3 May 2024

Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss

Most prime ministerial memoirs are a “multi-volume snoozefest”, says Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. But Liz Truss’s account of her ill-fated 49 days in Downing Street – with the “brilliantly presumptive” title Ten Years to Save the West – is the first that could be described as a “romp”. It is, of course, full of laughs. When Dominic Raab vacated his Chevening grace-and-favour residence, he “left behind protein drinks in the fridge with ‘Raab’ written on them”. Truss is kept awake by the Horse Guards clock that chimes every quarter hour, and is evicted from No 10 “before her furniture could be delivered” – this is one of those farces “in which the very set collapses”. Yet her wider point – that the “administrative state” stopped her implementing economic reforms – is a serious and undeniable one.

Truss might think she was “the serious thinker in a frivolous political world”, says Max Hastings in The Sunday Times, but the book actually reminds us of her “sheer silliness”. With her complaints about the “difficulties of making hair appointments” and convincing Ocado that her Downing Street delivery address wasn’t a hoax, she comes across as the “Mrs Pooter of politics”. Practically the only thing she expresses regret for is being unsuccessful in persuading others that she was right: “I assumed people understood what I was trying to do,” she writes. Instead, she blames the media and other politicians for not taking her seriously. How foolish she is for publishing this now, just as memories of her idiocy were beginning to fade. “I have encountered ten prime ministers and read all of their memoirs, and from none of the latter does any author emerge so diminished as does Truss.”

Ten Years to Save the West is available to buy here.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

CJ Sansom, who died on Monday, was a “special writer”, says Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph. His historical novels about Tudor England “never skimped on the local colour. You can practically smell the horse dung and suppurating corpses, and feel the prickle of flea bites.” Best of them all is the Matthew Shardlake series – recently adapted for TV by Disney – “in which a shrewd, hunchbacked lawyer solves grisly murders in 16th-century England”. It’s a society “closer to ours than we think”, full of religious extremism, unstable governments, technological change, plague and war. Throughout, Sansom distinguishes himself by his “respect for the past”: not by portraying it as “a purely barbarous (or picture-postcard) place”, but by withholding contemporary value judgements to show the Tudors as they were, “pockmarks and all”.

Dissolution, the first book in the series, is available to buy here.

Elsewhere in The Knowledge Premium:

❤️ David Nicholls’s new love story
🐧 Craig Brown on his favourite books
🌾 Trying to live off the land for a year