Imagine there is an accusation constantly being made about you that you think is unfair, and which unfailingly works its way under your skin where it itches. Imagine further that you possess substantially more faith in yourself than the average passenger on the Clapham omnibus.
The obvious next step should not be to engage a “dynamic and creative law firm” to compile these calumnies in a digestible six-page document which can be efficiently distributed to anyone who cares to pay attention.
Yet that is exactly what the former prime minister Liz Truss has done. Her legal representatives, Asserson, have issued her successor-but-one, Sir Keir Starmer, with a cease-and-desist letter in an attempt to prevent him repeating the “false and defamatory” accusation that she “crashed the economy” during her 49-day tenure as head of the British Government.
His repetition of these remarks has, she claims, harmed her reputation and was one of the factors which led to her defeat in her South West Norfolk constituency at 2024’s general election.
The meat of Truss’s defence is that the economic turmoil which followed her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s presentation of the Growth Plan to Parliament in September 2022 did not include a fall in GDP or a rise in unemployment, and therefore cannot fairly be described as a “crash of the economy”.
Furthermore, Dr Andrew Lilico, executive director of Europe Economics, is quoted as saying in a report that any disruption was due to circumstances over which Truss had “no control”, and that “the LDI crisis” – the excessive reliance on liability-driven investments – “would have happened at some point in any event”.
It is hard to know where to start. There is a debate about the precise timeline and causation of the unsettled economic conditions which surrounded the so-called “mini-Budget”, the scale of its long-term effects and the separation of fact and perception. That debate will roll on for decades, in the pages of memoirs and journals.
What can be stated with certainty is that three weeks to the day after announcing the Growth Plan, Kwarteng, one of Truss’s closest and oldest allies in the House of Commons, was dismissed as chancellor and replaced by Jeremy Hunt. The new chancellor’s subsequent announcements and Autumn Statement reversed every tax cut except the reduction of national insurance contributions and the raising of the stamp duty threshold, reduced the energy price cap and set out cuts in public spending.
It was a violent yank on the steering wheel to avoid a crash that Truss contends never happened. The BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, called it “perhaps the biggest U-turn in British economic history”.
In any event, that misses the point. Politics is defined not by what happens but what we remember happening. It is widely perceived by the electorate that Truss’s record-breakingly short premiership was a disaster, and that the disaster revolved around an enormous economic miscalculation. Whether it is described as a “crash” or not is as important as the precise arrangement of RMS Titanic’s deckchairs.
Surely, then, you might say as the straws slip between your fingers, Truss is right to fight back against this narrative and reclaim her reputation in the eyes of the electorate? If she can change the way people remember her premiership, she will, in a sense, change what happened.
I couldn’t finish Boris Johnson’s nor Liz Truss’s books
Read MoreThat could, in theory, be true. But Truss at 10, as Sir Anthony Seldon entitled his painstaking study of her short premiership, is a period beyond reputational salvage. The subtitle of Seldon’s book is “How Not to be Prime Minister”. Truss is not yet 50 years old but she is out of Parliament and there is no second act for her in the Conservative Party’s highest ranks. She lacks the self-awareness and grace to follow David Cameron, Alec Douglas-Home, Austen Chamberlain or AJ Balfour in serving under a successor.
A legal order to Sir Keir Starmer would in any event have no effect in the House of Commons. Article IX of the Bill of Rights 1688 states “that the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament”. So the Prime Minister could say what he liked from the dispatch box.
All of these arguments are secondary to the sheer, glaring weirdness of a professed defender of free speech attempting to use the law to bully an internationally renowned barrister and King’s Counsel. The idea that public opinion can be regulated and shaped positively by minatory legal instruments and the banning of specific phrases is plain madness.
The issuing of this cease-and-desist letter makes sense only to one person: Liz Truss. For her, it is another blow against the Deep State, the anti-growth coalition, the Establishment conspiracy which cruelly and underhandedly brought her low. For everyone’s sake, including her own, the former prime minister should cease and desist.
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