Saturday, January 25, 2025
Tories rush to disown Truss
The paper says that on Monday night, just hours after Trump was sworn in as president, the former prime minister, who lasted just 49 days in Downing Street, stood up at one of the official balls celebrating the inauguration and gave an impromptu speech.
They add that Truss is said to have repeated the line that Britain needs its own Trump, and praised the incoming US president for “saving Western civilisation”:
But Ms Truss’s interventions are causing alarm in the Conservative Party, with a number of Tories concerned that she is “becoming an embarrassment”. On Thursday, The Guardian reported that that current Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, had suggested at a shadow cabinet meeting that she “wants Liz Truss to shut up for a while”.
Two Conservatives visiting Washington DC for the Trump inauguration this week told The Independent that “she needs to take a holiday”, with one suggesting it should be “for at least a year”.
The scars left by the former prime minister’s disastrous mini-Budget, along with memories of the Daily Star’s lettuce campaign, still linger.
Ms Truss has not commented on the suggestions that she should disappear from the public gaze for a while, although an ally suggested that the comments were likely to have the opposite effect.
When The Independent caught up with Ms Truss at an inauguration event, she said she had “no intention of joining Reform” and would be staying with the Tories, arguing that “party support is a distraction at the moment”.
However, her conversion to Trumpian Maga politics has astonished some observers, particularly those who are concerned with culture war issues.
With Ms Truss now posing as a hardliner against trans and LGBT+ rights and diversity issues, one former civil servant who worked for her when she was a senior minister in charge of these matters recalled that she was known for her progressive views. Indeed, some reforms to transgender rights took place under her watch.
Ms Truss is a regular visitor to the powerful Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which led the way in developing the ultra-conservative Project 2025 policy manual for the Trump administration. But her presence there has caused division among senior members of the Tory party, who are split over her past record as a minister.
One source noted: “Liz was originally against Brexit and was for David Cameron. She was the Queen of woke.”
With opportunism like that it is no wonder that Badenoch and her colleagues are keen for a prolonged period of silence.
