Liz Truss failed as Prime Minister, but what the former Tory leader has done since has been even worse - Alexander Brown

The former Prime Minister is somehow making her legacy even worse.

Liz Truss was a dreadful prime minister who destroyed the economy and, to a lesser extent, her own party.

Not that she sees it that way. Britain’s shortest serving leader ever has spent her time since leaving office doing all she can to blame others and raise her profile, showing however little she knows about economics, she’s even less familiar with the concept of shame.

This week it was to promote her coming book “Ten Years to Save the West”, because if you’ve messed things up so profoundly in 49 days, why not offer advice on what you’d do with a time period 74 times longer? It’s also of note this book credits her as the “former prime minister of Great Britain”, seeing the ardent Brexiteer forget about Northern Ireland, again.

Former prime minister Liz Truss has gone off the deep end.

To plug this weighty tome, she’s spent the past few days at a right-wing event in the US, where somehow she’s found new depths to sink to. In a desperate bid to appeal to the American right, Truss has given up on engaging with the truth, and instead just started saying whatever she thinks will get applauded. This included, and I’m not joking, that “Conservatives need a bigger bazooka”. Her pork markets speech feels like a lifetime ago.

This far-right flirtation included sharing a stage with Steve Bannon, a man who called for the federal government's infectious disease expert and the director of the FBI to be executed, and was convicted over the July 6 insurrection.

Nobody with any sense of compassion would dare share a stage with such a man, but for Truss, he’s her new bedfellow, a comrade in Republican arms to laugh and grin at, while wailing at the “left-wing” orthodoxy that runs through banks, the civil service, government and anyone else who disagreed with her.

A couple of years ago, the idea that a senior Cabinet minister could share a stage with Bannon would be an outrage. But Truss has pivoted to populism, because it’s a space where she’ll rarely be held accountable for her own actions. You’re far more likely to fall victim to conspiracies if you’re the one making them up.

If that wasn’t enough, Truss also decided to back Donald Trump, insisting Britain and the world needs a Republican in the White House. As foreign secretary, Truss railed against Russia, calling for a hardline approach. She’s now endorsing a Presidential candidate who would stop funding Ukraine, and who said he would encourage Vladimir Putin to attack Nato countries that didn’t pay enough for defence.

Asked about this, Truss insisted she’d just judge Trump on what he did in office, which presumably means reducing access to abortion services, pretending climate change isn’t real and facing numerous court cases for sexual assault. President Trump has been accused of sexual harassment by nearly 30 women, and since paid out millions after a judge found rape claims against him to be “substantially true”. A former prime minister appears to think this isn’t a hindrance to being president.

Truss was a ruinous prime minister, but seemed to be following her beliefs. It now appears she doesn’t have any, other than an interest in money and selling a book.