Now political biographers are picking over the bones of her failure. Her attempts to crack America on a pro-Trump ticket have fallen flat. And Truss can’t even organize in parliament any more because she lost what should have been a safe Conservative seat at the election — the first former PM to suffer such ignominy for more than a century.
A former senior adviser to Truss, who like others in this piece was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “There was a time that, as her special advisers, we would have walked over hot coals for her. Not any more — nobody that worked for her in No. 10 wants anything to do with her these days.
“Unless you’re a free-market ideologue, an association with Truss post-No. 10 is a kiss of death for someone’s reputation.”
How not to be PM
It’s a far cry from the afterlife of other former British prime ministers, who have gotten used to racking up lucrative speaking gigs and earning rose-tinted reappraisals of their more controversial moves.
“In the past people like [Harold] Macmillan, [Winston] Churchill, [Harold] Wilson, [James] Callaghan and [Margaret] Thatcher did the decent thing, which was to sort of go off, write their memoirs and then pop their clogs,” said Anthony Seldon, the respected British political historian who has just released a warts-and-all biography of Truss subtitled “How not to be prime minister.”
Other former prime ministers have worked hard to salvage their reputation. Anthony Eden, for instance, attempted to use his time after No. 10 to repair the damage his handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis — seen as one of the great foreign policy debacles of the 20th century — had done to his standing. “He tried to rebuild his reputation on Suez by writing his memoirs, but he didn’t do so as shamelessly as Liz Truss,” Seldon said.