In a new memoir, Liz Truss recounts the advice she was given by Queen Elizabeth II when they met in September 2022 to confirm Truss as Britain’s new prime minister, the 15th and as it turned out last, to serve under Elizabeth II.
“Pace yourself,” the 96-year-old queen said – a suggestion Truss admits she failed to heed after the queen died, leaving Truss unsure if she could cope. Truss later introduced radical free-market policies that crashed the British economy and saw her ejected from office just 49 days after winning an internal Conservative party vote to succeed Boris Johnson, making her the shortest-serving prime minister of all. “Maybe I should have listened” to the queen, Truss writes. Replaced in Downing Street by Rishi Sunak, Truss still sits as an MP for South West Norfolk. Just 48, she has increasingly sought to carve out a prominent position on the hard right of British politics and turned her sights on the US, in particular its rightwing thinktanks and lucrative speaking circuit. Truss’s book, Ten Years To Save The West, will be published in the US and UK next week. Though Truss writes that the book is less a memoir than a manifesto for her continuing participation in global politics, it does contain extensive descriptions of her time as an MP, a member of successive Conservative cabinets, a minister of state, foreign secretary and finally, briefly as prime minister. Of her historic meeting with the queen at Balmoral in Scotland in September 2022, Truss says the 96-year-old monarch “seemed to have grown frailer” since she had last been in the public eye. “We spent around 20 minutes discussing politics,” Truss writes. “She was completely attuned to everything that was happening, as well as being typically sharp and witty. Towards the end of our discussion, she warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.” Elsewhere, Truss often writes of struggling with the pressures of high office, including an instance in Spain when she was foreign secretary in which motorcade delays saw her “beginning to lose my rag … on account of constant travel and pressure”, causing her to try to get out of her official car to “remonstrate with police”. That episode was quelled, Truss writes, with an intervention by her staff and “a cooling off period at a sherry bar”. But when the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?” Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”. Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”. She herself, she writes, predominantly felt profound sadness. Truss describes carrying out duties including giving a Downing Street speech about the queen’s death and having a first audience with King Charles III. A subsequent Buckingham Palace meeting between the king and his prime minister was widely noted for its stilted nature – Charles being heard to mutter: “Back again? Dear oh dear.” But Truss says their first official meeting made her feel “a bizarre sense of camaraderie between us, with both starting out in our new roles and having to navigate unfamiliar territory”. As the UK went into mourning, so Truss watched on television with her family as the queen’s coffin was brought from Balmoral to Edinburgh. Truss describes being “suddenly overwhelmed by the emotion of it all”, and breaking down “into floods of tears on the sofa”. “Once again,” she writes, “the grief was mixed with a feeling of awe over the sheer weight of the event, and the fact that it was happening on my watch.” That watch turned out to be shorter than anyone could have expected. But after a period out of the public eye Truss has re-emerged, especially in the US where Donald Trump is seeking to return to the White House as a far-right Republican. Last April, she delivered the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. This February, in Maryland, she spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, telling a pro-Trump audience the Anglo-American right “need[s] a bigger bazooka” to take on its leftwing enemies.
At that event, Truss stirred controversy by appearing with far-right figures, including the former Trump White House counselor Steve Bannon and allies of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Truss announced her book in September last year, saying she would use it to “share the lessons” of her time in government, in which she claimed often to have been “the only conservative in the room”, fighting a supposedly authoritarian left. In the event, she repeatedly blames the so-called “deep state” for her failures, from being excluded from meetings with Trump when Boris Johnson was prime minister to her own short-lived spell in that role. Popular on the US right, the deep state conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and operatives exists to thwart the ambitions of populist leaders. Bannon is one of its chief propagators. He has, however, said it is “for nut cases”.