Agent Truss

How Liz Truss became the Labour Party's most effective spokesperson

Who is the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history? Liz Truss. Who is the single most important reason why Labour is on course to win the next election? Liz Truss. Who is the person Labour would most like you to associate with the current government and the Conservative Party in general? Liz Truss. And who is currently doing a book tour? Liz Truss.

Keeping Liz Truss at the forefront of the national conversation is, at least so far as their attack on the Tories is concerned, the Labour Party’s biggest strategic goal. And fortunately for the Labour Party, keeping Liz Truss at the forefront of the national conversation is Liz Truss’s biggest strategic goal too. Truss’s interests and Labour’s interests have been aligned for some time. As Prime Minister, she did the kinds of things Labour always wants a Tory Prime Minister to do, with the results Labour always hopes a Tory Prime Minister will have. Labour always warns voters that Tory Prime Ministers will do the kinds of things Liz Truss did. Most Tory Prime Ministers are too smart to do them. And now here she is, on your TV, telling everyone she was right, and she’d do it again. Labour don’t even have to book the interviews. They just have to point.

Of course, Liz Truss isn’t the only former Tory Prime Minister Labour has wanted to point at as a way of scaring voters. See for example this 2001 Labour poster linking William Hague with Margaret Thatcher:

There’s an important difference, though. We don’t need to relitigate the Thatcher premiership: it’s completely uncontroversial to say that she was a divisive figure. She was extremely unpopular with a lot of people including a lot of Labour’s 2001 target voters, hence this poster. But she also won three elections and was very widely admired by people this poster wasn’t aimed at, which is why Labour has sometimes wanted to mention her in more positive terms.

Liz Truss is not a divisive figure. That is her tragedy.

This week, Truss is out and about putting herself at the forefront of the national conversation, and Labour has been having fun. It’s a common Labour complaint that the Tories get to play politics on easy mode. Well, now Labour are finding out how good it feels. This spoof Liz Truss book cover (with echoes of that Thatcher-Hague poster) was handed out to journalists by Labour and a picture of it was tweeted by the Mirror’s Lizzy Buchan:

Here’s another image tweeted by Labour with the caption “These are the books we should have gotten out of Liz Truss’s stint as Prime Minister”:¹

And here’s another one, tweeted by Labour with the caption “Just a reminder that an actual lettuce has done more to stand up to Liz Truss than Rishi Sunak”:

Obviously, this is all fun, but Labour aren’t the only people having fun. Liz Truss’s media round has been a lot of fun for everyone involved, summed up by this gif:²

Truss in particular has been having all sorts of fun: calling for the abolition of the United Nations, backing Donald Trump to win the US presidential election, saying that Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey should be sacked, breaking protocol by revealing the Queen’s last words to her,³ saying that Lee Anderson should still be in the Conservative Party, saying that Nigel Farage should join the Conservative Party, saying that the UK should “leave the ECHR, abolish the Supreme Court and abolish the Human Rights Act”, complaining about the civil service, and so on.

And as a result of all of this, she has gained enormous amounts of media coverage, much of it negative, some of it mocking, some of it chin-stroking and, inevitably, some of it positive:⁴ maybe she had a point, and maybe Westminster does need fresh ideas (the fact that Truss’s ideas aren’t particularly fresh - they are phenomenally bog-standard IEA boilerplate stuff - and that she did actually give them a go and it didn’t go brilliantly well, tends to get skated over in this kind of piece).

The most fun thing Truss said this week, from Labour’s point of view, was refusing to rule out running again for the Conservative leadership again, saying “Well, it's never wise to rule anything out in politics, is it?” and “I definitely have unfinished business. Definitely. And I think the Conservative Party has unfinished business”.

If there’s one person Labour wants to see giving interviews, it’s Liz Truss, and if there’s one thing Labour wants to see Liz Truss saying in interviews, it’s “I definitely have unfinished business. Definitely”. Hence this (frankly pretty basic) Labour video:

This is gold-dust for Labour: the Liz Truss story is not just about the Conservative Party’s and the country’s past, but - if she has her way - about their future. Labour’s message and Truss’s message are identical: Truss could lead the Conservative Party again, and even if she doesn’t, she will have a significant influence over its thinking and direction.⁵

Truss can’t not say this stuff, because she believes it and she means it. She wants to continue to play a role in public life and get her ideas across. She thinks they’re good ideas, she thinks she was right and she thinks her downfall was mostly not her fault. A more astute politician might judge that even if all her ideas are good ones, her palpable political failure as Prime Minister means that she cannot possibly be an effective spokesperson for them: that they are tainted by association with her. But a more astute politician would not have crashed and burned so rapidly in the first place. As it is, she couldn’t be doing a better job for Labour if they were paying her.

1. As you can see, they can’t decide which joke to go for here. My advice would be: one at a time.

2. I have a bit of history with Liz Truss gifs, having run a World Cup of Liz Truss gifs on Twitter a few years ago, which Truss herself revealed to the Sunday Times that she voted in:

She even admits voting in an online World Cup of Liz Truss Gifs which pitted videos of her worst moments against each other.

“I voted for cheese,” she says. The winner was pork products. “That was a disgrace!”

3. They were “I’ll see you next week”, which is both not very interesting and not true.

4. I particularly enjoyed the final line of Allison Pearson’s interview with Liz Truss in the Daily Telegraph:

I do think there is redemption for her among generous-minded people who will see the markets take umbrage at Labour’s tax and spending and, in the years to come, there may even be headlines that say the unimaginable. “Liz Truss was right.”

The rhetorical force of the word “unimaginable” as a description of the headline “Liz Truss was right” is only slightly undermined by the fact that, four days before Pearson’s article appeared, the very same newspaper had printed the headline “Liz Truss was right about the creeping dominance of the OBR”.

5. Note the link in the video between Truss’s “unfinished business” and Rishi Sunak’s as-yet unfunded, untimetabled plan to abolish National Insurance. One of the effects of this proposal, which would cost £46 billion and would have to be paid for one way or another, is that it resolves the contradiction between two different ways for Labour to connect Truss with Sunak. I wrote about this dilemma in my second-ever post on this Substack: the question for Labour was whether they wanted to say that Sunak was too weak to stand up to Truss, or that Sunak and Truss were fundamentally the same. Now, they can evidence both. Sunak and Truss are both in favour of large-scale unfunded tax cuts, which means they’re the same, but at the same time all the evidence that Labour already had about Sunak being weaker than Truss - losing to her in a leadership contest, and not being able to stand up to her now - still applies, which means the weakness attack works too. You can see both of them at work in the Labour attack materials pictured in this post: Sunak’s and Truss’s faces merged, in a “both the same” attack, and Sunak compared unfavourably with a lettuce, in a “too weak” attack. Labour used to have to choose, and now they can just have a bit of everything.