TRUSS AT 10: HOW NOT TO BE PRIME MINISTER, Anthony Seldon

Liz Truss’ chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, had contacted me about my work on how to characterize and optimize successful premierships. Here, after forty years of writing about Prime Ministers, was my first opportunity actually to shape a premiership. To my dismay and discomfort, she took almost all of my advice on board, by design or, almost certainly, by accident.

Sir Anthony Seldon, be warned, comes off as something of an arrogant prick in the foreword. He has a long and storied reputation as a historian, educator and author, and so can be forgiven some of his tone due to his achievements, which include several best-selling books about successive British Prime Ministers. This is his book on Liz Truss’ time in Number 10, and I find this book’s title delicious.

At the conclusion of one meeting, towards the end of August, Hope passed a note to a senior Cabinet Office official: ‘No way you can do this politically. It would mean not hitting the 20k increase to the police force, massive real terms cuts to the NHS, breaking the “triple lock” on pensions, not delivering on the AUKUS pact [trilateral security agreement with the USA and Australia], schools falling in, the Defence Secretary and Home Secretary resigning.’ For good measure, he added, ‘It’s f**king mental.’

It is a mildly venal and painfully hard look at Liz Truss’ forty-odd days as a disaster of a Prime Minister and all the things she could have done differently. In many ways, she was hobbled from the start, by events and, in common with Rishi Sunak, all the charisma and political acumen of a lumpfish. But it’s not unfair to say she made the worst possible fist of it, and this little knife of a book probes into all the ways she fucked it up.

Seldon makes attempts to be fair, or at least empathetic, but, um..

Placing the spotlight on her personal journey up from comprehensive school, in contrast to rich public schoolboy Sunak, invited a focus on her personality and intellect, neither of which she was capable of sustaining.

It’s an illuminating, slightly gossipy book, exhaustively sourced and probably a very fitting capstone for the radioactive dump of her brief reign.

HOW NOT TO BE PRIME MINISTER (UK) (US+)