Liz Truss’ revisionism and a rocky start to post-case life for Bruce Lehrmann

Truss’d like a Turkey

Former UK prime minister Liz Truss knows a thing or two about getting things on an urgent deadline — after all she only needed 49 days in the top job to chuck the country’s finances into the nearest volcano. In September 2022, Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced and then abandoned £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts. Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey would later reveal the UK was hours away from total financial meltdown thanks to this burst of activity. So when she says, via the title of her new book, that we have Ten Years to Save the West, we can only assume she would back herself to destroy it much quicker.

Truss was last seen initiating Popular Conservatism, a project aimed at reinvigorating conservative politics which splintered before its first event, and has released her book amid a predictable cacophony of revisionism and culture warring (the subtitle claims she is “leading the revolution against globalism, socialism and the liberal establishment”, presumably because it’s harder to get fired as leader of an imaginary thing).

Here are a few of our favourite quotes:

I’m gregarious and I like people, but even my best friends wouldn’t describe me as a great people manager.

[Number 10 Downing street] was infested with fleas. Some claimed that this was down to Boris and Carrie’s dog Dilyn, but there was no conclusive evidence. In any case, the entire place had to be sprayed with flea killer. I spent several weeks itching.

Towards the end of our discussion, [the Queen] warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.

Son of a mother

Bruce Lehrmann’s post-defamation case work prospects are off to a rocky start. It has long seemed his best prospects for ongoing work in the years to come would involve turning up in some of the right’s less edifying spots to talk about cancel culture and the corrosive effects of feminism — and that was before his case against Network Ten failed.

A $100-per-head event with anti-feminist campaigner Bettina Arndt sponsored by Mothers of Sons, “a group of ordinary women whose sons have faced extraordinary ordeals in our unfair, anti-male legal systems and workplaces”, seemed the perfect place to start for the self-described mummy’s boy. MOS, alas, has announced that Lehrmann has pulled out, on account of “extremely aggressive pursuit by the media”. Let’s hope, for all concerned, that this attention drops from “aggressive” to “roughly zero” sooner rather than later.

Loquacious Lee

Justice Michael Lee has gotten a great deal of attention for his, shall we say, slightly verbose judgment in the Lehrmann vs Network 10 case — and while yes, it sometimes felt a little odd for a summation of such serious matters to include quite so many zingers, it unarguably made for memorable reading.

At any rate, we must commend Lee for his revival of words that don’t get nearly enough use these days: we noted “invidious”, “celerity”, “jejune”, “lability”, “maladroit”, “irrefragably”, “ebullient”, “badinage”, “druthers”, “omnishambles”, “imbroglio”, “declaimed”, “adduced” and “preternatural”. Have we missed any?