Out of the Blue - the rise and fall of Liz Truss

 Book of the Week – Times

 

‘An insightful and at times riotously entertaining account of the lengthy rise and abrupt fall of Britain’s 56th Prime Minister. What was intended as a prologue to her premiership is now a riveting political obituary in which every page drips with the seeds of both triumph and disaster. Cole and Heale have produced a meticulously reported account of Truss’s drive, impulsiveness, eccentricity and ideological certainty which reads like a warning from history. It has elements of tragedy but is frequently very, very funny.’ Tim Shipman

 

'Make sure you put your seat belt on. Heale and Cole put you in the passenger seat of the fastest car crash in recent political history. It's an unmissable romp through Liz Truss's long journey to the top, fuelled by ambition and espresso. The clues that foretold the extraordinary catastrophe are all there, as the authors reveal in gory detail how Liz Truss nearly had the last laugh, before finally, as her government imploded, the joke was on her.' Laura Kuenssberg

 

Despite being written off and mocked by even her closest colleagues, Liz Truss slowly but determinedly achieved her goal of taking over 10 Downing Street – only to instantly plunge her administration into chaos and announce her resignation after a record-breaking 44 days. How did she do it? And what exactly went so wrong?

 

With unrivalled access and insight, award-winning political journalists Harry Cole and James Heale provide the answers, drawing on interviews with Truss’s friends and supporters, as well as her worst critics and rivals, from Kwasi Kwarteng to Michael Gove.

 

Tracking Truss’s transformation from geeky teenage Lib Dem to Tory PM, with the inside scoop on her first – and only – month in office, Out of the Blue is the unmissable behind-the-scenes account of Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister.

 

 

Out of the Blue review – the rise and fall of Liz Truss

 

How did Liz Truss become the seven-week prime minister? This juicy tale of high political farce hints at an answer

 

Gaby Hinsliff

Wed 23 Nov 2022 09.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/23/out-of-the-blue-review-the-rise-and-fall-of-liz-truss

 

Famously, she was the first British prime minister to be outlasted by a lettuce.

 

More pertinently for the book industry, however, Liz Truss was also the first to unravel almost faster than a biographer can type. She quit eight days before the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and Spectator diarist James Heale were due to deliver a portrait already being written at breakneck speed, and for a book to emerge at all in the circumstances arguably represents something of a heroic technical achievement. True, the writing is clunky in places. But nobody is going to be buying this book for its literary elegance; the point is to rubberneck at what remains of the crash site, and if that isn’t what Cole, Heale or most of their interviewees originally intended to deliver – well, life comes at you fast in British politics nowadays.

 

What emerges is a book of two parts, the second of which focuses heavily on her seven weeks in prime ministerial office and is essentially a Sunday newspaper long read on acid. Most of the clues as to what went wrong however lie in the first part, a very readable gallop through Truss’s childhood as the daughter of Guardian-reading, mildly eccentric leftwing parents, via her political awakening at university – first as a free market Lib Dem, then as libertarian Conservative – right the way through to her stint as foreign secretary, careering round the world in pursuit of the perfect Instagram shot. (It was during this stage that her ministerial “rider” was said to include multiple espressos in a flat white-sized cup and a bottle of sauvignon blanc chilling at every overnight stay.)

 

Over time Truss developed an overconfidence in her ability to wing it

 

I was intrigued by Truss’s mother, Priscilla, who briefly moved to eastern Europe in the 1970s to “try out life under the communists”, took her children on Greenham Common protests and made herself a bright yellow banana costume in which to promote fair trade back home in Leeds. When Truss recalls schoolmates shouting “saw your mum in Tesco’s dressed as a banana again”, other 70s children of free-thinking parents may understand her seeming obliviousness to criticism a little better. You don’t grow up with a banana-clad mother, I suspect, without developing a certain sturdiness.

