Shortest-serving PM has made lucrative speeches and backbench interventions but shown little remorse
After being outlasted by a lettuce in the Daily Star’s infamous stunt, Liz Truss now has a decidedly less central role on the political stage.
As her successor Rishi Sunak “studiously plods on with the business of government”, Truss has been “busy defending her record” as the shortest-serving UK prime minister in history, said Politico.
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But a year after she took office, as the country continues to feel the aftershocks of her disastrous mini-budget, she has given “no public sign of having learnt anything at all from her experiences”, wrote Tom Peck for The Independent, or from “the pain she inflicted on others”.
What does she do?
There are several state occasions to which all living prime ministers are invited – including coronations and Remembrance Sunday services. It is “feasible”, Peck noted, that Truss will end up spending more days at the Cenotaph than she did in 10 Downing Street, which was 49 in all.
She “continues to hold some political influence in the UK as a backbench MP”, said the Evening Standard, representing South West Norfolk. After being reselected in February, she made one notable intervention by joining fellow former prime minister Boris Johnson in a doomed rebellion against Sunak’s Windsor framework.
Truss has also stepped on to the lucrative speaking circuit, joining the books of Chartwell Speakers for her insights on “leadership” and the “economy”. “She entered Downing Street with a bold and radical plan to grow the economy and rescue the country from economic stagnation,” her biography reads.
Truss dabbles in geopolitics, finding time to visit Japan and Copenhagen, and Washington DC for a speech to a right-wing think tank, “expounding the same ideas that had ruined normal people’s lives and rendered her a joke”, said Peck.
Her highest-profile foray so far was a five-day trip to Taiwan in April – becoming the most senior British politician to visit the country since Margaret Thatcher. The former foreign secretary used a speech in Taipei to call for an “economic Nato” to tackle growing Chinese authoritarianism. The Chinese embassy wasn’t best pleased, calling the visit “a dangerous political show which will do nothing but harm the UK”.
But one Asia expert told Sky News that the “the near total absence of reaction” from Beijing showed that “most people in the region don’t think Liz Truss matters very much”.
“It’s not likely that any of this will stop the former prime minister speaking her mind,” noted political correspondent Rob Powell. She seems “as determined to ruffle feathers now as when she was in power, even if the political benefits of doing so appear close to negligible”.
What is the latest controversy?
This summer Truss caused a stir with her resignation honours list. “Even the political stink surrounding the Johnson list may soon be outdone by Liz Truss’s outrageous proposed resignation honours,” said The Guardian in response.
Her list is “a disgrace on two quite separate grounds”, said the paper, both its length and the fact that she has submitted one at all. It is “shameless and shaming, both to Truss and to those who are on it”.
The list is said to contain 14 names – one gong for every three and a half days she spent as prime minister. But according to The Times, the list could have been longer, but “at least two people turned down a nomination”. One source told the paper that it would be “humiliating” to receive an honour from Truss.
What has she been earning?
Truss was paid nearly £20,000 an hour for her Taipei speech, Sky News reported elsewhere, “nearly 1,500 times the UK average hourly wage”.
That’s on top of the £115,000 per year allowance Truss is entitled to claim as a former prime minister, said Bloomberg, despite widespread calls for her to refuse it given her short tenure, as well as her annual basic salary of £86,584 as an MP.
In July, documents also revealed that she’d received a lump sum pay-out after resigning as prime minister, a severance package of £18,600. That’s £381 for each of the 49 days she was in office.
