2023, a legal agreement between the UK and the EU to adjust the Northern Ireland Protocol, bearing more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before.”

(Seldon then spends some time on Truss’s meeting with President Biden, which was also coloured by the Northern Ireland issue, but I don’t have space for that here. I am trying to track down an amusing report that Truss instructed the British ambassador in Washington to complain to Biden’s chief of staff that he was listening too much to his advisers Jake Sullivan and Amanda Sloat on Ireland; Biden’s team apparently told the ambassador to get lost. I happen to know Amanda Sloat, who has spent more time in Northern Ireland than the entire Truss government combined. Or the Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak or Starmer governments, for that matter.)

I don’t find any contemporary reference to Truss and von der Leyen having had more than one meeting in New York on 21 September, or any other meeting anywhere else at any other time (they don’t seem to have interacted at the Queen’s funeral), and the statement post-meeting (and press briefing around it) suggests that they mainly talked about Russia. Truss and von der Leyen probably did agree back-channel communication to de-escalate tensions – it rings absolutely true for both of them – and of course one would not expect to see that in any contemporary reporting. Truss had already had a calm meeting with then Taoiseach Micheal Martin on 18 September, in the margins of the Queen’s funeral, leading to lower-level meetings on 6 and 7 October; but neither she nor Seldon mentions the Irish government at all in their books – it is of no importance to either narrative.

The one intervention that really did make the difference in terms of mood music during Truss’s premiership was the heartfelt apology to Ireland from Steve Baker, former Brexit hardliner turned Northern Ireland junior minister, during the Conservative Party’s annual conference. Baker was undergoing his own struggles at the time, as we now know, and Truss said that he was “speaking for himself”; but it made much more difference to the atmosphere than anything Truss did in public. The Irish Times ran a piece on 5 October (in advance of the 6/7 October talks mentioned above) wondering if the new mood music could be taken seriously, hopefully citing Martin’s conversation and also sources close to von der Leyen. Of course, the writing was already on the wall for Truss’s premiership by then, so it hardly mattered much. Perhaps it did matter a little.

I am particularly puzzled by Seldon’s assertion that the Windsor Framework of February 2023 bears “more than a passing reference to the ideas that Truss had promoted the year before”. The word “reference” here is presumably a mistake for “resemblance”. The puzzling question for me is: what ideas had Truss promoted the year before? The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which is the only such idea mentioned in Seldon’s earlier chapter and the only one mentioned by Truss herself in her book, was a unilateral revocation of parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement; you cannot draw a straight line between it and the Windsor Framework, which is a rather modest, mutually face-saving adaptation of the original Protocol. Truss herself certainly didn’t see them as related; she spoke out against the Windsor Framework, voted against it when it came to the House of Commons, and as noted above criticizes it again in her book.

POLITICO published an in-depth account of how the Windsor Framework was negotiated on 28 February 2023, the day after it was signed. The lion’s share of the credit is given to three British officials, Tim Barrow, Mark Davies and Brendan Threlfall; but I’ll admit that the article does give some mild kudos to Truss, basically for not being Boris Johnson and therefore changing the atmosphere of UK/EU relations for the better. (Other people given more credit than Truss in the piece include Rishi Sunak, James Cleverly and King Charles III.) Even so, the piece says that Truss “soon became ‘very disillusioned by the lack of pragmatism from the EU’.” I suspect that this is standard Truss language for people who won’t do what she wants; she makes similar comments about others in her book.

So, coming back to Seldon: it is decidedly odd that he gives Truss credit for the Windsor Framework, when it is clear that she herself thinks that the Framework is a dud and that Sunak threw away all her hard work. The consensus from other sources is that under Truss, relations with the EU improved simply because she was not Boris Johnson. I find it difficult to give her much credit for this – it’s not as if she had any choice in the matter. It’s a shame that Seldon allowed himself to be mesmerised by his anonymous source, without checking the details a bit more carefully.

As always, if you read a book on a topic you don’t know all that well, and there is a bit in the book about a subject you do happen to know something more about, and that bit of the book is wrong, it’s a healthy warning about how seriously the rest should be taken. I’m still recommending Seldon’s book – just not as heartily as I would have liked.

[Mergulum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t quite know whether to be depressed that someone so unsuited got to be the PM or relieved that the system managed to rid itself of her before she got to show us how much more damage she could really do given a prolonged stint in office. (I’m inclined to the former.) This book does provide useful insight into how she got the job and why she lost it. I suppose that the book I really want to read is the one that sets out why such a thing could never happen again. Tho I suspect that it would have to be categorised in the fiction section.