Gavin Williamson once said that Russia should ‘shut up’ and ‘go away’. I must confess to feeling a similar sentiment whenever Liz Truss tries to re-enter public life. 

Yesterday, our former Prime Minister and future pub quiz question answer made a speech to the Institute for Government. One year on from her premiership, Truss sought to defend her economic approach and the measures taken in her so-called Mini-Budget – where Kwasi Kwarteng announced the biggest fiscal loosening since the Barber Boom, and which she later largely U-turned on as Number 10 burnt around her. 

Perhaps surprisingly, Truss made for interesting listening. She acknowledged that her plans were somewhat rushed, that ‘communication wasn’t as good as it could have been’ and that she was ‘blindsided’ by the meltdown in pension funds caused by liability-driven investments (LDIs). But the tone was very much one of je ne regrette rien.

Truss said she was incapable of acting differently. Any mistakes were because of ‘basically the way [she is] and [her] character’. As she urged Rishi Sunak to set a manifesto of tax breaks, benefit cuts, and scrapping Net Zero, Truss blamed her record on the resistance of a left-wing ‘political economic establishment’ and its attendant ‘institutional bureaucracy’, a confused media class, and cowardly Tory MPs. 

Many a CapX reader will agree with a lot of what she said. When asked about Mark Carney’s snide suggestion that she had turned Britain into ‘Argentina-on-the-Channel’, she pointed out the ex-Governor of the Bank England was part of a ’25-year economic consensus that had let to low growth across the western world’. 

She was right to point out interest rates had been ‘artificially low’ for too long and, political drama notwithstanding, would have risen whatever her policies were.  And she was on the money in saying that the civil service has many good people, but they’re keener on Net Zero, diversity lanyards, and working from home than they are shipping criminals to Rwanda.