Liz Truss, Far-Right Ancient Mariner
Plus: Kemi Badenoch at war in Israel and Ukraine
Bird-Brained
To say a person has “an albatross” is to suggest a heavy and unpleasant burden. This is unfair on the albatross, who in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is described as “the bird of good omen” and a sign of good luck.
It’s only by killing the albatross, and thereby bringing a curse upon his ship, that the mariner turns the bird into a symbol of misfortune, and is made to wear it round his neck.
The distinction is entirely lost on Liz Truss. In an article for the Washington Post, the former Prime Minister of the UK repeats her melancholy tale, mariner-style — only unlike Coleridge’s old man, she still blames the bird.
In the piece, headlined ‘Elites killed my pro-growth agenda. Trump can’t let them stop his’, Truss again claims her wonderful September 2022 mini-budget — which spooked the markets and sunk the pound — was ruined by “establishment economists”, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Financial Times, and “the entire Davos elite, from the International Monetary Fund to [Joe] Biden himself”.
Not even her own Conservative Party is spared: “I got in the way of their plans. So, they stoked the narrative to depose me.” Et tu, Kwasi?
Far from learning to love all of God’s creatures, Truss is still looking for a fight. “What I learned from my experience”, she writes, “is the sheer power of the globalist economic establishment and its allies in the political arena”.
Her advice for U.S. president Donald Trump, whose agenda she endroses, is that he “must be given maximum support in Congress”, and should “dismantle” the “permanent bureaucracy” and take on this globalist elite. Truss concludes: “It will take a lot to defeat them, but they must be defeated to save the West.”
If this sounds mad, it’s because it is. As I wrote in my review of her book Ten Years to Save the West for Byline Supplement last year:
“Plainly, Truss is the latest politician (Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn) to reach for a conspiracy theory to explain their own failures. But it would be a mistake to laugh off a former Prime Minister reviving the politics of the Cold War, in it’s wacky John Birch Society form.
“To be direct: It’s incredibly dangerous to tell people that their country is ruled by covert enemies working in alliance with foreign powers. And the vagueness and omnipresence of the enemy makes this more and not less dangerous.”
Though ridiculous, Truss’s book was a glimpse of the future. Her call to “dismantle the Leftist state” is now U.S. government policy. And it’s clear that Truss (or whichever Project 2025 goon wrote the book) wants to see the same dismantling in the UK. (Ten Years was blurbed by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.) This might seem like a fanciful scheme, but it’s probably the dominant view among British conservatives, from the Daily Telegraph to the Tory party.
As I closed the review, riffing on Truss’s charge that her opponents are (of all things) useful idiots for Putin:
“Truss’s chosen autocrat abroad is Trump, and the U.S. imagined at CPAC is her deregulated paradise across the ocean – a place where the state is small, the markets are free, the left is nervous, the culture war is open and permanent, and where no clever civil servants will make her feel inferior.”
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Oh, What a Proxy War!
The award for Quote of the Week goes to Truss’s successor, Kemi Badenoch. The Conservative Party leader on Sunday (May 25) told Sky News:
“Israel is fighting a proxy war on behalf of the UK, just like Ukraine is on behalf of Western Europe against Russia.”
It’s quite something to echo both Kremlin and Hamas propaganda in a single sentence. The feat is even more impressive when you consider it’s roughly the opposite of her intention.
Badenoch was trying to act tough in defence of Israel and Ukraine. Instead she declared what their worst enemies allege — that they are puppets of the West!
Kemi said this while attacking PM Keir Starmer for a joint letter, signed with his counterparts in Canada and France, criticising Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. Badenoch said: “If Hamas is praising your actions, you’ve probably done something wrong.”
It’s doubly unfortunate, then, that the Russian foreign ministry seized on her remarks, posting on X.com: “Kemi Badenoch has finally called a spade a spade. Ukraine is indeed fighting a proxy war against Russia on behalf of Western interests.” D’oh!
The claim that Israel is fighting in Gaza on behalf of “western democracy”, “the civilized world” etc., is made by the French writer Bernard Henri Lévy in his terrible book Israel Alone, which I reviewed for Byline Times in October. As I wrote in that piece:
“Lévy’s book is also a helpful example of the dangers of abstraction — of imagining an abstract ‘Jew’ or ‘Palestinian’ who is either magically good or evil, depending on one’s point of view. For a conflict so painfully material in its focus on land and people, to transform groups of humans into ideas (or idealised countries), even if well-intentioned, is a kind of dehumanisation, when what’s required is mutual recognition.”
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