Will you be seeing a pantomime this year? Birmingham’s got Gok Wan and Biggins in Robin Hood, Bradford has Sinitta in Snow White, while Bromley landed Su Pollard for Beauty and the Beast. And at the end of YouTube’s infinite pier, there’s The Liz Truss Show, starring She’s-Behind-You herself. Curtain up on that one is tonight at 6pm.
According to the producers, Liz’s show “confronts the issues that others tiptoe around”. Wow. The lives, loves, and clinical explanations? Let’s just say I’d watch that. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the format. Instead, like all seasonal entertainment, The Liz Truss Show is based on a fairytale. “The deep state and their allies in the media and politics tried to destroy me,” madam explains in a statement, “now I’m back.” Are the gilt markets the deep state now? Honestly, I can’t keep up. You’ll remember that the irony of Truss’s flameout at the hands of market forces was particularly acute given that she had spent an entire career explaining that free markets were the greatest judge of absolutely everything. Small ideological adjustment: free markets are now the greatest judge of everything except the ideas and personage of Liz Truss.
Anyhow, Liz says her new show, also available on other platforms such as Spotify, X and Substack, is for people who are “tired of experts who get everything wrong, elites who refuse to listen, and weak leaders”. Amazing. Liz famously ticked each of those three boxes, yet somehow regards herself as the antidote. It’s a sort of political homeopathy, I guess, where a very small amount of the thing is also the cure for the thing. Furthermore, it confirms the notion that the modern political wilderness truly is a wilderness, in that absolutely no one even goes there any more, let alone stays there.
Primarily, our host says, this new punditry and debate show is about “the cultural battles reshaping the west”. Like me, many of you will feel you missed the meeting where Liz Truss was elected as the standard-bearer of “the west”. Yet it seems to have become the most inescapable element of her post-premiership LinkedIn profile. Her flop book was entitled Ten Years to Save the West, which is arguably not route one to appealing to a book-buying public whose mortgages you’ve just hiked. If Liz were capable of saving any west, you’d have thought South West Norfolk would have been a start, but the voters there had other ideas, overturning her 26,000 majority in the general election last year. (Incidentally, the save-the-west book was subtitled: Lessons From the Only Conservative in the Room. Which is one way of spinning the fact that you’re the only person in the room, because everyone else suddenly remembered they need to talk to someone in the kitchen.)
The new show tries once again for a new start, with Truss tweaking the origin story quite spellbindingly. Try to imagine the Family Fortunes researchers going down any British high street, asking 100 people, “Why did Liz Truss get ditched as PM?” and getting the following answer from even one of them: “I was deposed as prime minister for trying to save Britain from the doomloop we are in.” Picture the host with his arm around Truss, wincing comically at the board and saying: “If it’s up there, I’ll give you the money myself.”
Speaking of giving money to Liz, we must move on, because – amazingly – this new media venture is not even my favourite Truss announcement of the past fortnight. That honour has to go to the unveiling of a new private London club, spearheaded by Liz, who wants members to give her – are you ready for this? – £500,000 each to join. I know! But it’s true! She’s recorded a personal invitation video message and everything, in which she seeks recruits for a new kind of private members’ club. So, no shit coke or proud dad sexual harassers claiming to be film producers? Truly, end of a very long era. But apparently, this is one for “pro-growth leaders”, which is certainly something you can imagine being droned in your ear at 2am by an experiential marketing agency boss who’s missed the last train to Beaconsfield.
Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, it’s called The Leconfield, and I think you can officially regard the search for the most cursed private members’ club in Mayfair as over. What seems to be being offered is a shared office, or as Liz would have it, “a secure ecosystem” and “unique business centre” for people “at the forefront of technology, policy, and capital”. I want to call it “a WeWork for arseholes” but I think that’s just a WeWork. But with something this much of a joke, what a miss not to call it HoHo House.
Instead, black lacquer boxes have arrived at the offices of solicited members. These contained the personal message from Truss and the information that she was seeking to sign up no fewer than 700 people at that price point. “Join me,” she coaxed, “as we build this new reality of collaboration, innovation and prosperity together.”
Join her? JOIN HER? Now that I’ve perused the introductory offer – and, indeed, now that I know about The Liz Truss Show – I am struck by the fact that there is in fact a certain coherence to these two seemingly absurdist projects. If, after everything, Liz Truss genuinely is able to find 700 people to pay her half a million quid, then fine – I will agree with her. Because how could you not? How could you draw anything other than the conclusion that not just this country, but the entire west, has actually fallen?
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