It really should be the stuff of outrage. Liz Truss, who just three years ago was the prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, hosted her debut new online show last Friday, and denounced the country she led so badly – the one that still funds her to produce slop like this.
Sitting at a desk against the now-ubiquitous background of leather-bound books – in her case accentuated with a copy of her own, and a “New Labour, New Danger” poster of Tony Blair with demon eyes – Truss gave a dismal opening monologue stuffed with predictable and stupid far right hits.
“You’d have to be watching the fake news BBC or living on Elon Musk’s mars mission to not know that Britain is going to hell in a handcart,” she said in the opening moments. “Despite the valiant efforts of a certain prime minister to get things on track in 2022, this country seems to have a death wish.” Oh, for the valiant days when she crashed the economy, making everyone in Britain poorer!
What followed was a familiar lamentation of Britain’s travails. Truss was ostensibly addressing a British audience with her remarks, but the litany of complaints was aimed at satisfying US viewers. “Small businesses are dying, big businesses are leaving,” she ventured, managing to name absolutely none to back up her claim.
She moved onto attacking Muslims and suggesting free speech in Britain – from where she was recording the episode, apparently without trouble from the authorities – was dead. “If you speak out against the Islamists or the transgender ideologues you can be arrested, any time, any place, anywhere,” she ventured.
“We’ve been importing Islamists who want to destroy our country, from imposing Sharia law to orchestrating terror attacks… their crimes have been covered up by the authorities.”
The obligatory pandering to Donald Trump and denigration of the BBC included, “I’d rather my licence fee money went to Trump Media than Trotskyite media.”
It has been a common feature of Liz Truss’s pandering to America’s far right since her downfall that she has seemed to forget she was a government minister for a decade before becoming prime minister, and this continued here as she built up to the climax of what was clearly intended to be a searing monologue.
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“This calamity, the fall of Britain, the fall of England, the fall of London, has been presided over by a governing elite that hates our country,” she said at her conclusion. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the home of the counter-revolution. Welcome to the Liz Truss show.”
Liz Truss will receive up to £115,000 from the British taxpayer every year for life to run an office, will have a place of honour at official events and the memorial of soldiers, and was so recently the leader of the country. It is outrageous for someone of Truss’s former station to say these things and to attack the nation she once led in order to gain attention, validation and financial advantage.
But in reality, the production is so completely pathetic that it’s impossible to find it outrageous. At its best, the Liz Truss show is embarrassing. As its more frequent worst, it’s just amateurish and boring.
If the Liz Truss Show is the “home of the counter-revolution” then the British establishment can rest easy. Truss’s opening monologue is delivered with all the verve and passion of a minimum wage hotel worker explaining at check-in where breakfast is served and how to find the elevators.
The production values of the Liz Truss Show are non-existent. Everything about it screams “will this do?”, and even though the answer has surely come back as a “no”, they’ve uploaded it anyway.
The monologue cuts with no transition to a series of three interviews, all shot identically, and all clumsily introduced by a stammering Truss. The guests are exactly the third-tier right wing influencers you’d expect: the headline guest for the opening show is Matt Goodwin, followed by “famous podcaster and bitcoin expert and friend” Peter McCormack (I’d never heard of him either), and rounded off by former MEP and GB News host Alex Phillips, the only guest with even a modicum of broadcasting talent.
No self-respecting Gen-Zer would ever upload a video this shoddily edited or produced. It can at least credibly guarantee that it’s not AI, because not even the cheapest AI model would produce something this rubbish. It’s at least authentic.
No-one involved in the making of the Liz Truss Show believes in it, or cares about the job they were doing. Promotion is sketchy; 24 hours after its debut, at 6pm UK time Friday, there was only a one-minute-long clip of the 45-minute show on YouTube. It had attracted fewer than 2,000 views. Even a clip on Rumble, the pro-“free speech” right wing rival to YouTube only had 8,500 views – and Rumble is notorious for questionably high view counts on its content.
It’s impossible to stay angry at something this shoddy. It’s just sad: this is someone who, just three years ago, ran the fifth-biggest economy in the world and is deeply in denial that she was brought down by her own shortcomings. Her delusion has got her to this point, clearly unaware she’s no better at broadcasting than she was at politics, and equally unaware that the team around her are no better.
What Liz Truss is trying to do is appalling. But she’s so bad at it that it’s impossible to care. The Liz Truss Show will surely be cancelled after a handful of episodes. But if it isn’t, so what? Absolutely no-one would notice.
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