LIZ Truss, Britain’s shortest-ever serving prime minister, is reportedly plotting a political comeback with advice from right-wing US politicians.
The Tory MP embarked on a trip to Washington before the winter holidays and met with Republican lawmakers and activists to crib notes on how she might push the Government to come back around to her way of thinking, Politico reports.
Truss, who spooked financial markets with her infamous “mini-budget” and left her party looking like an opposition-in-waiting when she quit after just 49 days as PM, is said to have met with Republican congressman Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, a staunch economic conservative.
He is the chair of the Republican Study Committee, a large group of lawmakers who were described in the report as being the “ideological anchor” of the Republican party.
The group has inspired Truss to set up an equivalent in the Commons, bringing together likeminded small-state conservatives in parliament.
Hern told Politico Truss envisaged the Tory equivalent as being a vehicle to “house all of their ideas into a collective group, in order to hold the current prime minister accountable” and said she was considering naming it the “Conservative Growth Group”.
The site reported earlier in the month that its inaugural meeting was held in the Westminster office of Simon Clarke, who held the post of levelling up secretary during Truss’s brief spell in power.
Hern added that he thought of Truss as the “prime minister of what once was a great nation” and credited her with trying to “save Great Britain”.
“I think she felt like she tried to do too much, too soon, and didn’t have a following,” he said.
One congressional aide who spoke with the site said that Truss had expressed fears her ideology could “disappear entirely” from the mainstream of political opinion.
This was a view shared by former Tory party chairman Jake Berry, who accompanied Truss on the jaunt across the pond.
He told Politico he thought conservatism was in need of a “sort of a Marshall Plan” and expressed admiration at the way Republicans had ingrained their belief in low-taxes and limited government intervention in the economy in the pubic consciousness.
A spokesperson for the former PM said: "Liz attended the International Democrat Union (IDU) Forum, an annual gathering of senior centre-right politicians from around the globe, at the invitation of former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, the IDU chairman."