 

Obliviousness isn’t always a blessing in politics however, as becomes clear in her first job as early years minister under David Cameron. Truss had hatched a plan to cut childcare costs by slashing the number of adults required to supervise children, which unsurprisingly proved controversial. Instead of patiently trying to build public and political support for it, she simply put her head down and charged – much as she would a decade later with her mini-budget, and about as successfully. All young politicians make mistakes. What’s unusual about Truss is that the lesson she seemingly took from hers was to believe in herself even more, and listen to others even less.

 

Claims of Truss’s affair with an aide and that there’s a sex tape in circulation are left strangely hanging

An appetite for risk-taking emerges early. The authors recount sympathetically the well-trodden story of how an earlier extramarital affair with the married former Tory MP Mark Field nearly wrecked Truss’s search for a parliamentary seat, rightly noting the double standard that it never seemed to damage Field. But they also touch on some of the more explosive smears circulated about her during the leadership contest – including claims of an affair with an aide, allegations of predatory behaviour towards staff, and even one wild suggestion that there might be a sex tape of her in circulation. The authors interviewed her twice but their planned third session was canned when she resigned, so perhaps they simply never got to put these to her.

 

Despite his professional closeness to Truss, Cole and his co-author strive to put some distance between them in their final reflections on where it all went wrong. Putting aside her own fear, reportedly expressed to a visitor to the Foreign Office, that “I am weird and I don’t have any friends”, plausible theories for her implosion include that vaulting self-belief (even in her post-resignation speech to staff, she was still insisting she’d been on the right track) and determination to put the wrong people in cabinet.

 

But it’s perhaps significant too that she had got away with so much in the past, leading to an overconfidence about her ability to wing it – as she did even in the early days of her leadership campaign. If there’s one thing missing from this juicy tale of high political farce, it’s arguably a more unsparing account of what allowed a politician so flawed to rise so high at the expense of us all: a previous leader promoting her to spite his rivals, a dysfunctional Conservative party, but also an indulgent rightwing press that turned on her only when it was too late. Less a drama from “out of the blue”, perhaps, than a car crash waiting to happen.

Book of the Week – Times

 

‘An insightful and at times riotously entertaining account of the lengthy rise and abrupt fall of Britain’s 56th Prime Minister. What was intended as a prologue to her premiership is now a riveting political obituary in which every page drips with the seeds of both triumph and disaster. Cole and Heale have produced a meticulously reported account of Truss’s drive, impulsiveness, eccentricity and ideological certainty which reads like a warning from history. It has elements of tragedy but is frequently very, very funny.’ Tim Shipman

 

'Make sure you put your seat belt on. Heale and Cole put you in the passenger seat of the fastest car crash in recent political history. It's an unmissable romp through Liz Truss's long journey to the top, fuelled by ambition and espresso. The clues that foretold the extraordinary catastrophe are all there, as the authors reveal in gory detail how Liz Truss nearly had the last laugh, before finally, as her government imploded, the joke was on her.' Laura Kuenssberg

 

Despite being written off and mocked by even her closest colleagues, Liz Truss slowly but determinedly achieved her goal of taking over 10 Downing Street – only to instantly plunge her administration into chaos and announce her resignation after a record-breaking 44 days. How did she do it? And what exactly went so wrong?

 

With unrivalled access and insight, award-winning political journalists Harry Cole and James Heale provide the answers, drawing on interviews with Truss’s friends and supporters, as well as her worst critics and rivals, from Kwasi Kwarteng to Michael Gove.

 

Tracking Truss’s transformation from geeky teenage Lib Dem to Tory PM, with the inside scoop on her first – and only – month in office, Out of the Blue is the unmissable behind-the-scenes account of Britain’s shortest-serving Prime Minister.

 

 

Out of the Blue review – the rise and fall of Liz Truss

 

How did Liz Truss become the seven-week prime minister? This juicy tale of high political farce hints at an answer

 

Gaby Hinsliff

Wed 23 Nov 2022 09.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/23/out-of-the-blue-review-the-rise-and-fall-of-liz-truss

 

Famously, she was the first British prime minister to be outlasted by a lettuce.

