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Short Cuts

James Butler: Bellicose and Underinformed, 22 September 2022

... two months, the process of selecting Britain’s new prime minister has revealed little about what Liz Truss intends to do. Her short victory speech contained pro forma praise for her predecessor and ritual execration of the defeated socialist threat. Her Downing Street speech turned on the Cameron-era cliché about an ‘aspiration nation’. She ...

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: Inside the Thatcher Larp, 20 October 2022

... often dark version of the genre, the feared and respected school of Nordic Larp.Until Liz Truss, no one had ever thought to try Larping as a system of government. But it turns out that we in the UK are living inside a full-scale Thatcher Larp, whether we voted for it or not. (For the avoidance of doubt: we didn’t. Check the 2019 ...

Madman Economics

William Davies: What the hell is going on?, 20 October 2022

... freezing various budgets in cash terms, while inflation continues to rise. It’s no secret that Truss and Kwarteng subscribe to the radical conservative notion that public spending rewards laziness and moral delinquency; it was beliefs like these that led 81,326 Conservative Party members to appoint Truss as prime ...

Short Cuts

Francis FitzGibbon: Raab’s British Rights, 7 October 2021

... of publicly funded advocacy, but Theresa May sacked him before he could put them into practice. Liz Truss showed barely any interest in the job. David Lidington came and went without a trace in just seven months. David Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of eighteen months, had to renationalise the probation service, at a cost of about half a billion ...

Johnson’s Downfall

James Butler, 21 July 2022

... burnish their credentials as Johnson’s ideological successors. Now, the likes of Priti Patel and Liz Truss profess to have stayed simply to maintain the government of the country. Those candidates who have been closely associated with the old regime must wonder whether it will prove possible to stand for ‘Johnsonism without ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... became difficult to ignore and Boris Johnson tedious to chronicle. By the time I’d got round to Liz Truss she’d gone. Though this annual bulletin has never tried to be other than serendipitous, this year’s instalment seems particularly patchy while being a fair representation of my routine. The largest segment is occasioned by the death of HM the ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Environmental Law, 8 February 2018

... place: claimants would never have to pay more than £10,000 as part of an environmental challenge. Liz Truss, when she was lord chancellor, sought to change the new rule: litigants would be required to give detailed information about their finances; in certain cases, the cap could be lifted. This would, it was argued, deter ‘unmeritorious ...

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman: Twelve Years of Tory Rule, 17 November 2022

... the bottle.What was left? After the dutiful May and the vacuous Johnson came the madness of Liz Truss. Apparently, the problem had been sheer timidity. Far bolder and swifter action was needed. Why not spend more – in the form of a massive subsidy for fuel bills – at the same time as cutting taxes and then call it a strategy for growth? To ...

Up in Arms

James Butler, 16 November 2023

... law in continuing to grant arms licences to Saudi Arabia and ordered their immediate cessation. (Liz Truss, then international trade secretary, was forced to apologise to the Commons after the government continued to grant licences anyway.) The court’s judgment revealed some of the innovative ways in which humanitarian law obligations are managed ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... the many things Dorries’s ‘theory’ can’t account for is the reason the plotters moved in Liz Truss to succeed Johnson, rather than their main man, Sunak. Rory Stewart, a cabinet minister under May and now Britain’s most successful failed politician, sees Truss’s elevation, like Johnson’s, as proof of ...

Untouchable?

David Runciman: The Tory State?, 8 September 2016

... departments with barely a whisper of opposition. She appointed an inexperienced acolyte – Liz Truss – to the job of justice secretary, whose responsibilities include defending the integrity of the judiciary against the executive. Putting an apparatchik in charge of the legal system could be a mark of political weakness – May needs all the ...

The Seductions of Declinism

William Davies: Stagnation Nation, 4 August 2022

... investment in new firms and technologies because they’re too resentful towards the taxman. Liz Truss, so desperate to draw comparisons with Thatcher that she appeared to have dressed up as her idol for the Channel 4 leadership debate, has described government targets for housebuilding as ‘Stalinist’. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has internalised ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... most frequently around trans rights and refugees, but lacks a discernible political philosophy. Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce in Downing Street but is now touring the world touting her zombie Thatcherism, supported by a hard core of backbench MPs and a gaggle of heterodox Conservative donors. (Jeremy Hosking, who funds the Critic, gave her ...

At the Top Table

Tom Stevenson: The Defence Intelligentsia, 6 October 2022

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 45699 6
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... Relations at the Library of Congress), and foreign policy adviser to both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss; this month he was commissioned to lead yet another defence policy review. In 2016, Bew published a biography of Clement Attlee, whom he described as looking to the US on foreign affairs and as being a gatekeeper against elements in the British ...

Cronyism and Clientelism

Peter Geoghegan, 5 November 2020

... around the face. The deal was brokered by an adviser to the Board of Trade, which is chaired by Liz Truss, who just happened to be a senior board adviser at Ayanda. NHS data has been signed over not only to Amazon and Google but also to Palantir Technologies, the big data firm set up by the PayPal co-founder and Republican Party funder Peter Thiel, and ...

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