One of the really annoying things in life is seeing Liz Truss turn up at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, which as a former PM she is entitled to do, and realise that she is going to do this for the next 40 years. I suppose her ego demands it.
The poor woman also appears to think that she was right all along and that history will prove that crashing the markets and the pound was not her fault. She also believes that unfunded tax cuts for billionaires is a sensible economic policy, trickle down economics works and that she was some how betrayed by irrational markets.
Then we have Sir Robert Stheeman, the man who has run for 21 years the government department that actually has to go into the market and borrow all that money we need. He is retiring this year and told the FT that issuing bonds is getting harder and investors might increasingly act as a restraining influence on fiscal policy. “Don’t kid yourself in thinking that you can develop policy in a vacuum without taking the market into account,”
This is not so much a warning to Labour about the borrowing restraints it will face but a reflection on Liz Truss’s “mini” Budget of September 2022 which sent the gilt market into meltdown. “In a world where we have debt to sell, policymaking cannot be divorced from the reality of the market.”
Unfortunately, Liz Truss is also trying to make a political come back, giving speeches, backing Trump, telling the world that she was right all along, cheered on by the Tufton Street idiots. You might think she would realise how much damage she did to the UK and how much she is continuing to do but no.
The woman who cannot give a speech properly, cannot hold a press conference effectively, couldn’t run a whelk stall and almost bankrupted the country so badly and so quickly that the markets will never forget; has so much self confidence that she still thinks she is a player.
That is a staggering level of self delusion, a really worrying level for a politician. This is like Margaret Thatcher thinking she would continue to run the tory party and the government after they booted her out, or Lloyd George waiting for the call to lead the country again.
Doubtless she will still be pushing this line in 40 years time, when she will be no more than a very difficult question on Trivial Pursuit. But unlike her political career and her memory, the damage of her short lived administration lives on.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Not to mention her ill-deserved honours list :-(
Allegedly she was a remainer in the Brexit campaigning, but look who she's sent to the Lords!
Well said! Arrogance and stupidity are a powerful and dangerous combination - “the certainty of stupidity” as Fay Weldon put it