We happy few. We unlucky few. In years to come when we are all still recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we will be able to say we were there. That we have seen things that cannot be unseen. The 8,000 of us who, through a mixture of curiosity and comedy, chose to watch Liz Truss commit a drive-by on herself. Though only a very few will have made it to the end.
Some won’t have even made it to the start. The show started an hour late because Liz forgot to put her watch back in October. Still, this was an award-winning YouTube TV show. Though not the awards anyone would want to collect.
In January we were treated to the bizarre sight of Liz Truss live-tweeting the presidential inauguration from her hotel room in Washington. It had dawned on her too late that you actually needed an invitation to the Capitol and she wasn’t on anyone’s guest list. In hindsight, we can see this as a trial run.
For her new Liz Truss Show, she appeared to have turned her utility room into a makeshift studio. No expense incurred. Though she did have someone to do the filming this time. Albeit a 12-year-old intern doped up on ketamine. I’ve seen better editing on my dad’s home movies from the 60s.
We opened with a montage of Lizzy’s greatest hits. There she was being greeted by the queen at Balmoral. Huge mistake. She doesn’t seem to realise that the entire country holds her responsible for the queen’s death. The last photo we saw of the queen was of Truss being introduced to her on the Tuesday. Two days later she was dead. Case proved. It’s not hard to imagine the queen thinking: “You know what? It’s just not worth it any more. My first prime minister was Winston Churchill. Now it’s come to this …”
Then Liz stared straight to camera and launched into a deranged diatribe. If it wasn’t obvious before, it is now clear her care in the community experiment has failed. She is a danger to herself. It’s almost painful to watch someone so lacking in any self-awareness. Her therapist is doing her no favours by letting her out into the wild.
The message that Liz has taken from her 49 days in Downing Street is that the only reason she failed was because she wasn’t given long enough. She believes that deep down we all want more of her. Hell, she can’t even get a gig as a D-list wannabe on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. Remembered less fondly than Matt Hancock.
“Britain is going to hell in a handcart,” said Liz, sitting behind a makeshift bookcase containing the only copy of Ten Years to Save the West that hasn’t been pulped. The whole country was poorer than Mississippi. Yes, and who contributed most to that? Irony is not her strong point.
Islamists were everywhere. The governing elite hated us and civil servants were all trans activists. But she was going to lead the counter revolution against the DEEP STATE. Five minutes in, I was already exhausted. You can’t buy this level of nonsense. Thankfully I didn’t have to. She made Elon Musk sound like the voice of reason on X.
Next we came to Radon – “She’s a gas, but she’s inert” – Liz’s first special guest. Step forward Matt Goodwin, hot from the sewers of far-right conspiracy theories. Matt immediately went on to his favourite obsession. Foreigners. There were far too many of them. We were being betrayed by a self-loathing elite. Perhaps Matt would like to include himself in that. No one has ever knowingly see him smile.
“I went into politics because I was a patriot,” said Liz. “I didn’t want open borders.” YES, YOU DID. During the EU referendum you were one of the politicians campaigning loudest for remain. And you were a cabinet minister under Boris Johnson. Poor Lizzy. Her memory shot to pieces. By now, even Matt was looking queasy. Beginning to wonder if he had made a serious mistake by coming on a show hosted by a lunatic. And he had met many lunatics in his time.
But Lizzy was on a roll. Or a slur. The longer she spoke the more her words rolled into one another. Must have been the benzodiazepines starting to kick in. ‘KeirStarrmeristhemostunpopularprimeministereverrrrr.’ No, Liz that was you.
She sneered at the word compassionate. The Bank of England was full of Trotskyists. As were the police. It’s Britain, Matt, but not as you know it. The last word went to Matt. There were way too many foreigners. True Brits needed to have more babies. And we knew what he meant by True Brits. Not often the Great Replacement Theory gets an outing.
Jumpy cut to the next guest. Peter McCormack, podcaster and bitcoin enthusiast whom I had never heard of. He was wearing a T-shirt with “Freedom” on the front. Maybe that was a cry for help. He too seemed to have no idea what he was doing there. Other than to say everything is a bit shit over and over again while Lizzy talked over him. Communists were too clever for their own good, she told us, before concluding that gen Z were going to rescue the country. Go for it. You have nothing to lose but your oat milk skinny lattes.
That just left Alexandra Phillips, a rightwing talking head primarily remembered for having her GB News show cancelled in 2022. Since then she’s been on the same circuit as Goodwin. If anything, Alex hated Muslims even more than Matt. They came from a barbaric culture. Bournemouth was now a no-go area. A woman couldn’t walk down the sea front without the threat of being raped. It was the Muslims who were the real racists. Not the white Britons that hated them. Every single immigrant was a potential sex offender or terrorist. Liz nodded along eagerly. She couldn’t agree more. Though chiding her for being too woke.
A final jump back to the bookcase where Lizzy was giving her closing speech to camera. The country was in terminal decline. But there was hope. And that hope was her. SuperLiz to the rescue. Until next week, she said. If there is a next week. Episode two is in the balance. Fingers crossed. Right now everyone who made it to the end is in a survivor’s therapy group. In years to come we will see her with her carer at the Cenotaph and say to ourselves: “Wasn’t she the woman who had her own chatshow that nobody watched?”
