Some things you can set your watch by. Like every time small boats are in the news, the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, will manoeuvre himself in front of a camera to suggest that all male migrants are either murderers or rapists. Probably both.
But some things feel older than time itself. Like Liz Truss trying to persuade the world she was right all along. Most former prime ministers leave Downing Street relatively quietly. Lord Big Dave, the Maybot and even Boris nurse their grudges in private. Rishi lives in semi-retirement – almost a recluse – and only attends parliament when it suits him. Keir has been almost totally airbrushed out of history in a couple of months.
Liz, though, is the outlier. She refuses to give up. The last cockroach alive after a nuclear apocalypse. Even now, she probably has a platoon of nuns locked up in her basement in south-east London where they are being forced to embroider a 70-metre tapestry dedicated to a revisionist history of her 49 days in office. One in which an old monarch dies and a new king ascends the throne. As one Elizabethan era ends so another Elizabethan era begins and a grateful nation bows down to her genius.
You have to wonder if this obsession is healthy. Most normal people might be slightly embarrassed to be remembered as the UK’s shortest serving prime minister. And by far and away the dimmest in living memory. But Truss seems devoid of affect. No sense of shame. If anything she seems proud of her 49 days. That long! In Liz’s mind, she was simply too good for us. We weren’t ready for her. Give it a thousand years and her tapestry will be on show in the British Museum.
One thing you can guarantee: offer Liz a platform to speak and she will bite your hand off. No matter how deranged and delusional it may be, Liz is confident she can be yet more deranged and delusional. She is every rightwinger’s favourite guest. Not only is she guaranteed to say yes, she will also make everyone else seem almost normal. Win-win. She’s done all sorts of weird stuff in the US, and in the UK she has her own podcast where she pretends to be interested in someone other than herself on Mike Graham’s YouTube channel. Graham, you might remember, is the man who thinks you can grow concrete. And Liz is sure he’s right.
The new kid on the podcast block is the former Tory Brexiter Steve Baker. So who else would he get as his first guest than the Trusster. If anything, Steve has got even more weird in the two years since he lost his seat. These days he has the look of a far-right survivalist holed up in a hut somewhere in the Montana wilderness. And his podcast surroundings have the same feel. All very basic, just a table and chairs. The table probably has a cache of semi-automatic rifles underneath it. Every so often, Steve will interrupt the recording to do an ad for gold. He no longer trusts traditional currencies.
And up steps Liz. Doing what only someone as half-witted as she can: talking non-stop nonsense. Often with a weird half-smile on her face. At times you are tempted to believe that she is in on the joke that she is the joke. But then you realise she’s deadly serious. She hasn’t quite understood that people aren’t laughing with her, they are laughing at her. There’s something almost unbearably sad about this. So much so you almost feel guilty for indulging her insanity. Then you remember that only 2,000 people are going to watch this. And only we dedicated few are going to make it to the end.
Labour has ruined the country, she says. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had a secret plot to dismantle British civilisation and nothing has been the same since 1997. At which point, even Steve has to remind Liz that the Tories were in power from 2010. The Trusster doesn’t miss a beat. She is rushing on her run, her onboard computer set to auto-pilot. The Tories weren’t really the Tories. They were socialists in disguise. All of them. They were all part of the woke establishment. That’s why they were anti-Brexit. And austerity never happened.
At this point it would have been a kindness to wrap the podcast up. To remind Liz that antipsychotic help was available. Because to the best of my knowledge, Liz had been a minister in successive Tory governments since 2012. She had also been a vocal supporter of Remain.
Only it turns out that was a different Liz. A doppelganger. She had been temporarily captured by the wokerati and made to do and say a lot of things against her will. It was only when she became prime minister that she could self-actualise into her truest state and then she was thwarted by the Bank of England getting tough on quantitative easing. All a deliberate plot to destabilise her mini-budget. Nothing to do with the mini-budget being riddled with unfunded tax cuts.
There were only two trustworthy people left in the world, she said: Donald Trump and Javier Milei. It was time to disband the judiciary, the prisons and the civil service. The whole world order needed to be rebalanced. Steve readily agreed. He reckoned the NHS should also be included on the grounds that it had almost killed him and a friend of his. Not even Liz was going that far. But together the revolution was possible.
Then the big question. What next for Liz? Would she stand for election again? Maybe, she said. But who for? She’s long since been too mad for the Tories and might even be too bonkers for Reform. All she knew was that she would never go away. Not while there were still things to talk about that no one was talking about except her. Poor Liz. The problem isn’t that no one is talking. It’s that no one is listening. Steve chucked her a nugget of gold and they both ran for the hills. You’ll never take them alive.