 

More pertinently for the book industry, however, Liz Truss was also the first to unravel almost faster than a biographer can type. She quit eight days before the Sun’s political editor Harry Cole and Spectator diarist James Heale were due to deliver a portrait already being written at breakneck speed, and for a book to emerge at all in the circumstances arguably represents something of a heroic technical achievement. True, the writing is clunky in places. But nobody is going to be buying this book for its literary elegance; the point is to rubberneck at what remains of the crash site, and if that isn’t what Cole, Heale or most of their interviewees originally intended to deliver – well, life comes at you fast in British politics nowadays.

 

What emerges is a book of two parts, the second of which focuses heavily on her seven weeks in prime ministerial office and is essentially a Sunday newspaper long read on acid. Most of the clues as to what went wrong however lie in the first part, a very readable gallop through Truss’s childhood as the daughter of Guardian-reading, mildly eccentric leftwing parents, via her political awakening at university – first as a free market Lib Dem, then as libertarian Conservative – right the way through to her stint as foreign secretary, careering round the world in pursuit of the perfect Instagram shot. (It was during this stage that her ministerial “rider” was said to include multiple espressos in a flat white-sized cup and a bottle of sauvignon blanc chilling at every overnight stay.)

 

Over time Truss developed an overconfidence in her ability to wing it

 

I was intrigued by Truss’s mother, Priscilla, who briefly moved to eastern Europe in the 1970s to “try out life under the communists”, took her children on Greenham Common protests and made herself a bright yellow banana costume in which to promote fair trade back home in Leeds. When Truss recalls schoolmates shouting “saw your mum in Tesco’s dressed as a banana again”, other 70s children of free-thinking parents may understand her seeming obliviousness to criticism a little better. You don’t grow up with a banana-clad mother, I suspect, without developing a certain sturdiness.

 

Obliviousness isn’t always a blessing in politics however, as becomes clear in her first job as early years minister under David Cameron. Truss had hatched a plan to cut childcare costs by slashing the number of adults required to supervise children, which unsurprisingly proved controversial. Instead of patiently trying to build public and political support for it, she simply put her head down and charged – much as she would a decade later with her mini-budget, and about as successfully. All young politicians make mistakes. What’s unusual about Truss is that the lesson she seemingly took from hers was to believe in herself even more, and listen to others even less.

 

Claims of Truss’s affair with an aide and that there’s a sex tape in circulation are left strangely hanging

An appetite for risk-taking emerges early. The authors recount sympathetically the well-trodden story of how an earlier extramarital affair with the married former Tory MP Mark Field nearly wrecked Truss’s search for a parliamentary seat, rightly noting the double standard that it never seemed to damage Field. But they also touch on some of the more explosive smears circulated about her during the leadership contest – including claims of an affair with an aide, allegations of predatory behaviour towards staff, and even one wild suggestion that there might be a sex tape of her in circulation. The authors interviewed her twice but their planned third session was canned when she resigned, so perhaps they simply never got to put these to her.

 

Despite his professional closeness to Truss, Cole and his co-author strive to put some distance between them in their final reflections on where it all went wrong. Putting aside her own fear, reportedly expressed to a visitor to the Foreign Office, that “I am weird and I don’t have any friends”, plausible theories for her implosion include that vaulting self-belief (even in her post-resignation speech to staff, she was still insisting she’d been on the right track) and determination to put the wrong people in cabinet.

 

But it’s perhaps significant too that she had got away with so much in the past, leading to an overconfidence about her ability to wing it – as she did even in the early days of her leadership campaign. If there’s one thing missing from this juicy tale of high political farce, it’s arguably a more unsparing account of what allowed a politician so flawed to rise so high at the expense of us all: a previous leader promoting her to spite his rivals, a dysfunctional Conservative party, but also an indulgent rightwing press that turned on her only when it was too late. Less a drama from “out of the blue”, perhaps, than a car crash waiting to happen.