Liz Truss to save the West: is a political comeback really on the cards?

Former prime minister Liz Truss has stepped back into the political spotlight with the publication of her ambitiously titled new memoir, "Ten Years to Save the West".

Since being ousted in 2022, Britain's shortest-serving PM has remained a largely fringe figure in the Conservative Party. But in recent months, said David Runciman in The Guardian, Truss has "hitched her wagon to a newly launched organisation called Popular Conservatism".

Her "British version of much of the American alt-right agenda", said Adam Boulton at Reaction, has helped to ensure that Truss and her new book are making headlines.

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'Unfinished business'

Truss has said that she has "unfinished business" in politics, said Sky News, and she has "refused to rule out running" to be Tory leader again in the future. Her book, she said, was intended to "build support for her political ideas".

 But there "isn't much evidence" that the "hysterical pitch of American conservatives" that she has adopted "resonates across the Atlantic", argued Rafael Behr in The Guardian.

Reading the "Alan Partridge-esque anecdotes" in Truss's book, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman, what becomes clear is that she believes that the "first step" to saving the West is "saving the Conservative Party from itself". Truss's awareness that the current government "would prefer to pretend she doesn't exist", and that the mainstream party members consider her "an irrelevance", is why she has reappeared with a book of "tell-all revelations" and "bombastic end-of-the-world rhetoric".

Truss clearly has a "self-awareness problem" that "leads her to blame her failures on anyone and everyone" else, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator, but it is worth asking whether "there are points she makes that Westminster can actually learn from". Although Truss's focus is "largely limited to what stopped her", she also points to the "resistance from the civil service to reforms" and Whitehall's "obstructing" of elected politicians.

'A deeper problem'

Her specific policies and opinions aside, Truss's book highlights a greater problem in Westminster: "it has stopped listening", said Kate McCann at the i news site. Although many will "baulk at the idea" of a Truss comeback, the response to her memoir exposes the "deeper problem" of a "narrowing of the lens" and a tendency to "scoff and shrug" off ideas that "don't fit". Truss is "not the perfect messenger", but she is not the only one to identify the "failure to properly consider things which don't fit the narrative".

The question remains whether, despite making a return to public view, Truss could drum up enough support to make a concerted bid for power again. So far, her "attempt at a comeback" appears to be working, said Bouton, and she is "getting another hearing – at least in Conservative circles".

Her voice is "listened to and influential among her party members", agreed Chris Mason at the BBC, and while Tories "privately anticipate" losing the next election, Truss is hoping to be in the mix as they "consider their future after it".

If Truss's "is the only story anyone can hear", said Behr, it raises bigger questions for the future of the Conservatives. It indicates that they "don't have a leader" and "don't have an argument" and eventually "could end up without a party". In the long term,  there simply aren't "enough Trussite MPs, let alone Truss-supporters in the country", to "inspire much beyond ridicule" for the former PM.