It has been more than three years since Liz Truss’ disastrous 49-day premiership ended, with the Daily Star declaring victory for its “very own 60p lettuce” in its tongue-in-cheek longevity contest. Now the former PM is back with her own weekly streaming show, pitched as the “home of the counter-revolution”.
In the first episode of “The Liz Truss Show”, which appeared on YouTube at the weekend, the ex-Tory leader declared that “Britain is going to hell in a handcart”, laid into the “fake news BBC” and claimed the “steel towns, mill towns and car towns” of middle England “are being killed off by eco zealots”.
‘Coping mechanism’
“The show started an hour late because Liz forgot to put her watch back in October” and things didn’t get much better from there, said John Crace in The Guardian. Despite her omnipresence on the lucrative right-wing speaking circuit and her ex-prime ministerial allowance, the show appeared to have been filmed in a “makeshift studio”, with editing reminiscent of “a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine”.
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Viewers were treated to a “deranged diatribe” on “the deep state”, “Islamists” and the “governing elite”, all of whom apparently were more to blame for her downfall than Truss herself. “It’s almost painful to watch someone so lacking in any self-awareness.” This was nothing less than watching Truss “commit a drive-by on herself”.
Ultimately, this show is “less about charting a new redemptive path than it is about rewriting the story of her humiliation”, said UnHerd. A figure “defined entirely by her public fall from grace” and “ostracisation from the political class she had dedicated her life to joining”, this is “more about providing her with a coping mechanism than her viewers with thought-provoking content”.
‘Liz lectures’
“The Liz Truss Show” should be understood not just as the “classic conspiracy theorist’s yearning to make their bonkers views heard”, but also as “an audiovisual cover letter addressed to Donald Trump”, said Imogen West-Knights in The Independent.
Yet despite calls for Britain to undergo a Trump-style revolution, it seems “highly unlikely” that this show “is going to have a wide appeal among Maga types on either side of the Atlantic”. In truth, if “you’re into small boats rhetoric and hand-wringing content about raising the birth rate, you already have so many more eloquent nutters, more possessed of a kind of demonic alt-right charisma, to pick from”.
Truss “can’t start a revolution by chatting with polished media performers in a TV studio”, said Lloyd Evans in The Spectator. Her guests, such as academic and right-wing commentator Matthew Goodwin, “agreed with everything she said”, making the show feel more like a “bank holiday book-club or a gripe session at Wetherspoons”.
With its “mixture of invective, self-justification and political brainstorming”, the show’s “emotional theme is ‘Liz lectures’ rather than ‘Liz learns’. If she were to embrace her foes with an open mind, she may win over a few recruits” but “being angry and radical is pointless. And until her enemies start watching her show, she’s an irrelevance.”
