Guest of dishonour: Truss attends hard right YouTuber's wedding

Mayfly-like former prime minister Liz Truss has kept some odd company since her brief tenure in No 10, but her latest social appearance is strange even by her standards – attending the wedding of an obscure hard right YouTuber.

Truss was snapped last week attending the nuptials of Connor Tomlinson, host of the Tomlinson Talks YouTube series (recent episodes: ‘Why the UK is on the Brink of Civil War’, ‘Britain Bans Being Right-Wing. America Intervenes’, ‘Britain is About to Burn, and the State is to Blame’ and ‘The British State is Treating the Epping Protestors as Terrorists’).

Tomlinson was coy about his VIP guest, posting only on social media that he couldn’t “show too many photos, out of respect for the privacy of friends and family”, but guest – and fellow hard right “independent journalist” – Lewis Brackpool let the cat out of the bag, posting a picture of himself meeting Truss at the service and boasting “I met a former UK Prime Minister”.

Truss appears to have met Tomlinson last year when she appeared on a podcast he was hosting, Lotus Eaters – the podcast created by Carl Benjamin, the far right commentator and failed UKIP candidate who once told Labour MP Jess Phillips: “I wouldn’t even rape you”.

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On the podcast, Tomlinson pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory that elites were coordinating the mass migration of Asians and Africans to subvert Western societies, asking Truss whether Britain should be “more discriminatory” against “countries and cultures which may… present problems to assimilation”. Truss responded: “I think we should do it on a country by country basis.”

Tomlinson wrote on social media last year that: “The Great Replacement isn’t a White supremacist antisemitic conspiracy theory. It’s real” and has also claimed that “the erasure of native cultures through demographic change” is underway.

Truss has an unfortunate habit of associating herself with unsavoury sorts since her 45 days in office came to an end. Last year she took part in an interview with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, and remained silent as he called Tommy Robinson a “hero”. Earlier this year she headed to Budapest for a meet-up of the US Conservative Political Action Conference, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and the AfD’s Alice Weidel.

And in June a video emerged of Truss promoting a new whisky launched by Dougie Joyce, a bare-knuckle fighter. “Liz Truss loves you,” she third-personed while raising a glass to her new friend. Alas for the hapless Truss, Joyce was jailed for 19 months by Manchester crown court in November 2023 for a violent assault on a 78-year-old man, later using a smuggled phone to film himself laughing in his prison cell. What unfortunate company she keeps!